Kamala Harris's Father, Donald J. Harris Is an Award-Winning Stanford Professor (2024)

With the news that President Joe Biden is dropping out of the 2024 election and endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him on the ticket, Harris's life and career is firmly back in the spotlight.

In January 2021, when Harris was sworn in as the Vice President of the United States, she made American history as the first Black, first woman, and first Indian American to hold this office. Harris isn’t unfamiliar with being a “first” in her field, however: In 2011, Harris also made history when she was elected as the first Black and Indian American woman to serve as California’s attorney general.

As a lawyer and U.S. Senator, Harris’s identity in both her personal life and politics has been largely shaped by her background: her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who died in 2009, was an Indian immigrant, and her father, Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican immigrant.

During the Democratic National Convention in August of 2020, Harris reflected on her upbringing, making brief mention of her father. “At the University of California Berkeley [my mother] met my father, Donald Harris, who came from Jamaica to study economics. They fell in love in that most American way, while marching together for justice during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. In the streets of Oakland and Berkeley, I got a strollers-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’”

In a 2018 essay written by Donald entitled Reflections of a Jamaican Father, he noted that he's always pushed for Kamala and her sister, Maya, to uphold a connection to their Jamaican roots as well as their American ones. “To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me,” he wrote. “As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters.”

While Harris is very vocal about her Indian and Jamaican roots, it’s not often that she speaks out about her father. Below, what we know about Donald J. Harris.

He came to the United States to study economics.

Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica in 1938, and moved to the United States in the 1960s to get his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley. He later became naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Harris taught at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University briefly, then became an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to California and securing a job as a Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Now, after retiring in the late 1990s, he holds the title of emeritus professor.

He spent many years at Stanford University.

According to Harris’s Stanford bio, “His research and publications have centered on exploring the analytical conception of the process of capital accumulation and its implications for a theory of growth of the economy, with the aim of providing thereby an explanation of the intrinsic character of growth as a process of uneven development.”

Throughout his career, Harris traveled around the world to conduct research, give seminars, and consult with various governments—including his home country of Jamaica, where he served as an economic adviser—to work toward boosting their economies.

He and Kamala’s mother met at Berkeley during the Civil Rights movement.

Harris and Gopalan met at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were both studying for their doctorates. According to their daughter’s autobiography, The Truths We Hold, Donald and Shyamala “met and fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement.” Speaking about her parents, Kamala said in an Instagram post: “They laid the path for me, as only the second Black woman ever elected to the United States Senate.”

He and Kamala’s mother divorced when she was seven years old.

Kamala was just seven years old when her parents separated, and her mother was granted full custody of Kamala and her sister Maya. In the 2018 essay mentioned earlier, Donald went into some detail about their divorce, noting that it “came to an abrupt halt in 1972” after he lost a “hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California.” Despite the terms of their divorce, Harris claims that his love for his family didn't end when his marriage did. “Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.”

He made sure his daughters celebrated their heritage.

In the essay mentioned above, Donald also recalls memories of taking his daughters to Jamaica to teach them about their heritage.

“One of the most vivid and fondest memories I have of that early period with my children is of the visit we made in 1970 to Orange Hill,” he writes. “We trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, up-hill and down-hill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy (with Miss Chrishy hollering in the distance: “yu better cum home now, bwoy, or else!”).”

This likely had a lasting impact, as Kamala often reflects on her family’s heritage and her ancestors—factors that have shaped her worldview as a politician.

He famously criticized a joke Kamala made about her Jamaican roots.

During an appearance on the radio show “The Breakfast Club” in February 2019, Kamala Harris joked with host Charlamagne tha God about her views on marijuana use. When asked whether she supported or opposed the legalization of the drug, she replied saying, “Half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

Her father was far from amused. In a statement to Jamaica Global Online, Donald wrote that “My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.”