Kamala Harris's Parents Were Both Immigrants Who Met in Graduate School
"My mother had two goals in life: to cure breast cancer and to raise my sister and me."
Updated July 22 2024, 12:59 p.m. ET
Throughout her time in politics, from district attorney to vice president, Kamala Harris has been extremely open about how her parents have shaped her ambition. Her mother, who sadly passed away in 2009 due to cancer, starred in a handful of Harris's social media posts, featuring childhood photos and heartfelt captions. In a Mother's Day Facebook post in 2022, Harris said, "My mother was the first person to tell me that my thoughts and experiences mattered."
Kamala's mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and her father, Donald Harris, met as graduate students at University of California, Berkeley while attending the same Black study group, later known as the Afro-American Association, per the New York Times.
Get to know them here.
What is Kamala Harris's ethnicity? Her parents are Jamaican and Indian.
Kamala Harris's mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India and immigrated to the United States at the age of 19 to further her research in breast cancer after attending the Lady Irwin College in New Delhi. She met Donald Harris, a fellow grad student, while attending UC Berkeley.
Donald was born in Jamaica and moved to the U.S. in 1961 to earn his Ph.D. in economics. In his aforementioned interview with the New York Times, Donald recalled how he first met Shyamala.
She approached him after he had given a speech about British colonial power in Jamaica and social inequality, wanting to introduce herself and learn more: "This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming. ... At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history."
Kamala was born in California in 1964, the same year that Shyamala graduated and earned her Ph.D. Two years later, after Donald graduated, the small family moved to Illinois, where Kamala's sister, Maya, was born.
After moving around the Midwest for a few years, Shyamala, Kamala, and Maya moved back to California while Donald stayed in the Midwest. Donald and Shyamala divorced a few years later.
Donald Harris is now an economics professor at Stanford University.
