Kamala Harris’ father, her only living parent, was not in the audience with the rest of the vice president’s relatives during the most important speech of her political career Thursday night.
Donald Harris, a leftist economist who turned 86 Friday, was conspicuously absent from the row of family that included husband Doug Emhoff and his two adult children, Cole and Ella, as well as Harris’ younger sister, Maya Harris, and her family at the United Center in Chicago.
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.
She said from then, “it was mostly my mother who raised us.”
The estrangement between father and daughter is so pronounced, Harris has never publicly acknowledged she has a stepmother. Carol Kirlew, 70, is married to Donald Harris and is a former World Bank executive.
Both were born in Jamaica, and now live in a Washington, DC, condo a short drive from the White House, according to public records.
It’s not clear if Donald Harris had been invited to the Democratic convention or if he chose not to attend. He did not return a request for comment Friday.
“At the park, my mother would say, ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled, ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you,’ ” Harris said during her speech. “From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.”
Her parents split up when she was 8 years old, and she and her younger sister were largely raised by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher from India.
When her mother worked long hours while they were living in a small apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area, “she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us … none of them family by blood, and all of them family by love,” Harris told the cheering crowd of delegates.
Despite the estrangement, an academic who befriended Donald Harris when he was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil in the 1990s said father and daughter share similar economic views.
“I have the impression that the press tends to exaggerate the distance between them in the political sense with people saying that he was much more to the left, more of a social democrat than she is,” said Joanilio Teixeira, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Brasilia, in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper last month.
Although there is debate as to how leftist Donald’s theories were, he was recently described as a “combative Marxist economist” by the Economist.
Teixeira said Donald Harris lived with his family in Brazil’s capital for a few months in 1997, and the two became friends over long lunches and barbecues following Harris’ lectures, which mainly focused on the distribution of wealth and inflation.
Teixeira said he visited Harris while he was a professor at Stanford, and the two have continued to stay in touch, he said. Harris retired from the university in 1998 and was named an emeritus professor of economics.
“I am aware, of course, that some of his theories are very present in his daughter,” Teixeira continued. “The question of the distribution of wealth. The question of raising up people of African descent … These issues are very present in what she says.”
But Kamala Harris is seemingly not present in her father’s life. When he was awarded one of Jamaica’s highest distinctions in October 2021 for his work helping the government sort out its economic woes, the senior Harris attended the ceremony with Kirlew, according to Jamaican press reports.
Donald Harris said he was “honored and humbled” to receive the country’s Order of Merit, which had been bestowed on Jamaican musicians Bob Marley and Peter Tosh as well as Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the past.
Born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, in 1938, Harris studied at the University of the West Indies and the University of London before getting his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1966.
He met Gopalan in the fall of 1962 at a meeting of the Afro-American Association at the school. They married in 1963 and divorced in 1971.
Despite the divorce, Harris took his two daughters for visits with family in Jamaica, and dedicated his 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” to them.
Donald provided a recent picture of himself, Harris and her niece Meena for a 2019 article in Jamaica Global.
In the text, he blamed the California courts for his “hard-fought custody battle,” saying they didn’t respect his equal rights as a father, but added that he never gave up “on my love for my children or [reneged] on my responsibilities as a father.”
But when Kamala Harris entered national politics by running for vice president in the 2020 race, her father stayed out of the picture.
“I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media,” Donald Harris said in an email to Politico in 2019.
The comment came after his daughter had acknowledged smoking a joint in college in a radio interview with Charlamagne tha God while promoting her memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”
“Half my family’s from Jamaica,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?”
Donald Harris was so annoyed by the comment, he issued a statement about it in a Jamaican publication.
“My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote in an essay for Jamaica Global.
Kamala Harris’ team did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
