Why Kamala Harris' Father, Despite Living A Mile From White House, Never Paid Visit To Vice President

The strained relationship between Kamala and her father dates back to her childhood when her parents divorced. Her parents remained in Illinois while Kamala and her mother moved to California.

File photo of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris

Source : PTI

Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has a strained relationship with her 86-year-old father Donald J Harris, with no record of the latter visiting the US Vice President at the White House or attending her public events.

Donald J Harris, a retired Stanford professor with Marxist leanings, didn't attend Kamala's public events despite living less than a mile from the White House.

According to a report in the India Today, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) Kamala described her relationship with her father as "not close," noting his absence at the event. She admitted that his encouragement to be "fearless" but emphasised that her mother primarily raised her.

At the DNC, Kamala's "big, blended family," including her husband Douglas Emhoff, his ex-wife, and her stepchildren, were present, but her father was notably missing. 

While Harris spoke lovingly of her mother’s influence on her life in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, she only fleetingly mentioned Donald, cutting him out of her briefly recounted life story from the time she was in elementary school.

As per the New York Post, she said, “It was mostly my mother who raised us.” The estrangement between father and daughter is so pronounced, that Harris has never publicly acknowledged she has a stepmother. Carol Kirlew, 70, is married to Donald Harris and is a former World Bank executive.

Strained Relationship Of Kamala Dates Back To Her Childhood

Kamala Harris's father, Donald J Harris, was born in 1938 in Browns Town, Jamaica, in Saint Ann Parish, who studied in London and earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

He met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India while at Berkeley in 1962. They got married in 1963 and Kamala was born in 1964 while living in Oakland. Their second daughter, Maya, was born three years later.

The strained relationship between Kamala and her father dates back to her childhood when her parents divorced. Her parents remained in Illinois while Kamala and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, moved to California.

As per Kamala's 2019 memoir, her parents "stopped being kind to each other" when she was just five, leading to their separation around that time. They officially divorced when she was seven.

She suffered a personal loss when her mother, with whom she was very close, passed away from colon cancer at the age of 70 in 2009.

Although Donald Harris became her only surviving parent, there is no record of him attending Kamala's vice-presidential oath at Joe Biden's 2020 inauguration, as reported by the Daily Mail.

As the 2024 election approaches, many are curious whether Kamala Harris's father will be present at her presidential oath if she wins against Republican Donald Trump.