Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/politics/kamala-harris-father.html
Kamala Harris recalled a childhood memory of her father in her convention speech two months ago, when she said he exhorted her in an unnamed park to “Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.” It evoked a golden moment between a father and his older daughter and seemed a tribute to what he had helped her become. The reality is a great deal more complicated. Donald J. Harris, 86, a distinguished economist, lives with his second wife only two miles from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, yet he has been estranged for years from his daughter and the two seldom speak. Ms. Harris’s convention speech was a rare instance when she named her father publicly — a striking contrast to the praise she showers regularly on her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist who died in 2009. To the extent that Dr. Harris has been mentioned during his daughter’s presidential campaign, it is Ms. Harris’s detractors who have brought him up. “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” former President Donald J. Trump said derisively during his debate with Ms. Harris last month. “And he taught her well.” Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist. Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent. Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. Both are focused, demanding much of themselves and of others. Both can be generous mentors and devoted friends while warily maintaining a zone of privacy from everyone else. Both place a high premium on loyalty. Both can be stubborn.
Dr. Harris with his daughter, Kamala Harris, in 1965.Credit...Kamala Harris campaign, via Reuters “A big part of the difficulties between them,” said Gladstone Hutchinson, a Jamaican-American economist who is a close friend of Dr. Harris’s, “is that they’re so much alike.” Mr. Hutchinson was unaware of when the two had last spoken, and the vice president, through a spokeswoman, declined to address the matter. Both Ms. Harris and her father declined to be interviewed for this article. More In Politics Vance Strains to Sell a Softer TrumpOct. 2, 2024 In Georgia, Black Men’s Frustration With Democrats Creates Opening for TrumpOct. 4, 2024 How 2 Offhand Remarks by Biden Caused Waves in the Markets and the Middle EastOct. 3, 2024 To this day, friends say, Ms. Harris maintains an unswerving allegiance to her mother, even at the cost of relations with her father. It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. Five years later, Dr. Harris declined an invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding to Doug Emhoff in a small ceremony in Santa Barbara, Calif. But after Ms. Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, the three met in Washington for dinner, where Dr. Harris quizzed his son-in-law about his background, according to two people familiar with the encounter. Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.” He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.” An Acute Sense of Loss Like his daughter, Dr. Harris tended to achieve distinction wherever he went. In 1956, the 18-year-old high school graduate received Jamaica’s equivalent of the Rhodes scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies. He would go on to become Stanford’s first Black professor of economics to receive tenure. His byline appeared in the most prestigious journals of economics in the world. He helped write what would eventually become Jamaica’s enduring post-colonial economic policy.
The home where Ms. Harris’s great-uncle used to live in Orange Hill, Jamaica.Credit...Sharlene Hendricks/Associated Press And in 2021, the same year his daughter was sworn in as the nation’s first female, Black and Asian vice president, Dr. Harris received the Order of Merit, a high national honor bestowed by the Jamaican government that can only be held by 15 living individuals. He hailed from a well-off family of landowners and entrepreneurs in the Jamaican community known as Orange Hill, about a 60 mile drive northwest of Kingston. The Harris family owned a supermarket and other stores in nearby Brown’s Town, whose Irish founder, Hamilton Brown, held over 100 people in slavery and is believed in Harris family lore to be an ancestor. Even as a young student, classmates of Dr. Harris recall him as brainy and driven. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call him nerdy, but he was serious,” said Roy Anderson, a former high school classmate and retired judge of Jamaica’s Supreme Court. Though seemingly destined for a life in academia, Dr. Harris preferred mingling with street vendors and shop owners of the type he grew up with, rather than confining himself to an ivory tower. That predilection would shape his professional outlook as “a pro-business economist, focused on what entrepreneurs see and how they think,” said Keith Collister, a Jamaica-based business journalist and economist who has worked with Dr. Harris over the years. In 1961, Dr. Harris immigrated to the United States and enrolled in the graduate school of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A year later, after giving a lecture on social inequality to a study group known as the Afro American Association, he was approached by a member of the audience. The woman, Shyamala Gopalan, then 24, came from an upper-crust Tamil Brahmin family in India and was sheltered from the hard disparities that Dr. Harris had described in his lecture. The two married a year later, in 1963. Both became naturalized U.S. citizens. Their first of two children, Kamala, was born in 1964. Two years after that, the Harris couple traveled with their infant daughter to Brown’s Town, where her Jamaican great-grandmother blessed her by tracing a cross with her fingertip on the baby’s forehead. Ms. Harris as a baby with her great-grandmother, Iris Finegan, in Jamaica.Credit...Kamala Harris campaign, via Associated Press' Exactly what drove the couple apart is unclear. As Ms. Harris summed it up in her 2019 memoir, “They stopped being kind to each other.” In 1969, Dr. Harris, at that point an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, remained in Madison while his wife and two daughters returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. After the divorce and custody battle, two friends of Ms. Harris recall, she told them of her acute sense of loss and how she internalized the bitterness of her mother. Dr. Harris went on to a life of professional acclaim. Students and colleagues came to regard him as an urbane, understatedly personable scholar and prolific author. Upon leaving Wisconsin for Stanford in 1972, he immediately stood out from the faculty of mostly conservative and white economics professors. Election Q. and A. New York Times editors and reporters will provide answers about how we cover the candidates, conduct polls and follow the vote-count on election night. Curious About How The Times Is Covering the Election? Send Us Your Questions. Oct. 2, 2024 Both in essays and in the classroom, Dr. Harris argued that market economies should be inclusive rather than monopolistic. Some of his scholarly papers analyzed Marxist economic thinking, but by the early 1990s, “he had become more realistic, because he’d learned along the way,” said Anne Krueger, a conservative economist and fellow Stanford professor at the time. “He certainly had more faith in government than some of us did. But among the people I knew as Marxian economists, he was not there.” A Daughter’s Achievements In the mid-90s, Dr. Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and coordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fueled by debt into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships, took more than a decade for the financially hobbled government to put in place. Once the policy did take hold, roughly a decade ago, the economy’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was halved. The unemployment rate fell from 15 percent in 2013 to 5.4 percent today. “The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.” Dr. Harris continued to consult with both of Jamaica’s major political parties throughout the 2000s. By that time, his older daughter was achieving distinction of her own. Ms. Harris celebrating her election to the Senate in November 2016. Dr. Harris sent her a note of congratulations.Credit...Chris Carlson/Associated Press Dr. Harris sent her a note of congratulations after she was elected to the Senate in November 2016. After she declared her candidacy for president in 2019, Dr. Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when the candidate told a radio show host that she supported legalizing marijuana and then added, “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” Dr. Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The father “took umbrage,” said Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Harris’s friend, “because his family was blasting him for his offspring having embarrassed them in this way.” The cold war between them resumed. Still, after Ms. Harris became Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in 2020, the father sent another letter congratulating his daughter. A few months later, he received a letter inviting him to attend the inaugural ceremonies. The letter, however, was from an intermediary, not from the vice president-elect herself. Dr. Harris declined the invitation. Today, confidants of Dr. Harris say the father does not dwell on his estrangement from his daughter. His health is good for a man in his mid-eighties, apart from recurring problems with his right eye, which he injured decades ago in a head-on collision with a metal file cabinet in his Stanford office. He enjoys tooling around in his silver Corvette, unconstrained by any campaign activity. He has been married for roughly three decades to Carol Kirlew, a fellow Jamaican-American and former communications specialist with the World Bank who, in an earlier life, lived in the Bronx, where she was the occasional babysitter of a neighboring child with Jamaican roots, Wes Moore, now the governor of Maryland. Still, his friends say there is more that unites father and daughter than separates them. Mr. Hutchinson said he entertained fantasies about his friend and the Democratic presidential nominee conducting a town-hall-style meeting together on how to promote an economy that benefits disadvantaged communities. He imagines such an event in Baltimore, where Ms. Harris headquartered her 2019 campaign and where Dr. Harris currently does some consulting work. “That’s the healer, to me,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “And I know he’d be open to it.”
全文读了两遍，没看到有说哈哈姐的爸想跟她一起经济改革啊。 有说他爸给牙买加政府做咨询，把借债型经济改成了出口型经济，失业率从15%降到5%。牙买加总理说哈哈爸是搞市场经济的，完全是马克思主义的反面。 然后也有说哈哈姐支持大麻合法化，哈哈爸暴怒，发信息说哈哈姐丢人。然后俩人不说话了，哈哈姐入职典礼是中间人发邀请信，哈哈爸还没去。 听起来感觉跟板上众多吐槽亲子关系的有一拼😂 The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.”
CatFatCat 发表于 2024-10-04 15:50 全文读了两遍，没看到有说哈哈姐的爸想跟她一起经济改革啊。 有说他爸给牙买加政府做咨询，把借债型经济改成了出口型经济，失业率从15%降到5%。牙买加总理说哈哈爸是搞市场经济的，完全是马克思主义的反面。 然后也有说哈哈姐支持大麻合法化，哈哈爸暴怒，发信息说哈哈姐丢人。然后俩人不说话了，哈哈姐入职典礼是中间人发邀请信，哈哈爸还没去。 听起来感觉跟板上众多吐槽亲子关系的有一拼😂 The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.”
In terms of relationship, there may be a similar level of negativity but otherwise not similar to Chinese families at all. Dr. Harris and Ms. Harris had little to no interaction after Dr. Harris's divorce, according to this news article.
Kamala Harris recalled a childhood memory of her father in her convention speech two months ago, when she said he exhorted her in an unnamed park to “Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.” It evoked a golden moment between a father and his older daughter and seemed a tribute to what he had helped her become. The reality is a great deal more complicated. Donald J. Harris, 86, a distinguished economist, lives with his second wife only two miles from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, yet he has been estranged for years from his daughter and the two seldom speak. Ms. Harris’s convention speech was a rare instance when she named her father publicly — a striking contrast to the praise she showers regularly on her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist who died in 2009. To the extent that Dr. Harris has been mentioned during his daughter’s presidential campaign, it is Ms. Harris’s detractors who have brought him up.
“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” former President Donald J. Trump said derisively during his debate with Ms. Harris last month. “And he taught her well.” Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist. Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent. Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. Both are focused, demanding much of themselves and of others. Both can be generous mentors and devoted friends while warily maintaining a zone of privacy from everyone else. Both place a high premium on loyalty. Both can be stubborn.
“A big part of the difficulties between them,” said Gladstone Hutchinson, a Jamaican-American economist who is a close friend of Dr. Harris’s, “is that they’re so much alike.”
Mr. Hutchinson was unaware of when the two had last spoken, and the vice president, through a spokeswoman, declined to address the matter. Both Ms. Harris and her father declined to be interviewed for this article. More In Politics Vance Strains to Sell a Softer TrumpOct. 2, 2024 In Georgia, Black Men’s Frustration With Democrats Creates Opening for TrumpOct. 4, 2024 How 2 Offhand Remarks by Biden Caused Waves in the Markets and the Middle EastOct. 3, 2024 To this day, friends say, Ms. Harris maintains an unswerving allegiance to her mother, even at the cost of relations with her father. It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. Five years later, Dr. Harris declined an invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding to Doug Emhoff in a small ceremony in Santa Barbara, Calif. But after Ms. Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, the three met in Washington for dinner, where Dr. Harris quizzed his son-in-law about his background, according to two people familiar with the encounter. Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.” He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”
An Acute Sense of Loss Like his daughter, Dr. Harris tended to achieve distinction wherever he went. In 1956, the 18-year-old high school graduate received Jamaica’s equivalent of the Rhodes scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies. He would go on to become Stanford’s first Black professor of economics to receive tenure. His byline appeared in the most prestigious journals of economics in the world. He helped write what would eventually become Jamaica’s enduring post-colonial economic policy.
And in 2021, the same year his daughter was sworn in as the nation’s first female, Black and Asian vice president, Dr. Harris received the Order of Merit, a high national honor bestowed by the Jamaican government that can only be held by 15 living individuals. He hailed from a well-off family of landowners and entrepreneurs in the Jamaican community known as Orange Hill, about a 60 mile drive northwest of Kingston. The Harris family owned a supermarket and other stores in nearby Brown’s Town, whose Irish founder, Hamilton Brown, held over 100 people in slavery and is believed in Harris family lore to be an ancestor. Even as a young student, classmates of Dr. Harris recall him as brainy and driven. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call him nerdy, but he was serious,” said Roy Anderson, a former high school classmate and retired judge of Jamaica’s Supreme Court.
Though seemingly destined for a life in academia, Dr. Harris preferred mingling with street vendors and shop owners of the type he grew up with, rather than confining himself to an ivory tower. That predilection would shape his professional outlook as “a pro-business economist, focused on what entrepreneurs see and how they think,” said Keith Collister, a Jamaica-based business journalist and economist who has worked with Dr. Harris over the years. In 1961, Dr. Harris immigrated to the United States and enrolled in the graduate school of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A year later, after giving a lecture on social inequality to a study group known as the Afro American Association, he was approached by a member of the audience. The woman, Shyamala Gopalan, then 24, came from an upper-crust Tamil Brahmin family in India and was sheltered from the hard disparities that Dr. Harris had described in his lecture. The two married a year later, in 1963. Both became naturalized U.S. citizens. Their first of two children, Kamala, was born in 1964. Two years after that, the Harris couple traveled with their infant daughter to Brown’s Town, where her Jamaican great-grandmother blessed her by tracing a cross with her fingertip on the baby’s forehead.
Exactly what drove the couple apart is unclear. As Ms. Harris summed it up in her 2019 memoir, “They stopped being kind to each other.” In 1969, Dr. Harris, at that point an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, remained in Madison while his wife and two daughters returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. After the divorce and custody battle, two friends of Ms. Harris recall, she told them of her acute sense of loss and how she internalized the bitterness of her mother.
Dr. Harris went on to a life of professional acclaim. Students and colleagues came to regard him as an urbane, understatedly personable scholar and prolific author. Upon leaving Wisconsin for Stanford in 1972, he immediately stood out from the faculty of mostly conservative and white economics professors. Election Q. and A. New York Times editors and reporters will provide answers about how we cover the candidates, conduct polls and follow the vote-count on election night.
Curious About How The Times Is Covering the Election? Send Us Your Questions. Oct. 2, 2024 Both in essays and in the classroom, Dr. Harris argued that market economies should be inclusive rather than monopolistic. Some of his scholarly papers analyzed Marxist economic thinking, but by the early 1990s, “he had become more realistic, because he’d learned along the way,” said Anne Krueger, a conservative economist and fellow Stanford professor at the time. “He certainly had more faith in government than some of us did. But among the people I knew as Marxian economists, he was not there.” A Daughter’s Achievements In the mid-90s, Dr. Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and coordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fueled by debt into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships, took more than a decade for the financially hobbled government to put in place. Once the policy did take hold, roughly a decade ago, the economy’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was halved. The unemployment rate fell from 15 percent in 2013 to 5.4 percent today. “The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.” Dr. Harris continued to consult with both of Jamaica’s major political parties throughout the 2000s.
By that time, his older daughter was achieving distinction of her own.
Dr. Harris sent her a note of congratulations after she was elected to the Senate in November 2016. After she declared her candidacy for president in 2019, Dr. Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when the candidate told a radio show host that she supported legalizing marijuana and then added, “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” Dr. Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The father “took umbrage,” said Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Harris’s friend, “because his family was blasting him for his offspring having embarrassed them in this way.” The cold war between them resumed. Still, after Ms. Harris became Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in 2020, the father sent another letter congratulating his daughter. A few months later, he received a letter inviting him to attend the inaugural ceremonies. The letter, however, was from an intermediary, not from the vice president-elect herself. Dr. Harris declined the invitation. Today, confidants of Dr. Harris say the father does not dwell on his estrangement from his daughter. His health is good for a man in his mid-eighties, apart from recurring problems with his right eye, which he injured decades ago in a head-on collision with a metal file cabinet in his Stanford office. He enjoys tooling around in his silver Corvette, unconstrained by any campaign activity. He has been married for roughly three decades to Carol Kirlew, a fellow Jamaican-American and former communications specialist with the World Bank who, in an earlier life, lived in the Bronx, where she was the occasional babysitter of a neighboring child with Jamaican roots, Wes Moore, now the governor of Maryland.
Still, his friends say there is more that unites father and daughter than separates them. Mr. Hutchinson said he entertained fantasies about his friend and the Democratic presidential nominee conducting a town-hall-style meeting together on how to promote an economy that benefits disadvantaged communities. He imagines such an event in Baltimore, where Ms. Harris headquartered her 2019 campaign and where Dr. Harris currently does some consulting work. “That’s the healer, to me,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “And I know he’d be open to it.”
In terms of relationship, there may be a similar level of negativity but otherwise not similar to Chinese families at all. Dr. Harris and Ms. Harris had little to no interaction after Dr. Harris's divorce, according to this news article.