By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
The modern Democratic Party is a weird merger of its donor-establishment and activist-progressive wings. It is the party of the majority of the billionaire class, who fund the party’s operations, and of the real and nominally “disadvantaged,” who provide votes in exchange for patronage.
As columnist Armin Rosen of the Tablet website, who was covering the Democratic National Convention noted, the left’s hero, Bernie Sanders, told the delegates that “Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections.”
He was followed by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who is worth $3.6 billion and who spent $323 million of his own money to get elected governor. He is a member of the wealthy Pritzker family which owns the Hyatt hotel chain and numerous other enterprises.
But, smirked Rosen, “the living contradiction with Sanders’ speech from three minutes earlier disappears under the intoxicating influence of joy, which can not only contain both Sanders and Pritzker but can juxtapose them deadpan in prime time.”
So it’s only proper that its standard bearer in this presidential election is a Californian who embodies this “contradiction” with ease. Kamala Harris’s rise has been meteoric: She served as San Francisco District Attorney from 2004-2011, Attorney General of California from 2011-2017, elected to the United States Senate from California in 2016, and became Vice President in 2020.
In her ill-fated 2019 bid for the presidency, Harris’s campaign was chaired by her sister, Maya Harris, whose husband, Tony West, is an influential voice in Silicon Valley and a major fundraiser for Democratic politicians. West was the chief legal officer at Uber, and later helped to engineer Uber’s successive political victories over organised labour.
Kamala Harris has also availed herself of the expertise of Bearstar Strategies, a consultancy firm that helped her transition from the state’s attorney general to the Senate in 2016.
Bearstar strategists over the past decade have elected a cadre of prominent Democrats in California, while simultaneously advising the state’s largest corporations. Until last year, U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler also worked for the firm, where she advised Uber on its campaign to avoid classifying drivers as employees.
Harris was remarkably friendly to big business as California’s chief law officer, declining to criminally charge financial industry firms such as OneWest Bank, which had been accused of fraudulent foreclosure practices, and PG&E, the utility giant that ended up killing eight residents of San Bruno, south of San Francisco, with a gas pipeline explosion.
America has been introduced to Harris as an African American/South Asian candidate, the epitome of multicultural “woke” politics. This is, of course, true, but there’s more to her biography. She has been more privileged than almost every American, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or class.
Kamala Devi Harris was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She is, in part, a descendant of a Jamaican slave owner, as Harris’ father, Donald J. Harris, explained in a January 2019 essay about his family’s heritage:
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town).”
Kamala Harris’ father would become a professor of economics at Stanford University, arguably one of the top five universities in the United States. He served as an adviser to multiple Jamaican prime ministers and was the first Black scholar granted tenure in the Stanford Department of Economics.
Harris has done research on the Jamaican economy, presenting analyses and reports on the structural conditions, historical performance, and contemporary problems of the economy.
In 2012 he produced an economic growth strategy for Jamaica, which at the time was suffering from sluggish growth and cripplingly large debt. It played a key role in righting the country’s economy. Donald Harris later received the Order of Merit, Jamaica’s third-highest national honor.
Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, an upper-caste Brahmin Tamil, came from Chenai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. She was an internationally famous cancer researcher and the daughter of P.V. Gopalan, a high-ranking Indian diplomat.
Kamala and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal in 1976 after her parents separated; her mother was hired to teach at McGill University and conduct research at the Jewish General Hospital. Dr. Michael Pollak, who worked with her, described her in a note published on McGill’s website as a “pioneer” who left a mark on the institution.
Kamala returned to the United States after attending Westmount High School in Montreal from 1978 to 1981. Knowing that her future as an American politician would be more beneficial if she identified as Black, she chose to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, an historically African-American school. She obtained her law degree at the University of California.
Both sides of Kamala Harris’ family were upper-class political figures in their respective countries, with money and power. Her parents met while working on their PhDs at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the privileged child of two foreign grad students – a story not that different from that of Barack Obama, whose Kenyan father met his American mother while both were studying at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
Is Harris the new avatar of Obama-ism? History does rhyme.
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