Details About Kamala Harris' Strained Relationship With Her Father

While Vice President Kamala Harris often speaks of her late mother on the campaign trail, she doesn't mention her father, Dr. Donald J. Harris, nearly as much. They have a fraught relationship and he's declined to participate in any media since before his daughter launched her effort to become the next president of the United States of America. "I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media," he wrote in an email obtained by Politico in 2019.

In one of the only times the elder Harris did speak about his daughter, he had nothing but scathing remarks for her. During a 2019 interview with Charlamagne tha God, Kamala joked about past marijuana use. "Half my family's from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?" Her father did not take kindly to Vice President Harris quipping about stereotypes and wrote that he wished to "categorically dissociate [myself and my immediate Jamaican family] from this travesty" in an email to a Jamaican media outlet (via the Independent). "My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family's name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics."

The fissures in their relationship largely stem from Kamala's childhood. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old and divorced a few years later. A lost custody battle brought his relationship with Kamala and her sister Maya "to an abrupt halt," according to a 2018 essay Dr. Harris wrote (via The New York Times). According to the Times, Donald has remained distant in the years since. He did not go to Kamala's mother Shyamala Gopalan's funeral in 2009 and he decided against attending Kamala's 2014 wedding.

"[My parents] fell in love in that most American way — while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the streets of Oakland and Berkeley, I got a stroller's-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called 'good trouble,'" Vice President Kamala Harris said during her 2020 Democratic National Convention speech (via PBS). Shyamala Gopalan and Dr. Donald J. Harris met at the University of California Berkeley in 1962 and quickly fell in love. They married a year later, but ultimately divorced by 1971.

Dr. Harris became a professor at Stanford University, becoming the first Black academic to be tenured in the university's economics department and taught there until his retirement in 1998. "He was certainly very outspoken and prominent in the profession at one time, but not in a public way. He was certainly not shy. When I saw Kamala grill Judge Kavanaugh at his hearing, I saw echoes of her father grilling someone in a seminar," Dr. Robert A. Blecker said to The New York Times. Dr. Blecker was a student of Dr. Harris' at Stanford and is now a professor himself at American University. He's not the only one to draw comparisons between Dr. Harris and his daughter, as Dr. Harris' close friend, Gladstone Hutchinson, told the The New York Times, "A big part of the difficulties between them is that they're so much alike."