Kamala Devi Harris - Lifetime

 

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, at 9:28 p.m. in Oakland, California, the eldest daughter of Donald Harris (born August 23, 1938) and Shamala Gopalan (born April 7, 1938-February 11, 2009). Her father was an African-American from Browns Town, St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, and her mother was an Indian-American of South Indian Tamil descent from Chennai. Her mother, Shamala Gopalan, immigrated to the United States in 1960 and was a medical doctor doing breast cancer research during her lifetime, and her father was the first African-American tenured professor of economics at Stanford University.

 

Her maternal family is Brahmin, the highest caste, and her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan (1911-1998), was a high-ranking official in the British Indian government and worked with refugees in Zambia. Her maternal uncle Balachandran earned a Ph.D. in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin, and her aunt Sharala was an obstetrician and gynecologist, her aunt Mina Harris a scientist, and her half-cousin Mina Harris a lawyer. Her cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihla is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland.

 

The name Kamala (कमल) means lotus in Sanskrit and is an alias of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of fortune. She was born Kamala Iyer Harris, but was reportedly corrected to Devi at two weeks. Her father was a Protestant (Baptist) and her mother a Hindu, so she and her sister were raised with influences from both religions. She received a Hindu upbringing from her mother and has always emphasized her Indian identity, but when she entered adolescence, she attended a black Baptist church under the influence of her father and a neighbor, Regina Shelton, and has attended a black Baptist church ever since. Regina Shelton was a major influence on Harris' religious identity and remains a mentor to this day. When he was sworn in as California's attorney general, he took her Bible and placed her hand on it.

Her parents divorced at the age of seven while she was living in Berkeley, California, and she was raised by her mother in an Indian culture, identifying himself as Indian. However, as an adult, she has since pushed her black identity harder than her Indian identity because of the much greater influence of black voters in the United States. At the age of 12, she moved with her mother to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she completed secondary and high school. Her mother worked there as a university lecturer and hospital researcher. She was raised by her mother in the Indian culture and identified as Indian. However, she went to college at Howard University, a prestigious black university, and now, as a national politician, she emphasizes her black identity more.

 

Her first grade teacher at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley before she left for Montreal, Frances Wilson, is said to have convinced her that she could be and do anything, and she attended Carmela's law school graduation many years after elementary school.

Her mother often worked on weekends to support her children after their divorce, and whenever her mother was working, Carmela and her sister were cared for by a woman named Regina Shilton. Carmela recalled of Shilton: “My mother worked during the day, and she often worked on weekends, and my sister and I would walk to Mrs. Shilton's house, and she was like our second mother, and she took good care of us.” (USA Today interview) (during an interview with USA Today)

 

 

In 1981, she attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in economics and political science, and was elected to the student government as an undergraduate. After completing her undergraduate studies, she attended Hastings College of the Law at California State University, where she graduated and served as a prosecutor in the state of California. From 1990 to 1998, she was a Deputy District Attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, and in 2003, she challenged and won the San Francisco District Attorney's office, where she was re-elected and served for eight years. After stepping down from the San Francisco District Attorney's office, she challenged for California Attorney General, where she defeated Steve Cooley and was re-elected and served for eight years.

On February 11, 2009, her mother died of colon cancer. In 1994, she had an extramarital affair with Willie Brown, a black politician 30 years her junior, and there were numerous rumors that Brown would soon divorce her and marry Carmela in response to public criticism, but the marriage never materialized because of the political strain on both of them. In 2014, at the relatively late age of 49, Brown married lawyer Doug Emhoff. They have two stepchildren together.