44 The Times Magazineit?” Gopalan attended nearly every rally and
campaign event and Pride parade and
swearing-in, sometimes in a sari. Till her
death, Kamala called her “Mommy”.
Harris’s father does not participate in her
public life (and didn’t answer a request for
an interview). The exception to the rule is
telling. In February 2019, on The Breakfast
Club, a radio show, Harris admitted to
smoking a joint in college, and one of the
hosts asked if she supported legalising
marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica- are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing.
After Harris’s radio appearance, her father
gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora
website, reprimanding his daughter.
“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.” When I asked Harris how she
felt about this belated, public parenting, she
said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if
she found talking about Donald unpleasant.
“I’m happy to talk about my father,” she
said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her
eyebrows, and said nothing.
Since Harris announced her candidacy,
neo-birthers have been concocting spurious
stories about her origins. Because her father
is from the Caribbean, the argument goes,
Harris cannot lay claim to the term “African-
American”. (She is careful to describe herself
as “black”.) In Donald Harris’s family history,
he refers to his paternal grandmother as “a
descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on
record as plantation and slave owner”; some
antagonists of Harris have suggested that
this heritage disqualifies her from speaking
to the experience of Americans descended
from slaves. Donald Trump Jr retweeted (then
deleted) a message that denied Harris is a
“black American”, an assertion that attempted
to cast doubt on both parts of that identity.
“Look, this is the same thing they did to
Barack,” Harris said. “They don’t understand
what black people are. Because if you do, if you
walked down Hampton’s campus, or Howard’s
campus, or Morehouse, or Spelman, or Fisk,
you would have a much better appreciation for
the diaspora, for the diversity, for the beauty
in the diversity of who we are as black people.
So I’m not going to spend my time trying to
educate people about who black people are.”
If Harris developed her social conscience
in the yellow stucco house in the East Bay,
she got her political education in the drawing
rooms of Pacific Heights. San Francisco is
an incubator of Democratic talent and the
stronghold of California’s best-known political
families: the Feinsteins, Pelosis, Newsoms,
Browns. Politicians are pillars of high society.
“People like Kamala, past mayors, the Pelosis,
Feinstein, they are as much part of the
socialite scene as the barons of industry and
tech moguls,” a local observer told me. “At
a society party, the hostess will announce,
‘Nancy can’t be here tonight. She’s trying to
get Trump not to build a wall.’ ”
When Harris was a young prosecutor, she
dated Willie Brown, one of the most visible
and powerful politicians in the state. He was
60 – 4 years older than her dad. Originally
from segregated east Texas, he had come to
San Francisco during the era of Jim Crow (the
period of racial segregation) and, rather than
join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation,
became a defence attorney, representing pimps
and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in
the State Assembly and, for 14 years, served as
speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah.
He was investigated twice by the FBI for
corruption, but never charged with a crime.
(He played a version of himself in The
Godfather Part III, glad-handing Michael
Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy”, as he
puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably
apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He
has had a series of girlfriends – currently, he’s
dating a Russian socialite – and maintains a
large collection of friends all over the city,
notably among wealthy white donors.
During Harris’s short-lived romance with
Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up
sometime between his victory party and his
swearing-in. The association has clung to her- “an albatross”, she told SF Weekly years ago.
In his memoir, published the year Obama
was elected president, Brown writes that it
is critical for black candidates to “cross over
into the white community”. He maintains that
black women face a challenge being seen as
leaders. “When whites look at black women,
they see the women as servants, maids and
cooks ( just as my mother was),” he writes.
“No matter how astute these women are,
they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much
beyond domestic-service status.” His advice
to black women seeking office: get involved
at a high level with cultural and charitable
organisations, “like museums and hospitals”.
In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she
designed a mentorship program for public-
school teens.
In Harris’s first run for office, in late 2002,
she challenged an incumbent, an entrenched
progressive named Terence Hallinan, from a
storied liberal family that had helped drive the
House Un-American Activities Committee out
of San Francisco. He was also her former boss.
Hallinan had hired Harris. After working for
him in the San Francisco DA’s office, which
was plagued by low conviction rates, she quit
in disgust, and before long started planning
a renegade campaign. In San Francisco, as
in much of the nation, district attorney was
a position that had only ever been occupied
by white men. At the beginning of the
presidential race, Harris likes to point out,
only 6 people in 100 knew her name.
During the campaign, Hallinan invoked
the corruption allegations surrounding “her
boyfriend”, a jab at her autonomy that also
undermined her legitimacy. Harris felt
compelled to tell SF Weekly, regarding Brown,
“I have no doubt that I am independent of
him – and that he would probably right now
express some fright about the fact that he
cannot control me.” Countering the aura of
privilege projected by her appearances in the
society pages, Harris established her campaign
headquarters in Bayview-Hunters Point, a
forlorn part of San Francisco that was once a
naval shipyard. “It’s the hood,” Amelia Ashley-
Ward of the Sun-Reporter, the city’s oldest
black newspaper, told me. “Right above her
offices, you had the public housing. There was
always crime. But she was right there in the
hood. She would walk up and down the street,
the liquor stores, the bars, and talk to people.”
A week before Harris announced that she
was running for president in January 2019,
she was at a Barnes & Noble book store
at a busy mall in Los Angeles. Harris read
aloud from her new picture book, Superheroes
Are Everywhere, a stiff effort to link the
figures of her life – the uncle who taught her
chess, the aunt who worked with computers –
to the CV-style list of her achievements in
the endpapers.
Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, stood to
one side, holding her bag. Harris remained
unflaggingly engaged, asking each child aAt the annual SF Pride Parade in San Francisco, June 2019GETTY IMAGES. AN EDITED VERSION OF A PIECE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER