Kamala Should Call Her Father
As a girl, Kamala Harris had a fairly absent father.
Fifty years later, she still does.
As it turns out, the most important Donald in her life doesn’t have the last name Trump: Donald J. Harris, Ph.D. is alive and well, and he resides only two miles away from his estranged daughter.
A well-known economist in his ’80s, Dr. Harris is a Jamaican-born emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he was the first Black professor of economics to receive tenure. After divorcing his first wife in 1972, Dr. Harris lost custody of his two young daughters. He blames this for the beginning of the strain on their relationship, writing in 2018 that the custody decision was made “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting …”
The Washington Post pointed out the glaring omission of Harris’s father in her childhood narrative, saying they found it “baffling” that she “barely touched on it during her CNN interview last month or in the debate. She briefly mentioned her mother, but that’s only partly illuminating; it feels incomplete … perhaps she just doesn’t like talking about her father — or worries about what he might say.”
The article points out that absent fathers are “something of a recurring theme in Democratic campaigns; both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled with their feelings about fathers who abandoned them. But both made those fathers central to their personal and then political narratives … Harris, on the other hand, has mostly avoided discussing her father … for her entire political career.”
In a 2003 interview, Harris said she was not close to her father. In 2014, her father RSVP’d “No” to her wedding to Doug Emhoff; in 2016, he sent Kamala a congratulatory note after her Senate win; and, in 2019, he offered economic policy advice to her presidential campaign.
Shortly after offering his advisement, his daughter gave a radio interview during which she said she supported legalizing marijuana and had smoked pot regularly growing up, ending with the quip: “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”
Dr. Harris was not amused.
He sent a statement to Jamaica Global Online saying, “My dear departed grandmothers … 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.”
With a swift right hook, Dr. Harris hit the house of cards constructed out of identity politics that his eldest child had begun building and, being a man of some integrity, admonished her for it. Publicly.
When she became Biden’s running mate in 2020, he sent an olive branch in the form of another note of congratulations and in response received an impersonal invitation to the 2020 Presidential Inauguration. He declined.
Through her Facebook posts and interviews filled with anecdotes about her mother and strong women, her father’s absence is palpable. In that absence, Harris has leaned in to the dark charade that a woman can only depend upon herself to get what she wants out of life. It’s her girl-boss, brat-energy origin point. Her approach to life with this independent female perspective has been ruthless, strategic, and, if we’re being honest, largely successful.
Using these resources, Harris has been intentionally advancing herself in the game of politics. The Sunday Times addressed the repeated comment that Harris would be a political nobody if she hadn’t, at the young age of 29, pursued and maintained a two-year romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the then-60-year-old mayor of San Francisco. Brown had been a powerful and influential figure in California politics for four decades. During their relationship, he appointed Harris to two state regulatory boards, gifted her a BMW, took her to Europe on vacation, and invited her along to glitzy Hollywood events, like the Academy Awards. Harris also dated actor and celebrity Montel Williams — another older Black man of influence.
Her father, himself a few years younger than Brown, probably disapproved. “The celebrity-seeking business is not my thing, and I have tried hard to keep out of it,” Dr. Harris once told a reporter who asked why he avoids the media.
You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see where this is going. Harris’ propensity for using powerful, connected, older men is evidence of a deep need to be loved by the man who rejected her, and still does.
Biden was clear that his vice presidential pick in 2020 would be a Black woman. Harris was the only real candidate with a hat in the ring who fit that biological profile and, therefore, was the obvious “DEI pick” to become the first Black female vice president and first female Democratic presidential nominee.
It’s ironic that had her father not been her father she would not be a Black woman and, therefore, would not be considered for the job. The one man who denies her the love and public affirmation she wants is inherently responsible for her success. Poetically, her blackness remains the one gift her father can never take back.
All of this should alarm American voters.
It’s one thing to be a wildcard who’s ballsy enough to be unpredictable — like Trump. It’s quite another to have a chip on your shoulder and a need to prove yourself to a world of powerful men because you have unresolved family issues.
Kamala Harris is many things (most of which I happily join her father in publicly admonishing or mocking her for). But there remains one characteristic for which even I find pity — she is a woman in pain.
She glides to and fro, awkwardly cackling from one interaction to the next, lacking any real substance, and haunting us with her unhealed, broken heart — always trying to prove herself and looking in the all the wrong places for the unconditional love, respect, and approval her father continues to withhold from her.
And about that, I cannot laugh at all.
Tiffany Marie Brannon is a political strategist and the writer and host of the TMB Problems podcast.
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