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Kamala Harris and her 'next door' dad she doesn't talk to (almost never)

2024-10-05 16:59:02Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Kamala Harris and her 'next door' dad she doesn't talk to (almost
Kamala Harris with her father and granddaughter Meena, daughter of her sister, Maya

The break with Kamala is very deep, painful and starts with the divorce from his wife. But now the 85-year-old has offered advice to his daughter

In the fall of 1962, the University of California, Berkeley was already the capital of student protests for civil rights with demonstrations in Sproul Square, in the heart of the campus.

Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian endocrinology student, was captivated by a talk on social inequalities given at a meeting by Donald Harris, a young Jamaican economist about to receive his Ph.D.

The two discussed for a long time and met again several times. Civil passion became a romantic relationship: in 1963 they were married, and a year later Kamala was born.

In the accounts of her life, the Democratic candidate for the White House mentions very often her mother: a researcher who died in 2009, who dedicated her life to the fight against cancer.

However, the father figure is completely absent, except for a brief mention in the investiture speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago, despite the fact that Donald Harris has spent decades studying social inequality, a central theme for a Democratic political leader.

And although, as the newspaper "New York Times" discovered, the 85-year-old former teacher, still in excellent health, lives three kilometers from the residence of the vice president of the United States of America and who often travels around Washington in a Chevrolet- His silver Corvette, the two are almost never heard from and never met in recent years.

The only exception was a dinner in Washington in 2016, when Kamala was elected senator from California.

It has been written that Harris keeps her father at a distance because Donald Trump portrays him at campaign rallies as a Marxist economist who indoctrinated Kamala.

But he, despite criticizing classical economics from the left and having studied the work of Marx as well as many other economists, from Keynes to Sraffa, was never a Marxist.

The story of separation with Kamala is much deeper, more painful and begins with the divorce from Shyamala (mother) in 1972. Even Kamala in her memoirs does not explain the reason for the end of the relationship between the parents.

He mentions only growing disagreements and roughness between the two academics as Donald took professorships at far-flung universities, first in Illinois and then in Wisconsin.

The separation had already taken place in 1969. When the economist returned to California - in 1972, the first African-American to receive a professorship at Stanford - the divorce battle was over.

And Kamala's father expressed his frustration at not having custody of his daughters, Kamala and Maya, accusing the state of California of ruling that a father is incapable of parenting, adding, according to the Times , “especially if that parent is a black man who can eat his kids for breakfast…”.

Anger, perhaps, even at the girls who chose to stay with their mother: a grudge that Donald has carried with him all his life.

The son of wealthy Jamaican entrepreneurs, he returned to Jamaica when he retired from Stanford and authored an industrial policy plan that allowed the Caribbean country to halve its public debt and reduce unemployment from 15% 10 years earlier. at a current 5.4% In 1978, Harris dedicated his most successful book (Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution) to his two daughters. But he never wanted to meet them.

He didn't go to Shyamala's funeral in 2009, nor Kamala's wedding to Doug Emhoff in 2015. And he skipped the Biden-Harris presidential inauguration three and a half years ago.

But now he appears to have offered to pass on his economic policy advice to his daughter, proposing a public meeting in Baltimore, the home of Kamala's campaign and the companies her father consults for. / Corriere della Sera


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