Getty/Stanford Kamala Harris and her father, Donald Harris.
Donald Harris, the father of vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, is a prominent economics professor who once chastised his daughter when she made a joke about pot smoking.
Harris’s dad is from Jamaica, and he’s very proud of his Jamaican heritage. As a result, the marijuana joke didn’t go over so well with him, and he even contradicted his daughter via a public scolding.
Kamala Harris is appearing on October 7 in the first vice presidential debate against Vice President Mike Pence. The debate starts at 8 p.m. ET. You can read a biographical profile of Donald Harris here.
According to the New York Times, Donald Harris has remained largely silent as his daughter makes history on the campaign trail. He has expressed “a combination of pride in his daughter and bitterness over their estrangement,” says the newspaper, adding that Kamala’s parents divorced when she was young. He was once described as “a Marxist scholar,” according to The Times. The Times reported that the divorce was difficult, quoting Kamala as saying she invited both parents to events “even though I knew they wouldn’t speak to each other.”
Here’s what you need to know about Kamala, her father Donald, and the post smoking moment:
1. Harris’s Dad Felt the Pot Smoking Joke Was Disrespectful to Jamaican Heritage
GettyKamala Harris
Kamala Harris made the comment that offended her dad when she appeared on the radio during the 2020 primary when she was running for president. She was asked the standard question many candidates Get: Whether she’d smoked pot before. Her response: “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”
That upset Donald Harris, who perceived the joke as a sleight against their Jamaican background. He then wrote a response that he gave to a news site in Jamaica.
“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, according to Politico.
Added Donald Harris: “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
In his article about being a Jamaican father, Donald Harris wrote, “To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me. As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters. Born and bred in America, Kamala was the first in line to have it planted.”
In the article, Harris explained the family’s Jamaican roots, writing:
My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).
Who is Donald Harris
Donald Harris, who is also known as Donald J. Harris, born in Jamaica and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, according to his Stanford University biography. See his publications and articles here. He once wrote an article called, “Reflections of a Jamaican Father” for Jamaica Global Online.
According to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, “Donald J. Harris is best known for bringing Post-Keynesian economics (particularly the Kaleckian and Neo-Ricardian brand) into development economics.”
He has a prestigious career at a prominent university, Stanford, where he is an emeritus professor of economics.
According to his Stanford biography, Donald Harris, at Stanford, “was a leader in developing the new program in Alternative Approaches to Economic Analysis as a field of graduate study. For many years he also taught the popular undergraduate course in Theory of Capitalist Development.”
His research explored the “analytical conception of the process of capital accumulation and its implications for a theory of growth of the economy, with the aim of providing thereby an explanation of the intrinsic character of growth as a process of uneven development. From this standpoint, he has sought to critically assess the inherited traditions of economic analysis as well as contemporary contributions, while engaging in related empirical and historical studies of various countries’ experience.”
Harris has worked at Stanford since the 1970s. He previously was a professor in Wisconsin. He is now retired.
He has done a lot of work on the Jamaican economy.
“Throughout his career he has had a continuing engagement with work on the economy of Jamaica, his native country. He served there, at various times, as economic consultant to the Government of Jamaica and as economic adviser to successive Prime Ministers,” according to the Stanford bio.
You can watch an old C-Span video with him speaking here.
As for Kamala’s mother, she was an immigrant from India who is now deceased. The parents divorced.
Kamala also has a sister named Maya. Donald and Shyamala divorced when Kamala was 7. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, when she was 12, “Harris moved from Berkeley because her mother accepted a research job in Canada. She graduated from high school there.” In between, the Chronicle reports, she was indeed, as she said in the first Democratic debate, “part of the second class to integrate Berkeley’s classrooms when she began school in 1969…Thousand Oaks Elementary School, in a well-off area in North Berkeley near Solano Avenue, was the school to which Harris was bused.”