President Joe Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, following his announcement on Sunday afternoon that he will not run again this year.
There have been discussions about Harris. Some say she could be the first Black woman president, while others say she is Indian.
Family Details
Kamala Harris’s family roots are diverse. Her mother’s side comes from Tamil Nadu, India, and her father’s side is from Saint Ann, Jamaica.
She is married to Douglas Emhoff, an American entertainment lawyer and law professor.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist who made important contributions to breast cancer research.
She moved to the United States from India at the age of 19 in 1958 after studying home science at Lady Irwin College in New Delhi.
Shyamala then studied nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in 1964.
Kamala’s father, Donald J. Harris, is of Afro-Jamaican heritage. He is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University.
Donald came to the United States from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate studies at UC Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in economics in 1966.
Donald and Shyamala met at a college club for African-American students, where Shyamala, though Indian American, was welcomed.
Kamala Harris is proud of her South Asian roots. “My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots,” Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”
“Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture. All of my mother’s words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue — which seems fitting to me, since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all.”
Kamala Harris is a Black woman. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her book.
She went on to say that her mother, who died in 2009, “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
Harris recalled attending both a Hindu temple and a Black Baptist Church as a child in a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Even though she was welcomed in those houses of faith when she was a child, she wasn’t always welcomed in her own neighbors’ homes.
Regarding life in the Palo Alto neighborhood of her father Donald Harris, Harris remarked, “The neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with us, because we were Black.”
Discussions
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