Kamala Harris‘ acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention 2024 was full of praise for her parents. Though her younger sister joined Kamala, her father was missing from the audience.
Kamala Harris has been vocal and open about her mixed family background throughout her election campaigns and maintained it even while she ran for Vice President in 2020. This is also one of the things that roped in extra votes for her from the immigrants who resonated with her experiences. Kamala first detailed her personal life in her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, but her recent speech reflecting on how her parents shaped her has again touched America.
For a refresher, Kamala was born in Oakland, California, on Oct. 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a biologist who arrived in the United States from India in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. She met Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris at UC Berkeley in 1962, though he had arrived in the U.S. from Jamaica a year before and specialized in development economics.
Kamala and her sister Maya Harris both shared powerful speeches and heartwarming words for their mother Shyamala and how she shaped them into equally powerful women like her. The Democrat candidate described her mother as a “five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent” whose resilience and determination were central to the values of social justice instilled in her (via MEAWW). Sadly, Shyamala died of colon cancer in Oakland on Feb. 11, 2009, at age 70.
But what about the Vice-President’s father?
Where is Kamala Harris’ father now?
Kamala Harris’ mother and father separated in 1971 while she and her sister Maya were still in elementary school. Shyamala then raised Kamala and Maya by herself, but Donald remained involved in their lives. In her 2019 memoir, Kamala wrote that their dad kept meeting them on weekends and spent the summer holidays with them. Despite that, Kamala Harris has a complex relationship with her father.
To put it straight, Donald J. Harris is still alive and 86 years old, but his absence from Kamala’s DNC speech is raising questions about her relationship with him. It is no news to the public now that Donald is a Marxist economist who is a vocal critic of capitalism. This makes him naturally distant from her daughter ideologically.
However, Kamala still had some kind words for him during the convention where she reminisced one of her childhood memories of him where he would encourage Kamala to be free and “Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.” Donald J. currently lives in Jamaica and works as an economist developing public policies to promote economic growth and advance social equity in the country.