New York: Kamala Devi Harris has deftly melded her dominant African American identity with that of her Indian background as a Tamil to create the evergreen American classic of the immigrant dream.
Born in the US to immigrants, cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan from India and economics professor Donald Harris from Jamaica, Harris has leaped in a generation to run for a position that could put her a heartbeat away from the presidency.
She wrote in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” that she was raised in “a place where people believed in the most basic tenet of the American Dream: that if you worked hard and do right by the world, your kids will be better of than you were.” On Tuesday Joe Biden, who is to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, announced that she would be on his ticket at the nominee for vice president.
Her multiracial background – which includes a layer of a White Jewish husband, Douglas Emhoff, and two step-children – gives her a degree of identity fluidity to navigate American society riven by race and ethnicity.
After her parents divorced when she was only seven, Harris was brought up by her mother, whom she has described as “tough and fierce and protective” yet “generous and loyal.
Moving from New Delhi to Berkeley for her PhD in the tumultuous era of the 1960s civil rights movements, Shyamala Gopalan joined the protests “with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul,” Harris wrote.
Her relationship with fellow activist Donald Harris grew under the clamor of the protests
and Kamala Harris recalls, “My parents often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches.” In this environment, she wrote, “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters.
She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” Her sister Maya is also a lawyer.
While the African American identity became the dominant one – and, in fact, the one that boosted her chances to get the vice-presidential nomination – Harris wrote, “Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage and we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture.”
She wrote, “My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots.” I was also very close to my mother’s brother, Balu, and her two sisters, Sarala and Chinni (whom I called Chittis, which means ‘younger mother’ [in Tamil]),” she recalled.
Her uncle, G Balachandran is a retired academic, who has a PhD from the US. Her aunt Sarala is a retired obstetrician and the other aunt, Mahalaxmi, was an information scientist in Canada.
Shyamala Gopalan moved to Canada to teach at McGill University in Montreal when Harris was about 12. Harris rounded off her international exposure going to high school in Quebec. But returned to the US to study at Howard University, an African American institution in Washington.