Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are “Rootless Cosmopolitans”

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

We know politicians craft a “narrative” to present their “lived experience” to voters. They are aware that the question of where they’re from is more about “identity” than geography.

This is very important for Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, given their unusual biographies. Harris calls herself a “daughter of Oakland” while Obama lists Chicago as home. But should Harris win the Nov. 5 presidential election, not only will these two Democratic Party presidents have been “non-white,” but both are what some would term “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Why has this become such an important matter? Two reasons. First, for the past few decades, immigration, legal or otherwise, has become a major political issue in America and perhaps the most essential policy difference between those who have largely sorted themselves into the “pro-immigration” Democratic Party and the “anti-immigrant” Republicans. It has become the “third rail” in American politics.

The other reason is the debate about African Americans – who they are and who gets to define them. While Obama and Harris are often heralded as being the first Black president and vice-president, there’s more to it, because they are in effect the first “immigrants” to these offices -- though both are of course American-born and have every right to be president.

Three of their four respective parents were foreigners: Barack Obama had a Kenyan father while Kamala Harris had a Jamaican father and Indian mother. Both Obama and Harris were born not long after three of their four respective parents arrived in the United States as graduate students.

As well, both Obama and Harris spent many of their formative years outside the country. Those are very rare resumés indeed for American politicians seeking the highest office in the land.

Obama’s father, also named Barack, was a Luo born in Rachuonyo District, Kenya, who met Obama’s Kansas-born white American mother, Ann Dunham, in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. He was a foreign student on a scholarship.

The couple married in 1961, and Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu that year. His parents divorced in 1964, and the father returned to Kenya.

At the age of six, Barack and his mother, who had in the meantime remarried while in Honolulu, moved to Indonesia to join her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese who had also met her at the University of Hawaii.

Lolo Soetoro was a geographer who returned to Indonesia in 1966 and Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his parents. From ages six to ten, he attended local Indonesian-language schools in Jakarta and he can speak Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language.

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii, a formerly ethnic Polynesian kingdom in the middle of the Pacific Ocean conquered by the United States in 1898, and a place far outside of, and very different from, the continental U.S.

When he was 18 years old, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. He transferred to Columbia University in New York in 1981, graduating two years later. He obtained a law degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA in 1991. He only “invented” himself as an American Black later in Chicago, where he would work as a community organizer.

Kamala Devi Harris’ father and mother arrived in California as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley not long before she was born in 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an upper-caste Brahmin Tamil from Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, was a biologist who came to the United States in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology. 

Her father, Donald Harris, from Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, arrived in Berkely in 1961 to study economics. Harris’s parents met in 1962 and married in 1963. Donald Harris went on to become a professor at Stanford University. After the two divorced in 1972, Harris’ mother moved to Montreal with Kamala and her younger sister to work at the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University.

Kamala spent her formative teenage years, ages 12 to 18, in Montreal, attending anglophone Westmount High School for four years and a junior college, Vanier, for a year. She, too, had to invent herself as an American Black by returning to the U.S. and enrolling at historically Black Howard University in Washington, DC, also at age 18. Harris then attended the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and obtained her law degree in 1989.

Neither of them is African American in the way Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson or Jim Clyburn are. None of their four parents were part of the historic African American ethnic group, the descendants of the people enslaved in America for centuries.

Both are basically immigrants to that community, and in many ways have more in common with the experience of all first-generation immigrants, whatever their origins, than of “old stock” Americans. We’ll see how this plays out in the contest between Harris and Donald Trump.