The story of an American family from the two-room apartment to the White House
Kamala's mother was an Indian scientist, her father a Jamaican economist
4' min read
4' min read
"You could be the first. But make sure in the meantime that you are not the last." The slogan Kamala Harris likes to repeat is something her mother used to say to her as a child.
Kamala was born on 20 October 1964 in Oakland, an industrial city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The daughter of intellectuals. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian scientist with a doctorate from Berkeley, has devoted her life to cancer studies. Her father Donald Harris, a Jamaican economist - still alive - is professor emeritus at Stanford University. The two met on the Berkeley campus in the early 1960s while studying at university, united by their political commitment to the civil rights movement.
Her mother chose the name: Kamala means lotus flower and is another way of calling the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of luck, power and beauty. A reminder of her Indian roots and the emancipation of women.
Her parents divorced when Kamala was seven years old. Her mother brought her and her sister Maya up in a two-room apartment on the second floor in a small house in Berkeley.
As a child, she attended the Evangelical Baptist Church and the Hindu temple. 'My mother,' she writes in her autobiography The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, 'knew very well that she was raising two black daughters, and she was determined to make sure that we would grow up to be two black women, proud of our origin and confident in ourselves'. As a child, she visited India, where she was greatly influenced by her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who fought for Indian independence, and her grandmother, an activist who travelled the country teaching illiterate women the techniques of birth control.
