Vice President Kamala Harris Harris put her identity as the daughter of two immigrants at the forefront of her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — sharing how her “tough, courageous” mother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher who immigrated from India, deeply shaped her worldview as she makes a bid for the White House.

“My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” Harris said Thursday of her mother, who died of colon cancer in 2009. “And as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her — but my mother never lost her cool.”

Harris said it was her mother who mostly raised her after her parents separated when she was in elementary school. Her father, Donald Harris, an economist who immigrated from Jamaica, taught her as a young child to be fearless. “My father would say, as he smiled, ‘ … Don’t let anything stop you.’”

Harris — who, if she wins in November, would be the first woman and Black woman to hold the presidency and first Asian American president — lived a proudly African American life growing up in California where she also embraced her Indian culture.

The convention featured many speakers — including Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and former president Barack Obama — who prominently highlighted their blended families or diverse heritage, empowered by her campaign not to shy away from the complexities of their identities and seeking to reflect a diverse United States.

Here’s what to know about Harris’s parents.

Shyamala Gopalan was a renowned breast cancer scientist

“My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream,” to cure breast cancer, Harris told the DNC. After earning a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, she went on to become a breast cancer scientist. She worked as a researcher at McGill University, among other places. Harris in her speech called her mother a “trailblazer in the fight for women’s health.”

Gopalan and Donald Harris met at a civil rights gathering

Gopalan had been due to return home from the United States to Chennai in south India, for a “traditional arranged marriage” Harris told the DNC. Instead, Gopalan met Donald J. Harris, a student from Jamaica, while both were pursuing advanced degrees at Berkeley in the 1960s. They “fell in love and got married and that act of self-determination made my sister Maya and me,” she said.

Harris said she “grew up immersed in the ideals of the civil rights movement” — that her parents, who she says met at a civil rights gathering, made sure that she and her sister learned about civil rights leaders. “She taught us to never complain about injustice but do something about it,” Harris said of her mother, who died at age 70.

Gopalan ‘understood very well’ she was raising Black daughters

Gopalan taught her daughters about their Indian heritage — including taking them to Chennai, cooking Indian meals and dressing them in Indian jewelry. Yet in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters.” Adding, “she knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

Harris went on to attend Howard University, a historically Black college, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black sorority. She credits the college with cementing her identity. “That was the beauty of Howard. Every signal told students that we could be anything — that we were young, gifted and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success,” she wrote.

Harris’s biracial identity has been a topic during the heated election campaign against Donald Trump. The former president has accused Harris of previously hiding her Black heritage — which she has routinely highlighted in her career. Harris dismissed his comments, saying they engendered “divisiveness” and “disrespect."

Donald Harris was recognized for groundbreaking work on Jamaica’s economy

Donald Harris and his colleagues were nationally recognized in Jamaica for their work on reviving the country’s economy. Harris received an Order of Merit, Jamaica’s third-highest national honor, for helping to boost the Caribbean nation, producing papers on how to diversify exports, options for tax reform and what might improve worker productivity. “He was an invaluable resource whose opinions needed to be sought,” P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister from 1992 to 2006, said in a previous interview with The Washington Post.

He studied in London and California and later became the first Black person to be granted tenure in Stanford’s economic department. There, he wrote multiple books on economic disciplines, dedicating one to his daughters.

Born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, in 1938, Donald also made sure his children visited his home country when they were young and said those trips sought to educate them on different walks of life and economic means.

A saying from Harris’s mom led to that coconut tree

The coconut has quickly become synonymous with supporting Harris’s campaign after President Joe Biden announced his exit from the presidential race — and the meme factory went into overdrive. It originates from clips of a speech Harris made in 2023 at a White House event referencing a common saying from Gopalan. “My mother she would give us a hard time, sometimes, and she would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” Harris told the gathering.

The coconut tree reference has since gone viral, spawning memes, videos, and even merchandise featuring a coconut. Her fans are also using a coconut icon as a symbol of support in their social media handles and inserting the line along with the vice president’s ebullient laugh into their TikTok videos.

Harris’s mother, and best friend Wanda, inspired her career as a prosecutor

During her DNC address, Harris said her parents made sure she and her sister “learned about civil rights leaders, including the lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, those who battled in the courtroom to make real the promise of America. So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work. I wanted to be a lawyer.”

Her high school best friend, Wanda Kagan, also helped to shape her path. “She was sad at school and there were times she didn’t want to go home," Harris said of Wanda. “She confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather and I immediately told her she had to come stay with us and she did.”

“This is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor,” Harris continued, “to protect people like Wanda because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice.”

Maham Javaid and Niha Masih contributed.

Темы и теги

Чикаго Психология и Личное

Камала Харрис выступление днк мама отец родитель иммигрант Демократическая национальная конвенция вице-президент