As a child, Kamala Harris accompanied her father to a Bob Marley concert on the Berkeley campus. Beyond the anecdote, which recalls his Jamaican roots, the Democratic candidate for the White House very rarely mentions this 86-year-old fathereconomist and left-wing intellectual, still alive, and residing in Washington.
“She doesn’t talk much about him,” observes Corine Lesnes, correspondent for Monde in the United States. After her parents separated in 1973, when she was only seven years old, the future candidate went to live with her mother, of Indian origin, Shyamala Gopalan, a strong woman and renowned scientist, who died in 2009, and who she says is her main source of inspiration. “The divorce was contentious. They fought over who got to keep the books.” specifies the journalist.
Even today, Kamala Harris is careful not to talk too much about this part of her life, undoubtedly because of her father’s political convictions. Known for his “fairly radical Marxist obedience”, Donald Harris is also “the first black economist to have a chair at Stanford University”, indicates Corine Lesnes. A small revolution in the academic world at the time: “students and professors mobilized so that he could have a permanent chair”.
A left-wing and discreet father
“It’s not necessarily something Kamala Harris wants to display,” she comments. In this country, where liberal economics is king, Marxist ideas are radioactive for a career in politics. And the Californian candidate, whom Donald Trump likes to describe as “radical”, clearly does not want to be open to Republican attacks.
Donald Harris himself, for his part, adopted a certain discretion. In 2019, after having criticized in a newspaper “the weight of capitalism on third world economies”, he finally “announced that he would no longer speak to the media”, understanding that his opinions could harm the political career of his girl.
At the time, another area of tension arose between father and daughter. Kamala Harris had humorously referred to her origins to justify her relationship with marijuana, declaring that she had smoked “because she was of Jamaican origin.” This joke did not please his father, who saw it as a reductive cliché. “He took it badly because it’s the history of his country,” says Corine Lesnes.
The guest of “Confidential”
Corine Lesnes, corresponding to the Monde in the United States.
To read:
Kamala Harris: the biography, by Alexis Buisson (Archipel).
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