>"Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and an immigrant from a Brahmin family in India, raised her two daughters, Kamala and Maya. Kamala’s parents—her father, Donald Harris, is a renowned Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University for decades—might seem like toxic assets to the types of people who only think about politics through the lenses of polling and focus groups."
>"Harris [Kamala] need not center her campaign around her identity or her life story, but, when the moment arises to talk about herself, she should be open and honest. She should tell the story of her mother, a scientist who graduated from college at the age of nineteen in India and who came to the U.S. alone because she saw great opportunity in this country. She should talk about how that bright young woman fell in love with a rising Black academic, and, after the marriage ended, when Kamala was around seven years old, she raised her daughters in the activist community of the East Bay." >“'These [Black community] were my mother’s people,' Harris writes. 'In a country where she had no family, they were her family—and she was theirs. >From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.'” >"I have oftentimes found it hard to muster up much enthusiasm for Harris, but I feel differently about the story of Shyamala. And I do not believe that all swing voters and undecided voters hate immigrants, nor do I think they particularly like it when Trump refers to migrants as 'animals.'" >"She [Kamala] should tell the patriotic story of an idealistic young woman [her mother, Shyamala] from India who came to the U.S. to chase a big dream and to help cure breast cancer, a woman who found a loving and welcoming community in an unlikely place, and who raised a daughter who may very well become the first woman to win the White House in this nation’s history. She should remind the public that none of that would have been possible without the middle class in America and the creation of unified communities that raised one another and made sure that when one of them was ready to make something of herself, she would have all the support she needed. This is the actual context that created Kamala Harris, and I hope she has the courage to tell the American public about it." ------------------------ By: Jay Caspian Kang Published in: *The New Yorker* Date: July 26, 2024 The tale of two immigrants who found opportunity in America is an inspiring one. On the rare occasions that Harris shares it, her sometimes blurry identity comes into focus. This past week, I drove by Kamala Harris <https://www.newyorker.com/tag/kamala-harris>’s childhood home, a yellow, almost excessively pragmatic two-story building in Berkeley that now houses a preschool. This is where Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and an immigrant from a Brahmin family in India, raised her two daughters, Kamala and Maya. Kamala’s parents—her father, Donald Harris, is a renowned Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University for decades—might seem like toxic assets to the types of people who only think about politics through the lenses of polling and focus groups. Shyamala and Donald were, after all, left-wing immigrants who attended and taught at some of the most prestigious schools in the country, a litany of identities that, together, read like a hack joke that Greg Gutfeld would tell on his late-night Fox News comedy show. In the coming weeks, many of the Republican attacks on Kamala Harris will surely target her record on immigration. Conservative media figures are already targeting her for being Biden’s “border czar,” because part of her portfolio as Vice-President has involved working with Mexico and Central American countries to address the migrant crisis. Harris’s advisers, wary of encouraging this line of attack, may caution her against talking too much about her parents. I think that would be an unfortunate and, ultimately, cynical mistake. Harris need not center her campaign around her identity or her life story, but, when the moment arises to talk about herself, she should be open and honest. She should tell the story of her mother, a scientist who graduated from college at the age of nineteen in India and who came to the U.S. alone because she saw great opportunity in this country. She should talk about how that bright young woman fell in love with a rising Black academic, and, after the marriage ended, when Kamala was around seven years old, she raised her daughters in the activist community of the East Bay. In “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey <https://www.amazon.com/Truths-We-Hold-American-Journey/dp/0525560734/>,” Harris’s autobiography, from 2019, she describes her mother, who spoke with a heavy accent, singing along to Aretha Franklin in their kitchen, attending protests in the city, and meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. Even after Harris’s parents separated, Shyamala stayed involved in the Black community. “These were my mother’s people,” Harris writes. “In a country where she had no family, they were her family—and she was theirs. From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.” Harris has talked about her childhood on a national stage, though not often—as my colleague Doreen St. Félix noted <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/kamala-harris-the-candidate> recently, “Harris’s stump speeches tend to speed past personal mythology.” But her best moment as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary came when, at a debate, she referenced how she was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary, in the wealthier and considerably whiter northern edge of Berkeley. She criticized Joe Biden <https://www.newyorker.com/tag/joe-biden>—then her rival for the Democratic nomination—for his past opposition to federally mandated busing programs, and said, “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Watching that moment again today, it doesn’t feel like the sort of sound bite that launches a political career; Harris’s disappointing results in that campaign confirmed as much. Still, it was one of the only moments when she leaped off the screen—when she didn’t come across as a stiff actor playing whatever role her advisers had laid out for her. More than anything, it seemed, in that moment, like she was actually mad at Biden. It felt real. During the past three weeks, as Kamala the Presidential candidate, Part 2, came to seem inevitable, there were calls from various commentators for her to summon her past as the attorney general of California and the district attorney of San Francisco and to prosecute the case against Donald Trump <https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump>. Such rhetorical strategies are often better in theory than in practice. I lived in San Francisco during Harris’s time as D.A., which coincided with a violent gang war in the Mission District and the high-profile murder of a family returning from a barbeque. Harris never would have been mistaken for Jack McCoy <https://www.vulture.com/article/best-jack-mccoy-episodes-law-and-order-sam-waterston.html>. Even so, as a candidate, Harris already seems to be following the called-for playbook. On Tuesday, in one of her first speeches <https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-mood-of-optimism-at-kamala-harris-first-campaign-stop> as the presumptive nominee, she invoked her résumé as a prosecutor and said she had taken on “perpetrators of all kinds.” After pausing for applause, she added, “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.” Harris’s actual past as a prosecutor is more complicated. She ran as a progressive candidate—sometimes touting <https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-tm-kamala-20190121-story.html> her childhood among activists—but hardly followed the progressive consensus while in office. Perhaps most damagingly, as the law professor Lara Bazelon has pointed out <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html> in the *Times*, Harris “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.” This history, in large part, is why Harris seems so unbeloved in her native Bay Area. Will this harm her aspirational persona as the tough prosecutor who can take down Trump? No. The concerns of Bay Area progressives probably have an inverse relationship with those of the undecided and independent electorate that Harris is trying to reach. But it does bring up a consistent problem with Candidate Harris. She is perceived as being rootless, not just politically but also in life. In the 2020 primaries, she ran as a populist with the campaign slogan “Kamala Harris for the People.” But both the slogan and her platform seemed as though they had been cribbed off a consultant’s PowerPoint presentation for some other candidate, one who could actually sell populism. Harris is not Elizabeth Warren <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/can-elizabeth-warren-win-it-all>, who can call up years of work on consumer protections, nor is she Raphael Warnock <https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/the-political-gospel-of-raphael-warnock>, with his long history of faith-based political work. She is not a politician who has won broad swing-state support, as Gretchen Whitmer <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/how-gretchen-whitmer-made-michigan-a-democratic-stronghold> and Josh Shapiro have done. What is Kamala Harris’s signature moment? What fight made her? There is, to date, no clear answer to these questions. Harris has been part of my political life for almost twenty years, basically since I moved to California. I’ve read her autobiography and watched her debate. And yet I feel as though I couldn’t tell you much about her, outside of the fact that she keeps being elected to higher and higher offices. She has no clear political identity; she always seems stuck between places. I am not calling for Harris to rip up the Biden playbook and run as the new Kamala Harris, but rather to remember that she is asking for the approval of independents and swing voters who might, at this point, know her only as a seemingly do-nothing Vice-President who got put in as a last-second replacement. Trump is going to keep calling her the “border czar,” and, just as people on the right and left alike mocked Nikki Haley <https://www.newyorker.com/tag/nikki-haley>’s given name of Nimarata when Haley ran in the Republican primary, critics of Harris will bring up Harris’s Marxist immigrant parents—especially if it seems as though she’s avoiding talking about them. We are in a dark time in American immigration politics; the upcoming election will serve, in part, as a referendum on how the country feels about its borders. This might deter Harris from even mentioning Donald and Shyamala, except in passing. It’s better, some will say, to play the prosecutor and hit Trump on his criminal convictions, the dangers of his Presidency, the threat he poses to democracy. I imagine that Harris might very well take this advice. But doing so comes with its own risks. If Harris was inheriting a lead, she could probably play it safe—go from state to state to talk about abortion access, call Trump a felon—and squeak out a victory. But she is not the favorite to win the election at the moment, and she might need to introduce herself to the public as something other than an interchangeable Democrat. She also might remember that another supposedly rootless, multiracial candidate who ran for the Senate twenty years ago, in 2004, rode his story as a “skinny kid with a funny name” to the White House. Harris does not have Barack Obama’s gifts of oratory, but she does tell the story of her childhood quite well. It is, in fact, the only part of “The Truths We Hold” that doesn’t read like nearly every other perfunctory memoir written by an ambitious politician. I have oftentimes found it hard to muster up much enthusiasm for Harris, but I feel differently about the story of Shyamala. And I do not believe that all swing voters and undecided voters hate immigrants, nor do I think they particularly like it when Trump refers to migrants as “animals.” Even if many people may be concerned about the border, they, like most of us, are exhausted by relentless polarization, and a cynical politics that only tries to scare people into voting for one party over another. Harris can’t only play defense, even if those advising her both officially on the campaign and unofficially on the liberal presses may find it easier to urge caution. On Tuesday, Harris said that strengthening the middle class would be the “defining goal” of her Presidency. I imagine that she will soon be telling us about the normal, everyday Americans she has met on the campaign trail. But she should realize that her own story can be useful here as well. The house where Harris grew up is in West Berkeley, which once was a working- and middle-class Black neighborhood. Today, almost all traces of that community are gone, as the Black community of Berkeley has been decimated by the rising cost of housing. Even if Donald and Shyamala had been able to move into modern-day West Berkeley, they would not have found the same community, that second family that helped raise Kamala and her sister Maya. Harris would not have been bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary, where she was looked after by loving teachers, and where she befriended children from all different backgrounds. She should tell the patriotic story of an idealistic young woman from India who came to the U.S. to chase a big dream and to help cure breast cancer, a woman who found a loving and welcoming community in an unlikely place, and who raised a daughter who may very well become the first woman to win the White House in this nation’s history. She should remind the public that none of that would have been possible without the middle class in America and the creation of unified communities that raised one another and made sure that when one of them was ready to make something of herself, she would have all the support she needed. This is the actual context that created Kamala Harris, and I hope she has the courage to tell the American public about it. ♦
