Family is at the forefront of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and she speaks frequently and fondly of her late mother’s influence – but rarely is there mention of her father. A “Marxist” economics professor who left Jamaica for UC Berkeley, Donald J Harris has said little about his...
www.independent.co.uk
Kamala Harris was on her 2019 memoir promotion tour when she joked around with radio host Charlamagne the God, the future vice president cheekily answering his question about whether she’d ever used marijuana.
“Half my family’s from Jamaica,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”
The man responsible for that half of the family, however – the politician’s father, economist Donald J. Harris – wasn’t laughing. Despite his virtual invisibility throughout Harris’ political rise, her father chose that moment to raise his head above the parapet.
He sent a letter to a media outlet in his native Jamaica, publicly scolding her like a naughty child.
“
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,” he wrote.
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