Donald J. Harris (1938- ) is the father of Kamala Harris, the California senator who is running for US president in 2020. Born in Jamaica, he became a professor of economics in 1972 at Stanford, one of the top universities in the US. He retired in 1998 and and now lives in Jamaica.

Background: Donald Harris was born in St Ann parish in Jamaica. He is light-skinned and a descendant of Hamilton Brown, a slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town. Harris’s father’s father was Joseph Alexander Harris, a land owner who exported allspice, an ingredient of curry powder.

Work: Harris, like Barack Obama’s father, came to the US to get an education to help his own country. He wanted to understand how Jamaica as a whole and Black people in particular got a raw deal from world capitalism and what could be done about it. He has been a long-time adviser to the Jamaican government. Out of that work came the National Industrial Policy of 1996 and the Growth Inducement Strategy of 2011. He has also done work for the Ford Foundation, United Nations, World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Marriage: In the 1960s at Berkeley he met Shyamala Gopalan, a fellow grad student. She was from Madras, India (now called Chennai). They took part in the Civil Rights Movement, got married, and had two daughters, Kamala (b. 1964) and Maya (b. 1967). They divorced in 1972, when Kamala was seven. He remained in Kamala’s life, but she was mainly brought up by the Indian side of her family.

On fatherhood:

“As a child growing up in Jamaica, I often heard it said, by my parents and family friends: ‘memba whe yu cum fram’ [Remember where you come from]. To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me. “As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters. … It is for them to say truthfully now, not me, what if anything of value they carried from that early experience into adulthood.”

Kamala Harris, when asked two weeks ago on “The Breakfast Club” if she supports the legalization of marijuana, laughed and said:

“Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

That is a stereotype, something someone who barely knows Jamaica or Jamaicans would say. And, with her speaking as a Jamaican American and a former prosecutor, it is deeply irresponsible since it gives weight to those stereotypes, which in turn support racial profiling. Even if it is “just a joke”.

Her father was even less amused:

“My dear departed grandmothers … 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. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: mainly Stanford and Jamaica Global Online (January 13th and February 15th 2019).

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