We've Heard About Kamala Harris' Mother. Meet Her Dad

Kamala Harris regularly gushes about her late mother, biomedical scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris, but remarks about her father are rare—despite the fact that 86-year-old Donald Harris lives just a couple of miles away from his daughter's official residence in DC, with his second wife. The New York Times details the "complicated" relationship between the vice president and her estranged dad, a renowned economist. Neither Harris nor her father offered comment for the story.

• A separation: The rift between the two seems to have originated with the 1969 split of Kamala Harris' parents, when she was only 5, leading to a bitter custody battle. In a 2018 essay, Donald Harris wrote that his close relationship with Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, came to "an abrupt halt" after that.

• Interactions: Kamala Harris was reportedly irked when her father didn't attend her mother's 2009 funeral, or her wedding to Doug Emhoff in 2014. The three did meet for dinner in DC in 2016, after Kamala Harris had been elected to the US Senate, where the elder Harris "quizzed his son-in-law about his background," sources say.
• Cannabis kerfuffle: The "cold war" between Harris and her father resumed in 2019, when Harris ran for president the first time and said she supported marijuana legalization, joking, "Half my family's from Jamaica, are you kidding me?" Her father's cool response: his daughter's comments were a "travesty" for pushing "the fraudulent [Jamaican] stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker."
• Marxist? The Times notes one criticism of the vice president's father that keeps popping up—including from Donald Trump—is an allegation that he's a "Marxist" economist. Interviews with those close to him, however, reveal that although he can be considered "a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left, [he's] hardly a Marxist." The former dean of NYU's business school weighs in on the topic.

• Aid to his birth country: Dr. Harris hasn't forgotten his roots, as detailed in a Washington Post story on how he's worked with Jamaican officials to craft an "economic growth strategy" for the nation.
• More alike than different? The Times profile notes that certain shared traits between father and daughter—stubbornness, being hard on themselves (and others), loyalty, laser focus—may ultimately be what exacerbated their estrangement. "A big part of the difficulties between them is that they're so much alike," says Jamaican-American economist Gladstone Hutchinson, who considers himself a good friend of the elder Harris.
• More on Dr. Harris: People offers further insight into the vice president's father, including on his childhood in Jamaica, how he met Kamala's mother, and how he rarely speaks about his daughter's time in the political sphere.

Much more here from the Times. (More Kamala Harris stories.)