Kamala deeply influenced by her radical father
“If there is any virtue in the writing of this book, it springs from the sacrifices knowingly or unknowingly made by my two daughters, Kamala and Maya,” Donald J. Harris wrote in 1977 when he was an economics professor at Stanford University. “In return, it is dedicated to them.”
The book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” is a 313-page critique of capitalism and its allegedly inherent flaws, including “income inequality,” “cyclical disturbances,” and “exploitation” of workers. “Drawing upon certain elements of Marxian theory,” the preface says, Harris approvingly cites the socialist nostrums of Karl Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels – as well as Vladimir Lenin, the founder of communist Russia – to make his case for an “alternative” economic model in America.
Kamala Harris was 13 at the time. Five years later, she majored in economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she led an economics club founded in the name of black Marxist Abram Harris.
Such facts might be unexceptional but for the Harris campaign’s narrative that the presidential candidate has little to do with her father. A New York Times article reported this month that the two have “been estranged for years” and “seldom speak.” The Times even repeated rumors he was a no-show at the Democratic convention, another sign of their alleged “cold war.”
While the vagaries of family relationships are often complex and hidden from view, RealClearInvestigation’s examination of the six-decade relationship between father and daughter suggests they have been closer than the campaign lets on. While there is little evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris is a “Communist,” the record shows that Donald Harris’ left-wing views resonate with his daughter. In a campaign that has provided little policy discussion, her perspective also suggests how she might govern.
Despite her mother taking custody of the two daughters following a 1971 divorce, Kamala Harris echoes her father in both the egalitarian language he used, such as “social equity” and “income disparities,” and the progressive policies he advocated, including government-run health care and expansive government poverty programs.
The year before she first ran for president in 2019, her Jamaican-born father wrote an essay for a Jamaican publication in which he recounted instilling a “deep social awareness” in his oldest daughter. “Kamala was the first in line to have it planted,” Donald Harris wrote.
While there’s no evidence Donald Harris has formally advised his daughter’s 2024 campaign, he has been more of a factor in her life and intellectual development than is commonly understood. And while he does not show up in White House visitors logs, it doesn’t mean the two haven’t met privately. Property records show the 86-year-old lives in a condo less than two miles from the vice presidential mansion where Kamala Harris lives with her husband on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. Her father has lived in Washington since Kamala was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016; and back then, they lived right down the street from each other.
While enrolled at Berkeley,
Kamala’s father formed a friendship with Malcolm X. “I had the privilege of knowing him personally,” Don Harris revealed in a lengthy column he wrote for the Jamaican newspaper, “The Kingston Gleaner,” in 1965, following the assassination of the civil-rights firebrand.
Harris said he bonded with Malcolm X over his rejection of both white society and capitalism. Harris complained the black man’s daily experience “consists of confronting the unscrupulous white landlord, the hostile white policeman, the insensitive white social worker, and if he has a job, the arrogant white employer.”
In his tribute to Malcolm X, Kamala’s father argued in favor of Malcolm X’s version of resistance, which condoned violence against “white racists,” in contrast to Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach to securing equality. He explained that peaceful civil-rights protesters did not have enough “real contact” with “rank-and-file” blacks to understand their “anger, resentment and frustration” and “
take up more militant positions.” Don Harris also viewed America as a colonizer of blacks: “Certainly there is some validity to [Malcolm X’s] comparison of the civil-rights movement [in the U.S.] and the anti-colonial movement in Africa and Asia.”
