Malaika Adero - Vice President Kamala Harris: Her Path to the White House

Kamala Harriss story begins in a tumultuous time in modern America: the 1960s, when her parents, one from India, the other from Jamaica, each chose to immigrate to a country theyd never seen in order to pursue their graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. It was a time when America was digging deeper and deeper into an unwinnable foreign war in Vietnam. Because of television, a relatively new technology, civilian Americans witnessed the horrors of war for the first time from their own homes. The images they saw galvanized an unprecedented antiwar movement that intersected with the womens movement, the counterculture movement, and the mother of all modern American movements: the civil rights movement.

Harriss mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was nineteen when she graduated in 1957 from the University of Delhis Lady Irwin College with the degree most common for women at that time: a BSc in Home Science. Determined to study advanced sciences, she applied and was admitted to a masters degree program in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. She arrived in the US in 1958. (She would earn her PhD in 1964 and build a brilliant career as a dedicated teacher and biomedical scientist conducting breast cancer research.)

Harriss father, Donald Harris, a graduate of the University of the West Indies and the recipient of a prestigious government scholarship, immigrated in 1961 to pursue a doctorate in economics at Berkeley, which he received in 1965. (He would eventually serve as an economic advisor to his home country and become an esteemed professor of economics at Stanford University, where he is now a professor emeritus.)

As there were few foreign students at Berkeley at the time, they each looked beyond the campus to find people with whom they could share common concerns and ideas. Wearing a traditional Indian sari, Shyamala especially stood out, and she sought places where she could meet people who saw her as a peer and didnt gawk at her like an oddity. She and Donald were welcomed by a multicultural community that, while relatively small in number, was dynamic, particularly a group known as the Afro-American Association, which was started by a group of UC graduate and law students to educate African Americans about their history. Thats where they met in 1962. It was a time when Berkeley on the whole was becoming, in the words of the New York Times, a crucible of radical politics, as the trade-union left overlapped with early Black nationalist thinkers. Many of these thinkers came from the ranks of Black youth who were the descendants of enslaved people who migrated from the southeastern states.

The association would go on to make important contributions to the embryonic discipline of Black studies and to the creation of modern Black American rituals drawn from African traditions, such as the holiday Kwanzaa. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who cofounded the Black Panther Party in 1966, were in the mix. The main chapter of the national Black Panther Party was in Oakland.

Speakers were often asked to share their knowledge of other cultures. Donald was a speaker one evening about Jamaican life and politics; Shyamala was in the audience. In the exchange of ideas, Shyamala and Donald fell in love, and they married the next year. They were each twenty-four years old; he was her first boyfriend, and she would be, in Kamala Harriss words, going against traditions in her family dating back to 500 BC, my mother chose to pursue a marriage based on love, which is one of the greatest expressions of optimism that any one of us makes.

The couple had Kamala, their first child, October 20, 1964, the year Shyamala earned her PhD and Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize. Kamalas sister, Maya, was born two years later. In between, Donald received his PhD in economics.

: Kamala Harriss parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris.

The Afro-Indian American girls grew up in a community of Black and brown people, in what they describe in their speeches, books, and interviews as an atmosphere of love and encouragement. Like most families in academia and the sciences, they were not rich, not poor, but cultured. Their household was punctuated with artcarvings from Africa and India, framed posters of work by Studio Museum in Harlem artistsand kept ready for company with fresh-cut flowers.

A 2021 Essence article noted that meals at their dinner table would run the gamut from collard greens to curries. Their faith melded Hindu and Baptist practices. Activists would come to dinner and strategize. Harris wrote in her autobiography, My parents and their friends were more than just protesters. They were big thinkers, pushing big ideas, organizing their community. She often tells the story of how they brought her along in their activities, pushing her in a stroller on marches. She remembers a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants. Social justice was a central part of family discussions. Shed grow restless, as children do, and would wiggle and whine. When she was asked, What do you want? Her response was, in toddler speak, Fweedom.

The young family, a cross-cultural union, became a part of the cultural fabric in the Bay Area and formed a bridge of relationships to their extended families in India and Jamaica. Their parents took the girls on visits to both places and gave them an understanding of their ancestral ties. The marriage, though, began to strain. Kamala writes in her memoir The Truths We Hold (2019) that she imagines things might have turned out better had they not been so young. The couple separated, then divorced in 1972, when she was eight years old. After that, she writes, We would see [my father] on weekends and spend the summers with him in Palo Alto. But it was really my mother who took charge of our upbringing.

About a year after her parents separated, Shyamala moved with her daughters to the Flatlands, a working-class part of Berkeley with a significant African American population. Everyone in the neighborhood knew us as Shyamala and the girls, she recalled. She described the neighborhood as having a richness of conscience. People looked out for each other. Neighbors cared about what was going on up and down the block. And safety was a community value.