With the Democratic National Convention recently concluding nominating
Kamala Harris as the president candidate, questions were raised as to why Kamala Harris' father Donald J Harris whom Kamala mentioned in her speech did not attend the convention.
Kamala Harris' parents split when she was seven years old and her mother Shyamala Gopalan got the custody of the two daughters -- Kamala and Maya.
In a 2003 interview, Kamala Harris said she was not close to her father. His father, too, stayed away from her campaign in 2020 and refused giving interviews saying, "The celebrity-seeking business is not my thing, and I have tried hard to keep out of it."
A Marxist economist, emeritus professor of Stanford University, Donald J Harris was was made a senior economic advisor of the Jamaican government in the early 1990s. But now Donald J Harris stays in Washington DC, near to the White House with Carol Kirlew, Kamala Harris' step mother.
He did not attend when Kamala Harris took oath as the vice president at Joe Biden's 2020 inauguration.
In 2019, Kamala Harris' father disapproved of a joke that Kamala Harris said about her Jamaican lineage. In a radio interview, she said she smoked marijuana in her younger days. "Half of my family's from Jamaica. Are you Kidding me?" Kamala Harris said.
Donald J Harris issued a statement lamenting the comment and wrote: "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."
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he added.
It was during that time, Donald J Harris said he decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo.
But he has not been allowed to stay out of it as he is the center of all debates as Kamala is called 'Comrade Kamala' by the Republicans. The debate over Kamala Harris' ethnicity also traces its way to Donald Harris -- whether he was a Black or not.