"My father is a good guy, but we are not close."
When it comes to Kamala Harris’ family, it is public knowledge that she was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
But what is less known is that she has a seemingly distant relationship with her father.
Even though Donald J Harris owns a home less than a mile away from the White House, there is no record of him visiting her at her office.
Nor are there any recent public photographs of the pair together.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Kamala made a brief but perhaps telling mention of her father.
After telling the crowd that her father had encouraged her to be “fearless”, she added:
“It was mostly my mother who raised us.”
And as the cameras panned to her family, a glaring absentee was her father.
It is unclear if he had been invited or whether he chose not to come.
But Kamala Harris would have had a good reason to hope he stayed away.
Her father is a former professor of economics whose politics do little to persuade the Democrats’ critics that Kamala is not a proponent of hard-left beliefs.
Donald’s aggressively Marxist outlook makes him a lightning rod for attacks by Republicans.
He also used his qualifications to offer economic advice to the systemically corrupt Jamaican government – something that his daughter’s campaign will no doubt see as unfortunate.
But whatever the real reason, Donald Harris remains missing from his daughter’s public life.
And even if she wins the Presidential election in November 2024, it is a relationship that is unlikely to mend.
Born in Browns Town in 1938, Donald went on to study in London, before earning a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
It was there that he met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India.
They married in 1963 and had Kamala Harris the following year. Their second daughter arrived a few years later.
The family moved to Illinois when Donald secured prestigious teaching positions.
But despite his professional life’s success, his family life began to go downhill.
According to Kamala Harris’ 2019 memoir, her parents “stopped being kind to each other” around this time and, when she was just five, they split.
Donald stayed in Illinois while Shyamala and the two girls moved back to California. They officially divorced when Kamala was seven.
According to Donald, he was unhappy with the arrangement.
In a 2018 essay for ‘Jamaica Global’ website, he recalled how the “early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972”.
He blamed California’s court system, writing:
“After a hard-fought custody battle in the family court […] the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.
“Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.”
In another piece for Jamaica Global, Donald gushed about his daughters.
He wrote: “So, here we are now. All grown up now, Kamala is carving a way for herself in America and Meena is doing the same by her own route (as is her mother Maya).”
However, things seemingly soured shortly after.
Later that same year, Donald criticised Kamala for comments she had made about marijuana.
While promoting her memoir, the then-Senator rejected the idea she was opposed to legalising marijuana, saying:
“That’s not true. And look, I joke about it, half joking – half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”
Annoyed by the apparent reference to Jamaica’s marijuana-smoking stereotype, Donald raged:
“My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
There was no public response.
Soon enough, Donald said: “I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media.”
Kamala’s true feelings for her father remain obscure. In 2021, she told the Washington Post that they were on “good terms”.
But two years later, she said: “My father is a good guy, but we are not close.”
Donald Harris taught for over 20 years as a professor at Stanford.
In 1974, the Stanford student paper described him as a political “radical” and “magic pied piper who leads students astray from neoclassical economics”.
In 2009, Kamala’s mother passed away due to colon cancer.
Despite then being her only surviving parent, there’s no record that Donald was present when Kamala took her vice-presidential oath of office at Joe Biden’s 2020 inauguration.
Today, Donald lives with his second wife.
His remaining relatives in Jamaica said he no longer has a home on the island but continues to visit.
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