“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.”
The preceding paragraph was the worst criticism a father prepared for his daughter, who had been on a nationally syndicated radio show in an attempt to endear herself to her people, from whom she received an incredible lack of support. The father was Donald Jasper Harris, an emeritus economics professor and former Jamaican government economic adviser.
“Half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?,” Harris’ daughter Kamala had told host Charlamagne Tha God in February. Charlamagne wanted to know if the White House hopeful Ms. Harris supported the legalization of marijuana.
She accepted to an interview with The Breakfast Club despite being a former Attorney General in California who was not popular among many Black Americans. However, Ms. Harris’ managers would have informed her that the question would be posed, and given that the banning of the substance in many places constituted, in part, a thinly veiled assault on Black bodies, points had to be earned with her response, one way or the other.
So she opted for the perpetually high Jamaican trope. Laughingly.
Among African-Americans, Ms. Harris trailed old white men Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Harris also topped few people’s lists in California, where she was born and raised. This was the reality of her eerily brief race; a bid by a talented progressive lady who never quite realized the full potential of her individuality.
His daughter struggled, but Father Harris did not spare his rebuke. He heaped on publicly, as did his daughter’s detractors, condemning what appeared to be her eager performance.
His criticism provided us with insight into the professor’s personality. We may have also been given the instruments to describe the type of relationship that existed between the father and his daughter.
According to Ms. Harris’s book, The Truths We Hold, her Jamaican-born father and Indian mother met at UC Berkeley during the 1960s civil rights movement and fell in love. Prof. Harris’ social justice work is also supported by Ghanaian politician Dr. Kwaku Sarfo, a former student at Stanford where Harris taught.
“We were in the same (Economics) department and he often attended African Students’ Association events, of which I was President,” Dr. Sarfo revealed. The interest in Africa and the relationship with Africans at Stanford brought Harris’ into a strong friendship with the famed Ghanaian professor of economics, the late Tetteh Kofi.
Harris’ postdoctoral research focused on capital accumulation, income distribution, and uneven development, beginning at the University of Illinois and progressing to Stanford, where he became the first Black economics professor to gain tenure in 1972. He was once characterized to as a “Marxist scholar” whose challenge to neoclassical economics unnerved some at the prestigious school.
Harris, now 82, has been retired from teaching since 1998, but it is interesting to note that he would have supported the economic ideas of his daughter’s colleague in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders, rather than Kamala’s own brand of progressivism. Nonetheless, the professor approached his social justice advocacy with the open palms that intellectual honesty demanded.
In his 2018 work “Reflections of A Jamaican Father,” Prof. Harris revealed that his paternal grandmother’s ancestor was Hamilton Brown, a plantation and slave owner. Many people would have found it difficult to share that portion of their family background. The complex moral and political consequences of European slavery frequently compel perceived offenders and aggrieved to seek asylum, yet here was a man, an incurable academic, disclosing a small part of his own personality for the sake of study and society.
Perhaps this is why he was so harsh when his daughter played to the gallery. Identity, kinship, and legacy are important not only for electoral purposes, but also as the bedrock of our ideals and aspirations.
The underlying explanation of why Prof. Harris remains a footnote in his daughter’s widely publicized biography cannot be attributed to differences in political and social beliefs. We can acknowledge that Kamala’s mother was the parent the seven-year-old kid grew up with following her parents’ divorce in 1971.
Kamala’s deceased mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an intellectual, just like her former husband. Gopalan’s ideals became Kamala’s, and she has been widely credited as the most significant factor for her daughter’s success.
“Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father,” wrote Prof. Harris in 2018, describing the end of his marriage as “abrupt” and the subsequent battle for the custody of the kids “hard-fought”. He also rued not being part of the journey as Kamala and sister Maya became respectable lawyers and significant national voices.
However, Harris has been supportive of Kamala’s achievements as a senator, and there is reason to assume he will be heard now that she is on her way to becoming one of the most powerful persons in the world. His reservations about her could be forgiven in light of her new status.
When outsiders try to make sense of the daughter’s connection with her estranged father, the lead characters are responsible for filling in any gaps. So far, the lack of a great photograph has not harmed each other’s public profiles.