The education of US presidential candidate Kamala Harris, child of international students

Kamala Harris has become a household name since the 2020 US elections. She created history with a long list of “firsts” — most notably being the first black woman vice president.

Now, she’s about to top that achievement with something else: a US presidency.

On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as President of the United States and for his decades of service to our country.

I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 21, 2024

Across the world, in the homelands of Kamala Harris’s parents — India and Jamaica — citizens celebrated the first US Vice President with roots in their countries. They reveled in the streets with handmade posters featuring her picture.

A child of immigrants, Harris’ political clout draws largely from her origin story.

Her father and mother came from Jamaica and India respectively to study in the US back in the 60s, connecting at a black study group that would become the Afro-American Association  — a building block for the Black Panther Party and the American civil rights movement.

Although Harris’s mother was not Black, she grew up as a British colonial subject in India and as a person of colour, and Afro-American Association members told The New York Times that she was “accepted as part of the group.”

Donald Harris holding his daughter Kamala in April 1965. Source: Kamala Harris/AFP

The economist father

Donald J. Harris came to the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) to study economics on a scholarship from the British colonial government.

He was attracted to the US for the nascent civil rights movement brewing in the South; the study group introduced this Jamaican to the realities of African-American life. As he told the Washington Post, the country represented “a lively and evolving dynamic of a racially and ethnically complex society.”

After speaking at the Afro-American Association, Harris Sr. was approached by a young Indian scientist named Shyamala Gopalan. They were both deeply intellectual 24-year-old international students involved in transforming the political landscape of their new home.

They would get married in 1963, welcome two daughters, and go through a divorce in 1972. Kamala repeatedly recounts during the 2020 US elections campaign trail that she was raised by a single mother.

Since graduating from his studies and multiple teaching stints around the US, Harris Sr. served as a professor of economics at Stanford University from 1972 to 1998 and is now a professor emeritus. In addition to his work in academia, he also served as an economic consultant to the government of Jamaica and as an adviser to multiple prime ministers.

Kamala Harris with her maternal family. Her mother hails from Tamil Nadu, India. Source: Kamala Harris

The scientist mother

Shyamala Gopalan’s family in Chennai was progressive by South Asian standards. At 19, she completed her home science degree at the University of Delhi. At 25, she completed her PhD studies in nutrition and endocrinology at UC Berkeley.

“I never came (to the US) to stay. It’s the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came,” she told SF Weekly.

They were married in 1963 and welcomed their first child, Kamala, the following year — the same year Gopalan received her PhD.

She went on to research breast cancer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin, the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, McGill University Faculty of Medicine, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Her work advanced the understanding of hormones in breast cancer, including the groundbreaking work in “isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene in a mouse-a momentous finding that transformed our understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue,” her obituary reads.

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Vice President Kamala Harris (@vp)

Sufficed to say, Harris drew great inspiration from her scientist immigrant mother, who built a respectable research career while raising two daughters. She knocked down several barriers still familiar to international students today, including being underestimated for her accent.

Kamala Harris’s parents divorced when Kamala was just seven, so Harris credits her single mother for her upbringing. Nevertheless, Gopalan ensured Kamala and her sister Maya grew up well acquainted with both their African and Indian roots, which became formative to their American identity.

When her daughter ran for San Francisco district attorney, Gopalan volunteered selflessly on the campaign trail. Sadly, she passed away in 2009 from colon cancer.

The first-generation lawyer

Kamala Harris’s parents were bright, international students at UC Berkeley. Source: Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris recalls that her parents never fought for money during their divorce, only for the books they shared. Naturally, coming from an academically-inclined family, that set a high bar for her education.

Harris is a product of American higher education, having obtained a degree in political science and economics from Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C.

She then attended law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she led the Black Law Students Association chapter. Young Harris’ only stint as an international student was in Canada, where she lived as a child. She attended Notre-Dame-des-Neiges School and Westmount High School in Montreal.

Upon graduating, Harris worked in the Alameda County and San Francisco district attorney’s office before becoming the latter’s district attorney in 2003. This was momentous, for she was the first person of colour to land the position in the Californian city.

The new challenge ahead isn’t easy, but Kamala Harris has faced worse odds before. Source: AFP

In 2010, she was elected Attorney General of California, the state’s top law enforcement position, and was re-elected in 2014.

In 2016, Harris was elected to the US Senate and became a leading critic of Trump, particularly towards his immigration policies.

Finally, in 2020, she was part of a short-lived presidential run before joining Biden’s camp and making history as the first black female vice president, also making her the first daughter of immigrants ever elected as a US vice president.

And she’s more than ready to make history again, this time hopefully stepping out of the 2024 US presidential fight with a new title to her name.

Disclaimer: This article was last updated on July 22, 2024.