THE NEW YORK TIMES: Kamala Harris and the influence of an estranged father just two miles away

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.”

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 2 miles from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, yet he has been estranged for years from his daughter 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, Kamala Harris’ father, a 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 Kamala Harris’ 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 Shyamala Harris’ 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.

Donald Harris’ spectral presence in Kamala Harris’ life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Kamala Harris was five. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Kamala Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Donald Harris 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.”

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 post-colonial economic policy.

And 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 only be held 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 60-mile drive northwest of Kingston. The Harris family owned a supermarket and other stores in nearby Brown’s Town, whose Irish founder, Hamilton Brown, held over 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.

A Daughter’s Achievements

In the mid-’90s, Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and coordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fueled 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 did take 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.”

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

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

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, Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when the candidate told a radio show host that she supported legalising marijuana and then added: “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”

Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The father “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 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. Harris declined the invitation.

Today, confidants of Donald Harris say the father 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 file 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 benefits 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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