Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. Her father, Donald Harris, is an Afro-Jamaican American and a renowned economist and professor. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a biomedical scientist who helped make great strides in the field of breast cancer research before her death in 2009. They met at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in 1962 and married a year later. Harris was the first of two children in the marriage.
Donald and Gopalan bonded over shared political beliefs; they introduced their daughters to the Civil Rights Movement when both were still in their infancy. But while Harris couldn’t recall her parents arguing much while she was growing up, their marriage gradually fell apart. They divorced when Harris was seven. Primary custody of the children was given to Gopalan, and Harris had only limited time with her father afterward. Donald has remained distant from Harris’ public life, and she rarely talks about him.
But it was during visits to her father in Palo Alto that Harris got a taste of the civil rights issue from another perspective. Palo Alto is in the San Francisco area, and a significant majority of its population identifies as liberal. But when Harris and her sister went out to play, the white children in their father’s neighborhood wouldn’t join in. “[They] were not allowed to play with us because we were Black,” Harris told the Los Angeles Times. “We’d say, ‘Why can’t we play together?’ ‘My parents — we can’t play with you.’ In Palo Alto. The home of Google.”
