When Kamala Harris is sworn in as the first female and first black vice president of the United States next week, her Washington, D.C.-based father may not be in attendance.
Harris’s father lives barely a mile from the White House, two miles from One Observatory Circle, and under three miles from the U.S. Capitol, where the future vice president will be sworn in.
Harris said last year that she would be “thinking about” her mother on Inauguration Day, but according to the Washington Post, her transition team does not know if her father will be joining in the celebrations.
Harris’s parents separated when she was young, and then, they divorced several years later. A bitter custody battle meant that Kamala Harris and her sister Maya grew up mostly with their mother.
A Jamaican-born economics professor, Donald Harris arrived in Washington, D.C., from Stanford University in 1998 to consult on issues facing Caribbean economies.
Nearly two decades later, his daughter Kamala was sworn into Congress as California’s junior senator.
Former students have noted similarities between the father-daughter duo.
“He had a way of getting to the heart of the matter,” Tracy Mott, an economics professor at the University of Denver, told the Post. “And I loved watching Kamala grill people at the Judiciary Committee hearings. I’d hear her and say, ‘She’s smart like Don.’”
He has largely refrained from weighing in on his daughter’s political career, with some exceptions.
Two years ago, the elder Harris, who is now 82, chided his daughter in an op-ed for what he called her “pursuit of identity politics” after she quipped about her family to a black radio show host asking about marijuana legalization.
“That’s not true,” Harris said during an appearance on the New York radio show, The Breakfast Club, when asked if she opposed marijuana legalization. “And look, I joke about it, half-joking, half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”
Harris also said she smoked marijuana while in college. “And I inhaled,” she said in a reference to Bill Clinton’s claim about the drug on the 1992 campaign trail.
Writing in Jamaica Global Online, Harris’s father denounced her remarks as a “travesty.”
“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 Washington Examiner was unable to reach Donald Harris. The vice president-elect’s transition did not respond to a request for comment.
