Kamala Harris
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Brief biography
`Fearless' Kamala storms red bastion Nov 10 2016/ Agencies
In electing Kamala Harris -described by Barack Obama as “fearless“ -to the US Senate, voters tore down a colour barrier that had stood for as long as California statehood. Harris is the first Indian-American to make it to the upper house of American Congress. Born in Oakland, to an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father, the 52-year-old is also the first black and Asian senator from California.
Her mother Shyamala Gopalan went to the US from Chennai in 1960 to study science, specifically endocrinology and complex mechanisms of cancer.
Harris is the sixth black individual to be elected to the senate, Obama being the fifth. She is also the second black woman in the nation's history to serve in the US senate. In 2003, she became the first woman elected as San Francisco's district attorney , and eight years later, took over as the first woman attorney general of California .
Considered a protege of Obama, Harris is expected to be a fierce advocate of India-US relationship. Her platform includes such issues as criminal justice and immigration reform, creating good-paying jobs, enacting family leave and equal pay policies, and tackling climate change.
1964- August 2020
Sabrina Tavernise, August 19, 2020: The Yew York Times
From: Sabrina Tavernise, August 19, 2020: The Yew York Times
Kamala Harris, Daughter of Immigrants, Is the Face of America’s Demographic Shift
Her parents’ arrival to Berkeley as young graduate students was the beginning of a historic wave of immigration from outside Europe that would change the United States in ways its leaders never imagined.
When Kamala Harris’s mother left India for California in 1958, the percentage of Americans who were immigrants was at its lowest point in over a century.
That was about to change.
Her arrival at Berkeley as a young graduate student — and that of another student, an immigrant from Jamaica whom she would marry — was the beginning of a historic wave of immigration from outside Europe that would transform the United States in ways its leaders never imagined. Now, the American-born children of these immigrants — people like Ms. Harris — are the face of this country’s demographic future.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice of Ms. Harris as his running mate has been celebrated as a milestone because she is the first Black woman and the first of Indian descent in American history to be on a major party’s presidential ticket. But her selection also highlights a remarkable shift in this country: the rise of a new wave of children of immigrants, or second-generation Americans, as a growing political and cultural force, different from any that has come before. The last major influx of immigrants, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, came primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe. This time the surge comes from around the world, from India and Jamaica to China and Mexico and beyond.
In California, the state where Ms. Harris grew up and which she now represents in the Senate, about half of all children come from immigrant homes. Nationwide, for the first time in this country’s history, whites make up less than half of the population under the age of 16, the Brookings Institution has found; the trend is driven by larger numbers of Asians, Hispanics and people who are multiracial. Today, more than a quarter of American adults are immigrants or the American-born children of immigrants. About 25 million adults are American-born children of immigrants, representing about 10 percent of the adult population, according to Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center. By comparison the foreign-born portion of the population is still much larger — about 42 million adults, or roughly one in six of the country’s 250 million adults, Mr. Passel noted.
At 55, Ms. Harris is on the older side of this second generation of Americans whose parents came in those early years. But her family is part of a larger trend that has broad implications for the country’s identity, transforming a mostly white baby-boomer society into a multiethnic and racial patchwork.
Because of the influx of immigrants from outside Europe and their children, every successive generation in America in the past half-century has been less white than the one before: Boomers are 71.6 percent white, Millennials are 55 percent white, and post-Gen Z, those born after 2012, are 49.6 percent white, according William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
“The demography is moving forward,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, chancellor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has studied these modern children of immigrants from the Caribbean, China, Central America, and Mexico. “This is the future in the U.S.” The immigrants who arrived about fifty years ago — people from countries like India, China and Korea — often had higher education, but rarely went into politics. Their children, now middle-aged adults, are the ones moving into American public life.
“When my parents came, it was like, ‘we just want to make it,’” said Suhas Subramanyam, who was born to Indian parents in Houston in the 1980s and in 2019 became the first Indian-American to be elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. “But the second generation, we want to make our mark on the world. I wanted to do more than just work at a law firm and make money. I feel very patriotic about America.”
There were only about 12,000 Indian immigrants in the United States around the time Ms. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived. Satish Korpe, an engineer who moved to Virginia in 1975, said there were so few Indian immigrants in the state when he got there that there was not a single Indian food store, and people drove to New Jersey to buy groceries.
“In the mid-1970s, if you ran into someone who was American, you might have been the first Indian person they’d ever seen,” he said. “Then in the 1980s, maybe you would be the fifth. And in the 1990s, the tenth.”
These changes trace back to the passage of the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the quotas that were established in the 1920s to keep America white and Protestant. The 1965 law banned discrimination based on ethnicity in the immigration system and prioritized entry for people with relatives already in the United States and those with special skills. In addition to opening the door to many more immigrants from India, the law also ended a strict quota on the number of immigrants from the British West Indies.
Previously about only 100 Jamaican immigrants a year were allowed into the country. And in 1960, around the time when Ms. Harris’s father Donald Harris began to settle in the United States, there were fewer than 25,000 Jamaican immigrants in the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute. But by 2018, that number had increased to more than 733,000.
Amber Simon’s Jamaican mother came to the United States in 1984 at the invitation of an aunt. She eventually married a Black man from Alabama, and Ms. Simon, now 24, remembers growing up in Tampa, Fla. and feeling that her friends’ houses were different. They did not take off their shoes or have the same kind of respect for their parents that was the rule in her Jamaican household.
Her father taught her to conform to society, and to try not to stand out, and he talked to her about the dangers of the police. But her mother, who lived in Jamaica until she was 15, had none of those views.
“Half of me grew up oblivious to the fact that I was a minority, and half of me was really conscious of it,” said Ms. Simon, who began to write online about her thinking on race after the killing of George Floyd.
She visited Jamaica for the first time last year, and said she was stunned at how much it resembled her father’s living circumstances growing up: deeply poor. But she also gained an even greater respect for her mother, who, through force of will, completed her education and is now a project analyst for the federal government.
“I always say, if my Mom can overcome the obstacles she’s faced as an immigrant, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t have the success that I dream of,” said Ms. Simon, who is beginning an M.B.A. program next month. “There’s no excuse for me to not be exactly where I want to be in life.”
In 1970, when Ms. Harris was growing up and the effects of the 1965 law were not felt fully yet, America was still mostly a country of Black and white. Immigrants were less than 5 percent of the population. Ms. Harris’ parents divorced when she was 5, and her mother raised Ms. Harris and her sister as Black girls, because she knew American society would see them that way.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Ms. Harris wrote in her book, “The Truths We Hold.” Navigating the divide between Black and white can be difficult for the children of immigrants who are neither. Ghazala Hashmi grew up in southern Georgia, in the only Indian family in her small town. Her father had brought the family there after finishing his doctorate in the late 1960s.
“We were a minority of one in our school, always,” said Ms. Hashmi, 56, who is now a state senator in Virginia. “I never knew anybody who was like me. It was extremely isolating.”
Ms. Hashmi was in second grade when her school began to be integrated. She has clear memories of the awkward feeling of not fitting into a neat racial category, in a country where people clearly wanted to put her in one.
“I was very conscious as a child of being neither Black nor white,” she said. “The white children would not play with the Black children, and apparently I could play with either. Sometimes I could mediate. It was very formative to be part of that as an immigrant and a child of the South.”
Eventually more families came, and by the time her sister was born eight years later, there were more South Asian children to play with. Last fall, Ms. Hashmi, a former literature professor and a Democrat, flipped a State Senate seat in central Virginia. The tagline for her campaign, she said, was “Ghazala Hashmi is an American name.”
“I really needed people to understand that there was a more complex America that was growing,” she said, “that my name was part of a new American identity that had been emerging for 40 years, and we just hadn’t been conscious of it.”
These children of immigrants are mostly better off economically than immigrants. They earn more, are more educated, and are more likely to own a home, according to a 2013 Pew report. And they are more likely to marry a person of another race: Interracial marriage rates are especially high for second-generation Hispanics, at 26 percent, and among Asians, 23 percent, Pew found.
The cultural clout of immigrant families is set to grow even more given that America’s population is now growing at its lowest rate since 1919, because of a drop in births and an acceleration in deaths. If current trends continue, 93 percent of the growth of the nation’s working-age population between now and 2050 will be accounted for by immigrants and their U.S.-born children, Pew projected. They are also a growing political force: More than 23 million immigrants will be eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election, Pew has found. That is roughly 10 percent of the nation’s overall electorate, a record high. And because they and their children have tended to vote for Democrats, the political winds are shifting in states like Arizona, Nevada, Virginia, Georgia and Texas.
Ashu Rai grew up in the 1970s about 70 miles east of where Ms. Harris was born. Her town had a Sikh temple that was a gathering place for South Asians from miles around. As a child, she played on the grass outside and went to potluck suppers at people’s houses after worship. But South Asians were still rare in her suburban life, and for a while as a teenager, Ms. Rai pretended to be Hispanic. “It was just easier to assimilate, rather than trying to explain what being from India meant,” said Ms. Rai, whose Indian parents went to Wyoming in 1969 to earn postgraduate degrees before moving to California.
Today Ms. Rai, a Democrat, feels proud of her Indian roots. She works in health care marketing, and organizes dance parties for L.G.B.T.Q. South Asians. She badly wanted Ms. Harris to win the presidential primary. So when the senator was picked for the ticket this week, Ms. Rai was elated.
“My first word when I found out? I think it was a swear word,” she said. “I was like, ‘she’s got it.’”
The India connection
Indian influence
CHENNAI: One of Senator Kamala Harris ’ brightest childhood memories was walking down the beach hand in hand with her Indian grandfather.
Her grandfather, PV Gopalan, had served for decades in the Indian government, and his ritual, nearly every morning, was to meet up with his retired buddies and talk politics as they strolled along the beach in Besant Nagar, a seaside neighborhood in Chennai where brightly painted fishing boats line the sand and Hindu temples stare out at the sea. During her visits from the United States, Harris tagged along while the men discussed equal rights, corruption and the direction India was headed.
“I remember the stories that they would tell and the passion with which they spoke about the importance of democracy,” Harris said in a 2018 speech to an Indian-American group. “As I reflect on those moments in my life that have had the most impact on who I am today — I wasn’t conscious of it at the time — but it was those walks on the beach with my grandfather in Besant Nagar that had a profound impact on who I am today.”
Although Harris has been more understated about her Indian heritage than her experience as a Black woman, her path to US vice-presidential pick has also been guided by the values of her Indian-born mother, her Indian grandfather and her wider Indian family who have provided a lifelong support network that endures even from 8,000 miles away.
Her grandfather, wearing Coke-bottle glasses and often a necktie during strolls, may have looked like many other upper-crust Indian gentlemen. But he defied the conservative stereotypes of his era, embodying a progressive outlook on public service and unswerving support for women, especially in terms of their education, that was years ahead of his time.
He instilled great confidence in Harris ’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to America in the late 1950s young and alone and made a career as a breast cancer researcher before dying of cancer in 2009.
Harris remains close to her mother’s side of the family — her aunts and uncle can talk for hours from their homes in India about the bruising battles she has fought in San Francisco, Sacramento or Washington, giving the impression that they had ringside seats.
Her uncle, G Balachandran, who lives in New Delhi, recalled visiting Harris in California about 15 years ago when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and was taking heat for not seeking the death penalty for a man accused of killing a police officer. She considered the death penalty flawed on many levels, both high-minded and pragmatic: racial inequities being one and the cost of pursuing the cases being another. Despite intense pressure from police officers and some of the top politicians in the state, Harris didn’t back down.
“She got that from her mother,” her uncle said. “Shyamala always taught her: Don’t let anyone push you around.”
During a later race for California attorney general, Harris called her aunt Sarala Gopalan in Chennai and asked her to break coconuts for good luck at a Hindu temple overlooking the beach at Besant Nagar where she used to walk with her grandfather.
The aunt lined up 108 coconuts — an auspicious number in Hinduism — to be smashed. “And it takes a whole day to arrange that,” she said. Harris won the election, by the slimmest of margins.
That beach is now shut. With India hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and much of the country still locked down, the environs that Harris so fondly remembers are desolate. Last week a few sinewy, shirtless fishermen stood ankle deep in the waves and tugged hand lines, hoping for a fish.
Because of the foreign policy positions Harris has staked out as a senator, she has some detractors in India. But across the country she evokes enormous pride, particularly in the beachside community where she traces her roots.
“That family had an immaculate reputation,” said N Vyas, a retired doctor who was their upstairs neighbor. “They never raved about the great things that they have done in Delhi or something like that. They were straight-shooters — down-to-earth, happy people.”
Vyas’ wife, Jayanti, who is also a retired doctor and who was leaning in the doorway, shook her head with a knowing smile.
“We are not surprised,” she said of Harris ’ being named the first woman of color on the presidential ticket of a major US party.
“See, all the women in her family are strong personalities,” she said. “These are women who know what they are talking and what they are saying.”
The Gopalan story started in a small village south of Chennai called Painganadu, where Harris ’ grandfather was born in 1911. In terms of India’s caste system, the family was at the top of the heap. They were Tamil Brahmins, an elite subculture known as TamBrahms.
But Harris ’ uncle said that the family never looked down their noses at lower castes and that his parents valued, above all else, education.
The grandfather left the village as a young man to take a job as a stenographer for the British colonial government. Harris wrote in her memoir that he had been part of India’s independence movement, but other family members said he had never mentioned this. Had he openly campaigned, like Mohandas K. Gandhi or other freedom fighters, to break off from Britain, he might not have gotten too far with his British bosses.
After India’s independence in 1947, the grandfather continued as a civil servant for the new Indian government, and the Gopalans moved around a lot. Harris ’ mother, the eldest of four children, grew up like a military brat, adjusting to a new city every few years as her father was reposted.
Bright, determined and with a mellifluous voice that won her many singing prizes, Gopalan attended college in Delhi and studied home science, a vague field that touched on nutrition and children’s development. Her grandfather had higher hopes.
“What are you going to do with this home science degree, entertain guests?” he teased, according to Harris ’ uncle.
So when Gopalan won admission to a Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, to study nutrition and endocrinology (without anyone in the family knowing she had applied), her grandfather did not hesitate to pay, even though it was a lot of money for a civil servant.
“One thing that he strongly believed in was that, whether it is a son or a daughter, they must be equally educated,” said Harris ’ aunt, who became a well-known gynecologist. “I do not know whose influence it was, but this is how he was. He was very progressive.”
And she added, “He would do anything for us.”
Gopalan was only 19 when she arrived in Berkeley. Few Indians lived in the United States at the time, and she didn’t have many Indian friends.
“Whenever I would go to visit, she would say, ‘Bala, this is my neighbor and that is my old friend,’ pointing at Black Americans,” recalled her uncle, Balachandran, whose family nickname is Bala.
Gopalan quickly fell into a civil rights scene, marching in protests, being attacked by police officers with fire hoses and once, later on, racing away from a violent skirmish with Harris in a stroller. Berkeley was a hive of political activity.
It was also where she met Donald Harris , a graduate student from Jamaica who specialized in leftist economic theory. He was her first boyfriend. Balachandran chalked up their romance to “philosophical affinity.”
When the couple married, Harris ’ grandparents offered their blessings. The interracial dimension didn’t bother them, her aunt and uncle said. Harris ’ grandmother was so proud that she took out wedding announcements in The Illustrated Weekly, one of the classiest magazines of its day.
The couple soon had two daughters: Kamala , meaning “lotus” in Sanskrit, and Maya, meaning “illusion.” But the relationship didn’t last. Her mother filed for divorce when Harris was 7.
For Gopalan, it was important to maintain her Indian heritage. She introduced her daughters to Hindu mythology and South Indian dishes such as dosa and idli, and took them to a nearby Hindu temple where she occasionally sang. She also stayed close to her parents and flew back every few years to Chennai, on India’s southeast coast, where her parents had settled.
But as Harris explained in her memoir, published last year: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls.”
Harris is a symbol of the fluid, multicultural society that is increasingly part of the American political landscape, and she has said that when she first ran for office, she struggled with trying to define herself for others.
“I don’t blame her,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist at the University of California, Riverside, who focuses on Asian-American communities. “But I think in the course of her presidential campaign she became more comfortable talking about her identity.”
The reaction to Harris in India has been mixed. There has been excitement — and front-page newspaper articles. But there has also been suspicion.
Harris has expressed concern about Kashmir, whose statehood India’s central government revoked last year. And she criticized India’s foreign minister after he refused to meet with an Indian-American congresswoman who was also critical about Kashmir.
Kashmir is one of the most bitterly divisive issues in India. While many on India’s left have celebrated Harris ’ rise, others on the right have criticized her, calling her a sellout.
“It’s going to be hard to get an unequivocal hurrah, because Indian politics are polarized as well,” said Suhasini Haidar, a prominent Indian journalist.
Harris has not been back to India since her mother died 11 years ago. It had been her mother’s dying wish to return. In the end, Harris returned with her ashes.
It was obvious where they would go.
One sunny morning, Harris and her uncle walked down to the beach in Besant Nagar where she used to stroll with her grandfather all those years ago, and scattered the ashes on the waves.
Coconuts for good luck
When Kamala asked aunt to break coconuts for good luck, August 18, 2020: The Times of India
Although Kamala Harris has been more understated about her Indian heritage than her experience as a black woman, her path to US vice-presidential pick has also been guided by the values of her Indian family. While in the fray for California attorney general in 2010, Harris called her aunt Sarala Gopalan in Chennai and asked her to break coconuts for good luck at a Hindu temple overlooking the beach at Besant Nagar. The aunt lined up 108 coconuts — an auspicious number — to be smashed. “It takes a whole day to arrange that,” Harris, who won the election, said in a 2018 speech. One of Harris’ brightest childhood memories was walking down the beach with her grandfather PV Gopalan. Harris tagged along with Gopalan, who had served for decades in the Indian government, as he discussed politics with his retired buddies. “I remember the stories that they would tell and the passion with which they spoke about the importance of democracy,” she was quoted as saying. NYT
