The other Donald J. in Kamala Harris’ life – her estranged father

Kingston, Jamaica: Kamala Harris recalled a childhood memory of her father in her convention speech two months ago, when she said he exhorted her in an unnamed park to: “Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.”

Kamala Harris’ father, Donald J. Harris. Credit: Stanford

It evoked a golden moment between a father and his older daughter and seemed a tribute to what he had helped her become. The reality is a great deal more complicated.

Donald J. Harris, 86, a distinguished economist, lives with his second wife only three kilometres from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, D.C., yet he has been estranged from his daughter for years, and the two seldom speak. Kamala Harris’ convention speech was a rare instance when she named her father publicly – a striking contrast to the praise she showers regularly on her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist who died in 2009.

To the extent that Donald Harris has been mentioned during his daughter’s presidential campaign, it is Kamala Harris’ detractors who have brought him up.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” former president Donald Trump said derisively during his debate with Harris last month. “And he taught her well.”

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Donald Harris reveal two notable themes. First, the Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.

Second, Donald Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that, in retrospect, helps explain the Democratic candidate’s own ascent.

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. Both are focused, demanding much of themselves and of others. Both can be generous mentors and devoted friends while warily maintaining a zone of privacy from everyone else. Both place a high premium on loyalty. Both can be stubborn.

“A big part of the difficulties between them,” said Gladstone Hutchinson, a Jamaican-American economist who is a close friend of Donald Harris, “is that they’re so much alike.”

Hutchinson was unaware of when the two had last spoken, and the vice president, through a spokesperson, declined to address the matter. Both Kamala Harris and her father declined to be interviewed for this article.

To this day, friends say, Kamala Harris maintains an unswerving allegiance to her mother, even at the cost of relations with her father. It upset Harris that her father did not attend her mother’s funeral in 2009. Five years later, Donald Harris declined an invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding to Doug Emhoff in a small ceremony in Santa Barbara, California. But after Kamala Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, the three met in Washington for dinner, where Donald Harris quizzed his son-in-law about his background, according to two people familiar with the encounter.

Kamala Harris (right) is sworn in as district attorney of California in 2004 as her mother holds a copy of the US Bill of Rights.Credit: AP

Her father’s spectral presence in Harris’ life began when he and her mother separated in 1969 — Kamala was five. The parents divorced in 1972 after Donald Harris lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Kamala and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt”, he wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting”.

He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’ [who] might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children”.

An acute sense of loss

Like his daughter, Donald Harris tended to achieve distinction wherever he went.

In 1956, the 18-year-old high school graduate received Jamaica’s equivalent of the Rhodes scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies. He would go on to become Stanford’s first black professor of economics to receive tenure. His byline appeared in the most prestigious journals of economics in the world. He helped write what would eventually become Jamaica’s enduring postcolonial economic policy.

Kamala Harris (left) with her sister, Maya, and mother, Shyamala, outside their apartment in Berkeley, California, in January 1970.Credit: Kamala Harris campaign via AP

In 2021, the same year his daughter was sworn in as the nation’s first female, black and Asian vice president, Donald Harris received the Order of Merit, a high national honour bestowed by the Jamaican government that can be held only by 15 living individuals.

He hailed from a well-off family of landowners and entrepreneurs in the Jamaican community known as Orange Hill, about a 100-kilometre drive north-west of Kingston. The Harris family owned a supermarket and other stores in nearby Brown’s Town, whose Irish founder, Hamilton Brown, held more than 100 people in slavery and is believed in Harris family lore to be an ancestor.

Even as a young student, classmates of Donald Harris recall him as brainy and driven. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call him nerdy, but he was serious,” said Roy Anderson, a former high school classmate and retired judge of Jamaica’s Supreme Court.

Donald J. Harris in 1974.Credit: Stephen Carter/The Stanford Daily

Though seemingly destined for a life in academia, Harris preferred mingling with street vendors and shop owners of the type he grew up with rather than confining himself to an ivory tower. That predilection would shape his professional outlook as “a pro-business economist, focused on what entrepreneurs see and how they think”, said Keith Collister, a Jamaica-based business journalist and economist who has worked with Harris over the years.

In 1961, Harris immigrated to the United States and enrolled in the graduate school of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A year later, after giving a lecture on social inequality to a study group known as the Afro-American Association, he was approached by a member of the audience. The woman, Shyamala Gopalan, then 24, came from an upper-crust Tamil Brahmin family in India and was sheltered from the hard disparities that Harris had described in his lecture.

The two married in 1963, and both became naturalised US citizens. Their first of two children, Kamala, was born in 1964. Two years after that, the Harris couple travelled with their infant daughter to Brown’s Town, where her Jamaican great-grandmother blessed her by tracing a cross with her fingertip on the baby’s forehead.

Exactly what drove the couple apart is unclear. As Kamala Harris summed it up in her 2019 memoir: “They stopped being kind to each other.” In 1969, Donald Harris, at that point an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, remained in Madison while his wife and two daughters returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. After the divorce and custody battle, two friends of Kamala Harris recall, she told them of her acute sense of loss and how she internalised her mother’s bitterness.

Kamala Harris and her mother, Shyamala, in 2007.Credit: AP

Donald Harris went on to a life of professional acclaim. Students and colleagues came to regard him as an urbane, understatedly personable scholar and prolific author. Upon leaving Wisconsin for Stanford in 1972, he immediately stood out from the faculty of mostly conservative and white economics professors.

Both in essays and in the classroom, Harris argued that market economies should be inclusive rather than monopolistic. Some of his scholarly papers analysed Marxist economic thinking, but by the early 1990s, “he had become more realistic because he’d learned along the way”, said Anne Krueger, a conservative economist and fellow Stanford professor at the time. “He certainly had more faith in government than some of us did. But among the people I knew as Marxian economists, he was not there.”

A daughter’s achievements

In the mid-’90s, Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and co-ordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fuelled by debt into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships, took more than a decade for the financially hobbled government to put in place. Once the policy took hold roughly a decade ago, the economy’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was halved. The unemployment rate fell from 15 per cent in 2013 to 5.4 per cent today.

“The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.”

Donald J. Harris holding his daughter, Kamala, in April 1965.Credit: Kamala Harris campaign

Harris continued to consult for both of Jamaica’s major political parties throughout the 2000s.

By that time, his older daughter was achieving distinction of her own.

Donald Harris sent her a note of congratulations after she was elected to the Senate in November 2016. After she declared her candidacy for president in 2019, Donald Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when Kamala told a radio show host that she supported legalising marijuana and then added: “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”

The senior Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker”. He “took umbrage”, said Hutchinson, Donald Harris’ friend, “because his family was blasting him for his offspring having embarrassed them in this way”.

The cold war between them resumed. Still, after Kamala Harris became President Joe Biden’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in 2020, the father sent another letter congratulating his daughter. A few months later, he received a letter inviting him to attend the inaugural ceremonies. The letter, however, was from an intermediary, not from the vice president-elect herself. Donald Harris declined the invitation.

Today, confidants of the father say he does not dwell on his estrangement from his daughter. His health is good for a man in his mid-80s, apart from recurring problems with his right eye, which he injured decades ago in a head-on collision with a metal filing cabinet in his Stanford office. He enjoys tooling around in his silver Corvette, unconstrained by any campaign activity. He has been married for roughly three decades to Carol Kirlew, a fellow Jamaican American and former communications specialist with the World Bank who, in an earlier life, lived in the Bronx borough of New York City, where she was the occasional babysitter of a neighbouring child with Jamaican roots, Wes Moore, now the governor of Maryland.

Still, his friends say there is more that unites father and daughter than separates them. Hutchinson said he entertained fantasies about his friend and the Democratic presidential nominee conducting a town-hall-style meeting together on how to promote an economy that benefited disadvantaged communities.

He imagines such an event in Baltimore, where Kamala Harris headquartered her 2019 campaign and where Donald Harris currently does some consulting work. “That’s the healer, to me,” Hutchinson said. “And I know he’d be open to it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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