The report added that the divorce between Kamala Harris’ parents was bitter.
New York:
Donald Harris, the father of Indian-born senator and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, has said close contact with his daughters “came to an abrupt halt” following a controversial victim attitude, according to a media report.
The New York Times report said the Jamaican-born economics professor expressed regret that the battle over custody put an end to contact with his daughters.
Kamala Harris’ mother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer biologist came to India from the US at the age of 19 to cure her dream of cancer.
In her speech at the Democratic National Conference, Kamala Harris spoke lovingly and professionally about her mother, but had limited words for her father.
She said her mother met her father, who came from Jamaica to study economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and “the two fell in love in the most American way – while marching together for justice in the United States. 1960s civil rights movement “.
“My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would map the course of our life images. She encouraged us to be proud, strong Black women. And she raised us to know and be proud. to be on our Indian heritage, ”Kamala Harris, 55, said in her acceptance speech on Wednesday.
“When I was 5, my parents and my mother grew up mostly on their own. Like so many mothers, they worked round the clock to pick up the afternoon work before we woke up and pay bills after we went to bed. Help us with homework on the kitchen table — and sending us to church for choir practice, ”said the Indian-American senator from California.
“She made it easy, even though I knew it was never. She taught us to put family first – the family you were born into and the family you choose,” Kamala Harris said.
The New York Times article said her father Donald, 81, has long since retired from teaching and has remained largely silent, even when his daughter “stepped into the national spotlight.”
The report cited a 2018 essay by Donald, in which he says that his early, close contact with his daughters “came to an abrupt halt” after a controversial custody battle.
“This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972. When the context of the relationship after a fierce fight in family law in Oakland, California, was placed within arbitrary boundaries imposed by a “court divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the state of California that fathers cannot handle parental law … Nevertheless, I have been persecuted, never given up on my love for my children or forgotten on my responsibilities as their father,” he wrote.
The report said his only recent remarks about her, published on a Jamaican website, run by an acquaintance, “express a combination of pride in his daughter and bitterness about her stranger”.
“He shocked her in a letter, which has since been removed from the site, for joking in an interview that, growing up in a Jamaican family, it was natural that she had smoked marijuana,” the report said.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we want to categorize ourselves from this travesty,” Kamala Harris’ father wrote in the letter, according to the report.
The report added that the divorce between Kamala Harris’ parents was bitter. Harris reminds her to invite both parents to her high school graduation, “even though I knew they would not talk to each other,” and initially feared her mother would not show up, it said.
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