Vice President Kamala Harris has frequently spoken about her upbringing and family as she crisscrosses the country to rally support for her newly formed presidential campaign, and made a rare mention of her father at the Democratic National Convention.
“I have such fond memories of my childhood with my parents together. Our house was filled with laughter and music. Aretha, Coltrane, Miles. At the park, my mother would say, 'Stay close,' but my father would smile and say, 'Run, Kamala, run. Don't be afraid. Don't let anything stop you.' From an early age, my father taught me to be fearless,” Harris said during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last Thursday.
Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist who immigrated to the United States from India, and Donald Harris, an economist who immigrated from Jamaica.
Harris' parents divorced when she was seven, and the future vice president spent much of her childhood in Canada with her mother and sister, where her mother worked as a researcher at McGill University's medical school.
Harris doesn't mention fatally botched Afghanistan withdrawal in military-focused speech at DNC
Donald Harris holds his daughter, Kamala, in April 1965. (Kamala Harris campaign via The Associated Press)
As Harris has emerged as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential field and formally accepted the party's nomination last week, Fox News Digital looked into her father's background and academic accomplishments.
Donald J. Harris, who coincidentally shares a name with Vice President Harris' Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, is a former Stanford University professor of economics whose economics background is deeply rooted in Marxist theory and who was described by The Economist magazine last month as a “militant Marxist economist.”
“He writes clearly, with few compound nouns or paragraph-length sentences. But he remains a Marxist and his work is peppered with Enlightenment theory. Republicans who have mocked Harris's rambling speeches will find precedent in her father's work,” The Economist wrote of Harris' father.
Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica in 1938 and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of London before moving to the United States in 1966 and earning his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he met the vice president's mother, and the two married and had two daughters, Kamala Harris and Maya Harris.
Kamala Harris' father says his parents would be 'turning in their graves' over her marijuana and Jamaican comments: Report
He taught at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until the couple divorced in the early 1970s, and later worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining Stanford University as a professor of economics in 1972.
The elite university's student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, described Donald Harris as a “Marxist economist” who taught “radical political economy” in 1974. He is famous for being the first black scholar to be tenured in Stanford's economics department.
Kamala Harris has also barely mentioned her father throughout her political career. (Kenny Holston Pool/Getty Images)
He left his teaching position in 1998 “to pursue more actively and practically the lifelong interest that first led him to study economics: developing public policies that promote economic growth, unleash productive capacity and advance social equality,” according to his Stanford resume. He has since become an expert on how to foster economic growth in his native Jamaica, The Washington Post previously reported.
After his retirement, Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University.
He has remained relatively quiet about his daughter's political success, not attending the Democratic National Convention or other political rallies with her and speaking little about his relationship with her.
Kamala Harris has also rarely mentioned her father throughout her political career, saying in 2003 that her “dad is a good guy, but we're not close,” before telling The Washington Post in 2021 that she and her father “get along well.”
She mentioned her father only a few times in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” and told the audience at the Democratic National Convention that “it was primarily our mother who raised us.”
“Our father remained a part of our lives,” Harris wrote in her 2019 book. “We saw him on weekends and spent summers with him in Palo Alto, but it was our mother who raised us. She was the person who played the biggest role in shaping the women we became.”
Kamala Harris' husband Doug Emhoff admits to affair that led to the breakup of first marriage
Donald Harris wrote in a recent essay that he fought to maintain a relationship with his daughters despite his divorce from their mother and the subsequent custody battle.
Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama, and President Biden arrive at an event commemorating the passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 in the East Room of the White House on April 5, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“After a bitter custody battle in Family Court in Oakland, California, the court ordered a divorce and placed our marriage under arbitrary restrictions based on the State of California's mistaken belief that the father was incapable of parenting,” he wrote in an essay for Jamaica Global in 2020. “But I persevered, never giving up on my love for my children or abandoning my responsibilities as a father.”
In February 2019, Donald Harris had an unusual response to his daughter after Kamala Harris spoke about smoking marijuana when she was younger.
RFK JR responds to Kennedy family drama and wife's discomfort after supporting Trump
“Half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” Kamala Harris joked in 2019 when asked about her marijuana use history.
Her father disputed the remarks, writing in an essay for Jamaican media that his parents would be “crying in their graves” over them.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago on August 22, 2024. (Reuters/Brendan McDiarmid)
“My late grandmothers and my late parents must be writhing in their graves right now seeing their family name, reputation and identity as proud Jamaicans linked, joke or not, to the false stereotype of marijuana-smoking pleasure seekers and the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote.
“On behalf of myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically distance ourselves from this tragedy,” he added.
Click here to get the FOX News app
The Democratic candidate's 86-year-old father has remained publicly silent about his daughter since then, consistent with comments he made to Politico after scolding the vice president for joking about smoking marijuana.
“I have decided to stay out of the political fray by not giving interviews to the media,” he wrote to Politico at the time.
Fox News Digital reached out to Donald Harris for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication.
Get the latest 2024 campaign updates, exclusive interviews and more on Fox News Digital's Election Hub.
