When you're a toddler, all that matters is who your family is and who they hang out with. And Kamala was raised by her Black Jamaican father and Indian mother who were both deeply involved with the Black activist community and constantly had radical Black people around them. Claiming that she was just around white people is a completely fabricated lie.
Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on different sides of the planet. They were each drawn to Berkeley, and became part of an intellectual circle that shaped the rest of their lives.
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Except that when her mother divorced, she explicitly moved to a Black neighborhood in Berkeley to reconnect with the Afro-American Association where she was surrounded by Black activists who provided her entire support structure.
Into the vacuum stepped Ms. Gopalan Harris’s old friends, connections from the Berkeley study group. She was a single, working mother of two, far from her family. Not until her oldest daughter was in high school could she afford a down payment on her own home, something she desperately wanted, Senator Harris wrote in her memoir. A web of support — from day care, to church, to godparents and piano lessons — radiated out from the Afro American Association.
“Those ties became the village that supported her in rearing the children,” said Ms. Dashiell, the sociology professor who was a member of the discussion group. “I don’t mean financially. They surrounded those children.” Mr. LaBrie introduced Ms. Gopalan Harris to his aunt, Regina Shelton, who ran a day care center in West Berkeley. Mrs. Shelton, who had been born in Louisiana, became a pillar of the young family’s life, eventually renting them an apartment upstairs from the day care center.
....But there was always a snack and a hug at Mrs. Shelton’s. If it got too late, the sleepy children would go to bed at her house, or Mrs. Shelton would send her daughters to tuck them in at home. One of Senator Harris’s favorite stories from childhood is of preparing a batch of lemon squares with salt instead of sugar; Mrs. Shelton, her face puckered, said they were delicious.
On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Shelton would take the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church. This, Ms. Porter said, was what Shyamala wanted for them. “She raised them to be Black women,” Ms. Porter said. “Shyamala really wanted them to have both.”
Ms. Dashiell said she was certain that some influence of the study group survived in the Harris children. “The thinking within the association was deep,” she said. “You would look at, what are the underlying causes of the problems that we find ourselves in as Black people? And that is something that would have translated, through these families, to Kamala.”
In the years since, Senator Harris has often reflected that her immigrant mother’s chosen family — Black families one generation removed from the segregated South — powerfully shaped her as a politician. When she took the oath of office to become California’s attorney general, and then a U.S. Senator, she asked to lay her hand on Mrs. Shelton’s Bible. “In office and into the fight,” she wrote in an essay last year, “I carry Mrs. Shelton with me always.”
Except that her high school in Montreal was 40% Black, her closest friends were Black, and her best friend from the very beginning of her getting there moved in with her for her entire senior year. And she continued visiting her father on holidays and summers.
Ms. Harris went north as a 12-year-old when her mother was recruited to conduct breast-cancer research, but California was always on her mind. The experience of a Canadian friend inspired her to become a prosecutor.
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Ms. Harris did, indeed, move to Montreal as a 12-year-old with her sister in 1976, when their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was recruited to conduct breast-cancer research at Jewish General Hospital and to teach at McGill University’s medical school. Over the next five years, Kamala Harris continued to shuttle between Quebec’s largest city and California to stay with her father, Donald J. Harris, an economist at Stanford, and a family friend during holidays and vacations.
Kamala Harris' childhood best friend has told how the kindness of the Vice President- elect's family 'changed the trajectory of her life' when they took her in as a teenager.
Wanda Kagan, an administrative agent from Montreal, met the Harris after they both joined Westmount High School in Quebec and said the pair 'instantly bonded'.
The pair found themselves in a high school that was about 60 percent white and 40 percent Black and drew from a variety of neighborhoods that cut across economic lines.
They developed an unusually close friendship. When Ms. Kagan told Ms. Harris that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather, Ms. Harris had her move into her family’s apartment in a middle-class neighborhood.
“It’s not just that she took me in,” Ms. Kagan said. “It’s that human side of her, that empathetic side of her that could be so compassionate to realize that there was something going on.”
Her mother was so deeply involved in the Black Power movement that as late as 1983 (when Kamala had already left for Howard), the famous Black academic and activist Cedric Robinson thanked her in the acknowledgements of his best-known book, "Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition", for helping him to get the project rolling. That was a full 21 years after Kamala's mom first joined the Afro-American Association, met Douglas Harris, and became a part of Black Power circles.
And claiming she lived among "wealthy white people" is completely false. She couldn't even afford her first mortgage until Kamala was in high school and her communities in both Berkeley and Montreal were heavily Black and not at all upper-class. In Berkeley she was living in a rented apartment upstairs from a Black daycare just down the street from the Black Community Center, and you had the nerve to lie and claim she was living in upper-class white neighborhoods.
She only spent one year at Vanier College, which is actually one of the most diverse colleges in Canada and has produced a disproportionate number of Black celebrities and public figures. I'm not even sure it's majority white, I believe it's majority-minority or somewhere close to it. And then she went to Howard after that, of course.
You're losing this argument on every level.
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