American Presidential Contender Kamala Harris is a Political Chameleon

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

For more than a year now, I have been predicting that Kamala Harris will become the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States in 2020, with a very good chance of beating Donald Trump.

In 2012, Harris, then California’s attorney general, first came to public notice when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention. In 2016, she won an election to become the junior United States senator from California.

But who is Kamala Devi Harris? She’s somewhat of a chameleon, and, like former president Barack Obama, one with an unusual life history for a presidential candidate.

Harris is even more multicultural than Obama. Born in 1964, in Oakland, California, she is the daughter of highly educated West Indian and South Asian immigrants: Shyamala Gopolan, from Chenai, Tamil Nadu, India, and Donald J. Harris, born in St. Ann Parish, Jamaica. 

They were each born in 1938 and both came to the United States in 1960 and 1961, respectively; they met doing graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.

Gopolan, a Hindu Brahmin whose first language was Tamil, gave her daughters names taken from Hindu mythology, in part to connect her children to their heritage. Kamala is a word derived from Sanskrit meaning lotus; Devi, also from Sanskrit, is a term for a goddess. 

“A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” Gopolan remarked in a Los Angeles Times interview in 2004.

Almost every year, Harris and her sister Maya Lakshmi would visit their grandparents, uncles and aunts in Tamil Nadu.

Donald Harris, Kamala’s father, a professor of economics at California’s elite Stanford University, had less of an impact on her life. 

A left-wing academic, Harris helped develop a program of “alternative approaches to economic analysis,” where students explored theories, including Marxism, that went against the dominant views of the time. 

He, too, remained attached to his country of birth and served, at various times, as an economic consultant to the government of Jamaica and as economic adviser to successive Jamaican prime ministers.

Harris’ parents divorced when she was just seven years old and she and her sister would eventually grow up with their single mother in Montreal. Kamala went to Canadian schools from ages 12 to 18, graduating from Westmount High School in Montreal in 1981. 

Her mother at the time was a renowned medical researcher affiliated with the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital and the Department of Medicine at McGill University.

When it came time to go to college, though, Harris chose Howard University in Washington, DC, an iconic Black school. She clearly decided that her choice of identity would primarily be African-American. 

This was no doubt how she viewed herself emotionally. Her parents had been prominent in the civil rights movement in California. 

But perhaps even back then, knowing full well that, in the Democratic Party, gender and race are what matter most, she saw this as also the politically smarter choice. (Her sister, on the other hand, was an undergraduate at Berkeley. Both women obtained law degrees at the university’s Hastings College of Law.)

When Harris announced that she planned to run for the presidency, on Martin Luther King Day this past January 21, most of the headlines identified her as “African-American.” 

The Indian ethnicity didn’t make it into many reports. Neither did her Jamaican roots, though newspapers in that country certainly took notice.

As her candidacy takes shape, polling and interviews suggest that the Indian-American community is still making up its mind about whether, or when, to get behind Harris, who grew up going to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. 

Though her father does come from a similar background of oppression, nevertheless, Harris is not, as neither was Obama, by birth part of the historic community of Black Americans.

African-Americans are descended from people brought, forcibly and without their consent, to the United States from the 17th to 19^th centuries and who have lived, mostly under dire conditions, in the country for centuries.

Neither of Harris’ parents were yet American citizens when she was born. And Harris’ formative years were in Montreal, during the turbulent rule of the Parti Québécois. She might be considered as much a Canadian as anything else!