Since becoming the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to be elected vice president in 2021, Kamala Harris has continued to break barriers. Despite her many achievements, her path has been marked by significant hardships. From growing up in an era shadowed by segregation to enduring the loss of multiple family members, Harris has faced numerous challenges. Yet, these obstacles did not deter her from building an impressive career, even before she entered politics.
“I think it’s really important for America to just have further evidence of the breadth and depth of what women are and what we can do,” Harris told People in mid-2020. “It is worth it, but it is not without sacrifice and not without pain.” The personal pain she has experienced extends beyond her public life, touching on trials and losses that many people can relate to.
Kamala Harris’ Parents Divorced Before She Turned 10
Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and her father, Donald Harris, met at the University of California, Berkeley. Both had immigrated to the U.S. for their education—Shyamala from India and Donald from Jamaica. However, their marriage began to deteriorate after the birth of their two daughters. “In time, things got harder. They stopped being kind to each other. I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water,” Kamala wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.
Shyamala and Donald separated when Kamala was five. During this period, the children lived with their mother but continued to spend time with their father on weekends and during holidays. However, after the couple’s divorce, things changed. “This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972 when, after a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting,” Donald wrote in an essay for Jamaica Global.
Despite the ruling, Donald remained a part of his daughters’ lives. However, Kamala mentioned in her memoir that the relationship between her parents remained strained, and she even worried that her mother might skip her high school graduation to avoid seeing her father.
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Racism Has Impacted Kamala Harris Since Early Childhood
As a public figure, Harris has faced a significant amount of hostility. “Research shows that Kamala Harris may be the most targeted American politician on the internet, one who checks every box for the haters of the fever swamps: She’s a woman, she’s a person of color and she holds power,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2021. Some attacks focus on her status as a minority, while others question her identity as “Black enough.”
Harris has faced discrimination from a young age. Born in 1964, she grew up in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that made segregation in schools illegal. However, this ruling did not instantly eradicate segregation. Harris recalled to the LA Times the divisions she faced as a child while visiting her father in Palo Alto. “The neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with us because we were black,” she stated. “We’d say, ‘Why can’t we play together?’ ‘My parents—we can’t play with you.'”
As she grew older, these experiences of separation manifested in other ways. “I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other,” she wrote in her memoir.
Kamala Harris Faced the Loss of Her Grandfather Just as Her Political Career Took Off
P.V. Gopalan, an Indian civil servant, inspired his granddaughter in numerous ways. Despite prevailing gender norms in India, he encouraged his unmarried daughter, Shyamala, to pursue her education in the United States. “Shyamala was quite definitely influenced by my father, and she in turn had a great influence on Kamala,” G. Balachandran, Harris’ uncle, told the Los Angeles Times.
Harris described her maternal grandfather as “one of my favorite people in my world.” They fostered their close relationship through her trips to India and long-distance communication. “My grandfather felt very strongly about the importance of defending civil rights and fighting for equality and integrity,” she shared, highlighting the clear parallels between Gopalan and her approach to politics. He passed away in 1998, the same year Harris became assistant district attorney in San Francisco.
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Kamala Harris’ Mother Died of Cancer in 2009
As a largely single parent, Shyamala Gopalan had a significant impact on her daughter’s life. “Like so many mothers, she worked around the clock to make it work, packing lunches before we woke up and paying bills after we went to bed, helping us with homework at the kitchen table and shuttling us to church for choir practice,” Harris shared in a 2020 DNC speech (via Today). “She made it look easy, though it never was.”
Gopalan dedicated her career to breast cancer research but ultimately succumbed to colon cancer at the age of 70. Before her death, she expressed a desire to return to India. Although she could not make the trip while alive, Harris honored her wish by traveling to India and scattering her ashes in the ocean. “It was a shock when she told us in 2008 that she herself was diagnosed with colon cancer—and a great sadness when she passed away a year later,” Harris wrote in a Facebook post. “My mother was the first person to tell me that my thoughts and experiences mattered,” she shared in another post the following year.