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Kamala Harris’ West Wing workplace is lower than a mile from her father’s Washington, D.C. residence.
However they may not be additional aside.
Regardless of the proximity between father and world-famous daughter, there isn’t any file of Donald, 86, ever having visited her within the White Home.
His title doesn’t seem in any of the publicly obtainable customer logs from her three-and-a-half years in workplace. Nor are there any current public pictures of the pair collectively.
It’s potential that the VP has privately hosted her father in her government-provided residence – at america Naval Observatory in DC – the place customer information should not public.
However it’s maybe extra possible that Donald Harris has stored a deliberate distance, decided to steer clear of what he has described because the ‘political hullabaloo’ surrounding his daughter, whose controversial feedback he as soon as criticized as ‘a travesty’.
For her half, VP Harris has beforehand described their relationship as ‘not shut’.
So simply who’s Donald Harris?
Whereas Kamala Harris campaigns from her West Wing workplace, her 86-year-old father, Donald J. Harris (proper), owns a house lower than a mile away.
Regardless of the proximity, nonetheless, there isn’t any file of Donald assembly his well-known daughter (pictured in his arms, aged one) within the White Home.
‘Largely my mom who raised us’
On the Democratic Nationwide Conference in Chicago over the summer time, as Harris formally accepted the celebration nomination – she made a quick however maybe telling point out of her father.
After telling the gang that her father had inspired her to be ‘fearless’, she added: ‘It was principally my mom who raised us.’
And because the cameras panned to her self-described ‘massive, blended household’ within the viewers – together with her stepchildren, husband Doug, and even Doug’s ex-wife – Donald Harris was obviously absent.
It was not clear if he’d been invited, or whether or not he selected to not come.
However Kamala would’ve had good purpose to hope he stayed away.
Marxist lightning rod
Donald Harris, who turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the largest speech of her life, is a former professor of economics whose politics do little to steer the Democrat’s critics that Kamala will not be a proponent of hard-left beliefs.
Cast in Nineteen Sixties academia, his aggressively Marxist outlook makes him a lightning rod for assaults by Republicans.
Donald has additionally used his {qualifications} in later life by providing financial recommendation to the systemically corrupt Jamaican authorities – one thing that his daughter’s marketing campaign will little doubt see as unlucky.
However regardless of the true causes, Donald Harris stays surprisingly lacking from the general public story of his daughter’s life.
And, even when she wins the election in November and he turns into the ‘first father’, theirs is a relationship that is unlikely to fix.
The rupture between them dates again to Kamala’s early childhood.
Donald used his tutorial {qualifications} in later life as an financial advisor to the systemically corrupt Jamaican authorities.
In 1962, he met Shyamala Gopalan (pictured left), a 19-year-old most cancers researcher from India. They married the next yr and had Kamala in 1964 whereas residing in Oakland.
Dad’s hyperlink to Bob Marley
Born in 1938 in Browns City, in Jamaica’s Saint Ann parish, Donald went on to check in London.
Saint Ann can be the house parish of reggae godfather Bob Marley, who was born in its 9 Mile part in 1945.
Harris would then earn a PhD from the College of California, Berkeley. And it was there that, in 1962, he met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old most cancers researcher from India.
They had been reportedly each energetic in leftist circles at Berkeley.
“She was a part of the actual brotherhood and sisterhood. There was by no means a difficulty,” Aubrey LaBrie, informed The New York Instances in 2020. “She was simply accepted as a part of the group.”
They married the next yr and had Kamala in 1964 whereas residing in Oakland (her sister Maya arrived three years later).
Prestigious instructing positions adopted for Donald at two faculties in Illinois, the place the household moved.
But when he was having fun with skilled success, his household life was beginning to unravel.
Based on Kamala’s 2019 memoir, her mother and father ‘stopped being type to one another’ round this time and, when she was simply 5, they cut up.
Donald remained in Illinois whereas Shyamala and the 2 ladies moved again to California. They formally divorced when Kamala was seven.
By Donald’s account, he wasn’t pleased with the association.
‘Arduous-fought custody battle’
In a 2018 essay for ‘Jamaica World’ web site, he recalled how the ‘early section of interplay with my kids got here to an abrupt halt in 1972.’
He blamed the courtroom system in California, writing: ‘After a hard-fought custody battle within the household courtroom […] the context of the connection was positioned inside arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement primarily based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers can not deal with parenting.
‘However, I continued, by no means giving up on my love for my kids or reneging on my duties as their father.’
Donald additionally gushed about his daughters in one other piece for Jamaica World.
Alongside {a photograph} of them collectively, he wrote: ‘So, right here we are actually. All grown up now, Kamala is carving a means for herself in America and Meena is doing the identical by her personal route (as is her mom Maya).’
But this explicit home fissure is all of a sudden now extra poignant, because the daughter in query is the Vice President of america – and within the operating for the highest job.
Donald taught as a professor at Stanford. Certainly one of his revealed Communist works was devoted to his daughters.
Nevertheless it wasn’t lengthy earlier than these heat emotions seemingly soured.
Preaching financial ‘fairness’
In his essay, ‘Reflections of a Jamaican Father,’ revealed by Jamaica World, Donald Harris, like his daughter, gave most credit score for his upbringing to the ladies in his life: ‘Miss Chrishy’ and ‘Miss Iris.’
Chrishy, or Christiana Brown, Donald’s paternal grandmother, and Iris Finegan, his maternal grandmother, had the largest influences on his life and childhood.
The Harris title comes from his paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, a land-owner and agricultural exporter, he wrote in the identical essay, who died in 1939, a yr after he was born.
‘Miss Chrishy was the disciplinarian, reserved and stern in look, agency with “the strap”, however able to essentially the most endearing and real acts of affection, affection, and care,’ he wrote.
‘She sparked my curiosity in economics and politics just by my observing and listening to her in her each day routine’ via her dry items retailer, he wrote.
However there ‘was a each day food regimen of politics’ in rising up round her as nicely, he mentioned. Chrishy ‘was an incredible admirer’ of Sir William Alexander Bustamante, then Chief Minister within the colonial authorities and chief of the Jamaica Labour Social gathering (JLP).
‘Little did I do know then, what I realized later in finding out economics, that my grandmother was espousing her independently found model of a Labour Concept of Worth!’ he wrote.
Miss Iris, he mentioned, ‘was the sweetest and gentlest individual one may meet, however beneath it was a tricky farming girl who ran the cane farm’ collectively owned together with her husband.
‘Trying again now I can say, with certainty … that it was this early intimate publicity to operation of the sugar trade on the native degree of small-scale manufacturing with household labour and free wage-labour … that led me, as soon as I began studying concerning the historical past of Jamaica, to a better research of the sugar trade.’
‘Of their early years, I attempted to convey this message in very concrete phrases, via frequent visits to Jamaica and fascinating life there in all its richness and complexity,’ he mentioned of Kamala and her sister Maya.
‘I might additionally attempt to clarify to them the contradictions of financial and social life in a “poor” nation, just like the putting juxtaposition of maximum poverty and excessive wealth, whereas working arduous myself with the federal government of Jamaica to design a plan and acceptable insurance policies to do one thing about these situations,’ he wrote.
Pot-smoking stereotype
Later that very same yr, Donald made his solely public intervention in his daughter’s political profession up to now – brutally scolding her for feedback she’d made about marijuana.
Whereas selling her memoir, the then-senator rejected the thought she was against legalizing pot, saying in a podcast interview: ‘That is not true. And look, I joke about it, half joking – half my household’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?’
That ‘half of her household’ is her father’s facet and Prof. Harris was not amused by the obvious reference to a marijuana-smoking stereotype.
In a press release to a Jamaican information outlet, he raged: ‘My pricey departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a current essay on this web site), in addition to my deceased mother and father, have to be turning of their grave proper now to see their household’s title, fame and proud Jamaican id being related, in any means, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking pleasure seeker and within the pursuit of id politics,’ he wrote.
‘Talking for myself and my instant Jamaican household, we want to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.’
There was no public response from his daughter or her marketing campaign workforce. However the familial broadside was stunning. Quickly sufficient, Donald Harris was pressured to stroll again his anger.
In a press release to Politico, he mentioned: ‘I’ve determined to remain out of all of the political hullabaloo by not participating in any interviews with the media.’
Kamala’s true emotions for her father stay opaque. In 2021, the Vice President informed the Washington Put up that they had been on ‘good phrases’.
Two years later, a press release to the San Francisco Weekly was extra nuanced. ‘My father is an efficient man, however we aren’t shut,’ she mentioned.
Donald, like his daughter, has loved skilled success.
‘Magic pied-piper’ of a instructor
He taught for greater than twenty years as a professor at Stanford, the place considered one of his revealed works – ‘Capital Accumulation and Earnings Distribution’ – was devoted to his daughters.
In 1974, the Stanford pupil paper described him as a political ‘radical’ and ‘magic pied piper who leads college students astray from neoclassical economics’.
In 2009, Kamala suffered a private blow when her mom (pictured in 1970 with daughters), with whom she was notably shut, died of colon most cancers aged 70.
It isn’t clear if he was paid for his further work as an adviser to the Jamaican authorities on financial coverage, however Donald retired early in 1998.
In 2009, Kamala suffered a private blow when her mom, with whom she was notably shut, died of colon most cancers aged 70.
Regardless of then being her solely surviving mum or dad, there is no file that Donald was current when Kamala took her vice-presidential oath of workplace at Joe Biden’s 2020 inauguration.
Right now, Donald’s second spouse lives on the identical Washington property as he does, in response to public information.
His remaining family in Jamaica informed DailyMail.com that he now not has a house on the island however continues to go to.
Clearly pleased with Kamala’s success, her family informed the Mail they’d watched her acceptance speech collectively at their hilltop property in Browns City above Harris Quarry – which they’ve run for 2 generations producing crushed limestone and bricks.
Sherman Harris, Donald’s first cousin, mentioned: ‘We’re very pleased with Kamala – and might’t anticipate her to get into the White Home.’
If she does win, all eyes might be on whether or not or not daddy Donald exhibits up for her inauguration.