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Kamala Harris’ Estranged Dad Owns a Home Just a Mile From the White House—So, Why Has He Never Gone To Visit?
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Aug 30, 2024
When Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, she raised eyebrows when she made an incredibly rare reference to her estranged father, Donald J. Harris, praising him for inspiring her to “be fearless.” She recalled how her father had once told her,
“Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you,” when she was playing in the park as a child.
“From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless,” she noted. Kamala paid tribute to her father in her history-making speech in front of the world at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
However, privately, her relationship with Donald, 86, is understood to have broken down almost entirely. So much so, that the pair are reported to have spent very little time together—even though Kamala’s dad lives just one mile away from the White House that his daughter is now fighting to claim. His geographical proximity to his daughter makes the apparent rift between the pair all the more stark, with DailyMail.com reporting that there is no record of the vice president‘s father ever having visited Kamala, 59, at the White House.
Donald was not present at the DNC when Kamala gave her acceptance speech, despite being her only living parent. Her mother, who she also spoke very warmly about at the convention, died in 2009.
It is not known whether Donald has visited his daughter privately. However, both he and Kamala have been open about their estranged relationship.
“When I was in elementary school, [my parents] split up, and it was mostly my mother who raised us,” Kamala said in her DNC speech.
In 2019, Donald told Politico that he did not wish to engage in the “political hullabaloo” surrounding his daughter and would therefore not be giving any interviews to the press, a promise that he has kept.
However, this was only after he had taken aim at his daughter over a comment she made about smoking marijuana when she was younger, admitting during a radio interview:
“Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”
The quip did not sit well with Donald, who issued a statement to Jamaica Global Online in which he decried the comments.
“My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), 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,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
The Harris campaign did not respond.
Close, but yet so far
The presidential candidate currently lives with her husband, Doug Emhoff, in the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president.
As for her father, a Jamaican-American economist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, he lives in a condo in Washington, DC. Located downtown, Donald’s three-bedroom home spans 2,200 square feet. He purchased his longtime home in 2000 for $700,000, and it sits about 2 miles from the Naval Observatory.The building offers amenities such as 24/7 concierge service, a fitness room, a party room, and a lobby patio. Dining options, entertainment venues, and the Metro are nearby. The locale is minutes from Dupont Circle, downtown, and Georgetown, along with nearby Rock Creek Park.
From Jamaica to California Donald Harris is an economist. Jamaican-born, he immigrated to the U.S. to complete a doctoral degree at the University of California at Berkeley. There he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian immigrant and scientist who also was earning her doctorate, and the two married in 1963.
Kamala Harris was born in 1964, and sister Maya in 1967. Their parents divorced in 1971.
Divorced Dad
After the divorce, Gopalan had custody, but the girls continued to see their father on weekends and summers in Palo Alto, CA, Kamala recounted in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.
“Had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived,” she wrote. “But they were so young. My father was my mother’s first boyfriend.”
Donald wrote about his frustration over having less contact with his girls after the divorce.
“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,” he wrote in Jamaica Global Online.
“Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father,” he added.
Economics professor Donald held professorships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining Stanford University as professor of economics. He was the first Black scholar granted tenure in the Stanford Department of Economics.
At the age of 86, he remains a professor emeritus at Stanford. The economist, whose philosophy has been referred to as Marxist, continued to hold ties to Jamaica as he’s served as an adviser to the country at various times on economic policy.
He’s a "Good Guy"
The Democratic nominee hasn’t referred many times to her father, but in a 2003 interview, she said,
“My father is a good guy, but we are not close.”
More recently, she told the Washington Post in 2021, the two are on “good terms.
