By Edwin Eriye
Kamala Harris, who has become the first Black woman to run for US vice president, undoubtedly has the spotlight on her from all ends of the world.
The rays from that spotlight was intensified, after democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that Kamala Harris will be his vice presidential running mate to try to unseat incumbent Donald Trump in the November election.
Hence, in spirit of professionalism, here are some facts about Harris.
1. Why she’s called “Kamala Devi Harris”
Her full name is Kamala Devi Harris. Her mother, Shyamala, a Hindu, gave her daughters names taken from Hindu mythology in part to connect her children to their heritage.
Kamalā is one of many Sanskrit words meaning lotus, as well as a name for Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and good fortune. Harris’s middle name, Devi, is a Sanskrit word used within Hinduism as the general term for a goddess. (Shyamala named her second daughter Maya Lakshmi, continuing the goddess trend.)
2. Family background
Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California to two ambitious graduate students—both immigrants. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was raised in southern India and completed her undergraduate education at the University of Delhi at just 19, at which point she came to the U.S. to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala was supposed to complete her studies and then return to India for an arranged marriage, but instead, she became active in the American civil rights movement. There she met Donald Harris, a Jamaican native who also came to the United States as a young adult to pursue doctoral work at Berkeley in economics. Shyamala ended up marrying Donald, and stayed in the U.S. By marrying for love outside her Brahmin caste—and outside her culture entirely—Shyamala made a bold choice.
But Shyamala had been raised to act on her conscience. Her father, P.V. Gopalan, was active in the Indian independence movement and then became a high-ranking civil servant who fought corruption and acted as an adviser to newly independent nations, including Zambia. Her mother, Rajam Gopalan, had been betrothed at 12 and married at 16, but grew into a self-assured woman who used her position as an upper-caste wife to advocate for less advantaged women. During the 1940s, Rajam would drive around in her Volkswagen bug with a bullhorn, telling poor women how to access birth control. “My grandfather would joke that her community activism would be the end of his career,” Harris wrote in her book, Smart on Crime. “That never stopped her.”
3. She had a multicultural childhood.
Harris also grew up steeped in multiple rich cultures. “I grew up with a strong Indian culture, and I was raised in a black community,” Harris told AsianWeek in 2003. “All my friends were black and we got together and cooked Indian food and painted henna on our hands, and I never felt uncomfortable with my cultural background.” The two Harris girls, Kamala and Maya, sang in the choir at a black Baptist church and attended a Hindu temple with their mother.
They also had the chance to travel extensively. The sisters traveled to Jamaica with their father to visit his family and, every two years, went to India with Shyamala.“When Kamala was in first grade,” Shyamala toldSan Francisco Magazine, “one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, “Oh, I’ve been there.’ So I told her, ‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.”
Harris also spent time living in Canada. When she was in her early teens, her mother, by then a scientist studying breast cancer, took a position doing research at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, and teaching at McGill University. Harris completed high school in Montreal and returned to the U.S. for college, attending Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her father had become an economics professor at Stanford, and Harris followed in his footsteps by majoring in economics, adding a double major in political science.
4. Her first taste of politics was during college.
Harris’s first-ever campaign was for freshman class representative of the liberal arts student council at Howard University. Harris also sharpened her public speaking skills on Howard’s debate team and joined the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, all while organizing mentor programs for minority youths and demonstrating against apartheid. “The thing that Howard taught me is that you can do any collection of things, and not one thing to the exclusion of the other,” Harris said in 2016. “You could be homecoming queen and valedictorian. There are no false choices at Howard.”
With Howard located in the nation’s capital, Harris explored a number of potential paths for public service while in college, working as a tour guide at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, serving as a press aide at the Federal Trade Commission, and interning for Senator Alan Cranston of her home state of California.
6. She’s wanted to be a lawyer since she was a child.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Growing up, Harris always wanted to be a lawyer. “They were the heroes growing up,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009. “They were the architects of the civil rights movement. I thought that that was the way you do good things and serve and achieve justice. It was pretty simple.” In particular, she cites Constance Baker Motley, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Thurgood Marshall as her role models.
After completing her undergraduate education at Howard, Harris returned to California for law school, attending the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. But rather than take up civil rights litigation or criminal defense work, Harris decided to become a prosecutor—a choice she’s said “surprised” her family members. But growing up in the Bay Area, she had seen the impact of law enforcement on disadvantaged populations and wanted to use the law to protect the vulnerable and correct imbalances of power. Being a prosecutor gave Harris more power to change the criminal justice system from within—choosing who to prosecute, what crimes to focus on, and which people to present with options for rehabilitation rather than prison.
