🌊 The Making of Kamala Harris

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On June 27, 2019, Kamala Harris was polling fifth in the Democratic primary and needed to make a splash.

So she turned to Joe Biden: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day.”

“And that little girl was me.”

55 years earlier, Harris was born in Oakland, California. Her mother, India-born Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher; her father, Jamaica-born Donald Harris, was an economist. The couple met through civil rights activism in Berkeley, California, where both were graduate students.

When Harris’ mother arrived in Berkeley in 1958, the US was accepting just 100 Indian immigrants a year. But Gopalan – the daughter of a high-ranking official in Britain’s India colony – had attended college in India, excelled, and secured a spot at Berkeley. She soon found herself in the midst of Berkeley’s 1960s anti-war, anti-segregationist, and anti-capitalist activism. Kamala and a younger sister, Maya, were born into this.

Kamala’s parents divorced when she was seven. She spent weekends and some vacations with her father, who became a Stanford professor, but was mostly raised by her mother, who became a professor at McGill University and relocated her daughters to Montreal. Kamala’s sister had her first child at 17, and Kamala and Gopalan helped raise her.

Gopalan taught her daughters about Indian culture and took them on periodic trips to India. Yet she was also involved in social justice activism and would take them to sing in a choir at a black Baptist church and to participate in activities at a black cultural center in Berkeley.

After high school, Harris chose to attend Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, DC. Immediately after graduating in 1986, she moved back to San Francisco and enrolled in the city’s University of California College of the Law. Harris graduated law school in 1989 but initially failed the bar exam. After retaking and passing it in 1990, she became a deputy district attorney in the Bay Area.

In that capacity she met Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California State Assembly. They began dating, and Brown introduced Harris to a San Francisco elite that included the Pelosis, Newsoms, and Feinsteins. Harris soon became a fixture of San Francisco high society.

Brown gave Harris a car and appointed her to two state boards, which paid her $400,000 over eight years. The pair denies there was anything corrupt about their relationship: When it became a political issue, Brown wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled, "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" Harris and Brown broke up weeks before he became San Francisco’s mayor in 1996.

At the same time Brown dated Harris, he also mentored Gavin Newsom, another young and ambitious Bay Area figure. Newsom and Harris cultivated the same San Francisco elite as donors and political backers. In the same 2003 election, Newsom became San Francisco’s mayor, succeeding Brown, and Harris became the city’s district attorney. They were sworn in on the same day in 2004. In the same month in 2011, Harris became California’s attorney general and Newsom became the state’s lieutenant governor, second only to the governor.

Harris had won the district attorney election by running to the right of her competitor, calling for a tougher line on crime. In office, she boosted the number of offenders sent to state prison, courted the police union, and increased conviction rates for drug dealers. She also rejected calls to eliminate cash bail and investigate the police killings of two black men. When she ran for Senate in 2016, she claimed to be California’s “top cop.”

But Harris was no conservative: She also called for overhauling the criminal justice system and opposed the death penalty. A year into her stint, the Los Angeles Times wrote that she was “in the vanguard of progressive reformers who say that California’s criminal justice system is in dire need of drastic change.”

In 2014, Harris married Doug Emhoff, an attorney with two kids from a previous marriage. Two years later – after donning the nickname “Momala” – she ran for Senate.

So in Washington, who would Harris be? A progressive legislator or a defender of the status quo?

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