Get to know the Vice President’s blended family.

BY EMILY BURACK – PUBLISHED: JUL 24, 2024 – Town and Country

My cmnt: In 2008 we elected a typical, white, Leftist, democrat to the presidency. Many pundits (democrat talking heads) were quick to proclaim Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, as our first black president. The old-time racists in the South would say that just one drop of black blood in you made you black. Our current democrat racists label Obama and Tiger Woods as black men when they could just as well reasonably call them white or Thailandese respectively as both men had mothers who were either of European or Southeast Asian descent.

My cmnt: In point of fact in 1998, speaking of Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison wrote a commentary for The New Yorker arguing that  “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” Last week the New York Times, implicitly cited Morrison’s piece, and claimed the author was giving Clinton “a compliment.”

My cmnt: At the time notable black leaders in America said that Obama was not authentic because he hadn’t been “down for the struggle”. They were aware that his mother was a white woman from Kansas and his father was a black man from Kenya working on his PhD and that he was raised in Hawaii mostly by his white grandparents and went to a predominantly white high school. In other words his was a typical, privileged, white upbringing.

My cmnt: And now we have another democrat running for president who was raised in a privileged white-adjacent family whose mother has a PhD and is from India and whose father also has a PhD and is from Jamaica. So naturally the racist democrats in America call her African-American. Clearly Kamala has also never been “down for the struggle” either. In fact Kamala acts, laughs and thinks like a typical, guilty, white upper middle class, college girl.

Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in her memoir that her mother always said to her, “Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you’re not the last.”

Now, as Kamala Harris is on the verge of making history as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, her family is back in the spotlight. Here, her family tree—featuring the Harris, Gopalan, and Emhoff families, all the extended family of Vice President Harris:

Below, meet all the members of Kamala Harris’s family.

Kamala’s dad: Donald J. Harris

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Harris speaking on an American University forum in May 1989.

Donald J. Harris (b. August 23, 1938) was born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, to Oscar Joseph Harris and Beryl Christie Finegan, Afro-Jamaicans. Oscar’s parents were, Joseph Alexander Harris and Christiana Brown. Christiana, who went by Chrisy, was reportedly the descendant of Hamilton Brown, a plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town, Jamaica.

“As a child growing up in Jamaica, I often heard it said, by my parents and family friends: ‘memba whe yu cum fram,'” Donald wrote in a 2019 essay in Jamaica Global. “To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me. As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters.”

COURTESY OF KAMALA HARRIS

Kamala and her father in an undated photo.

“He was a brilliant student,” Kamala writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, of her father. He studied at the University College of the West Indies, before earning his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of London in 1960. In 1960, he immigrated to the U.S. after being admitted to University of California at Berkeley, and he received his PhD from UC Berkley in 1966. At Berkeley, he met Shyamala Gopalan (see below). As Post-Keynesian economist and development theorist, he taught at University of Illinois, Northwestern, and University of Wisconsin, but he spent the majority of his career at Stanford University.

In 2021, he received the Order of Merit, a Jamaica National Award. “I think of myself as ‘a likkle country boy’ from Brown’s Town in St Ann who got started in life with a level of social awareness and sense of belonging and love of country that were given to me by my early upbringing in that little community,” Donald told the Jamaica Observer in response to the honor. “It made me commit to a lifetime of study and learning and analysis to understand what accounts for the inequality that I continued to keenly observe in the conditions of economic life for people around me and in the world at large, and to search for public policies to improve those conditions. In that process I also sought to give back in terms of service to the country and community that brought me up. That remains today as a core value in my thinking and my work.”

READ MORE ON KAMALA’S DAD:

• Kamala’s Father Is an Award-Winning Professor

Kamala’s mom: Shyamala Gopalan

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Shyamala Gopalan with her daughters, Kamala and Maya in 1970.

Shyamala Gopalan (b. December 7, 1938, d. February 11, 2009), was born in what was then Madras, British India (now Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India). Her father, P. V. Gopalan (b. 1911, d. 1998), was an Indian civil servant, and her mom Rajam Gopalan, was a community organizer. Shyamala has three younger siblings: G. Balachandran (“Balu”), an economist and computer scientist in New Dehli; Sarala, an obstetrician in Chennai; and Chinni, an information scientist in Ontario.

Kamala is close with her chitthis (aunts) Sarala and Chinni and her uncle Balu, shouting them out in her DNC address in 2020. “I was actually very touched,” Chinni Subash said at the time. “I mean, with everything that she has to take care of these days … I was very touched and very honored that she acknowledged us.”

COURTESY OF KAMALA HARRIS

Kamala (center, bottom), Maya (bottom right), Shyamala (center, above) and her grandparents, 1972.

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Kamala often cites her mom, and her maternal grandparents as a major inspiration. “My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally,” she wrote in her memoir. “Her mother, my grandmother, Rajam Gopalan, had never attended high school, but she was a skilled community organizer. She would take in women who were being abused by their husbands, and then she’d call the husbands and tell them they’d better shape up or she would take care of them. She used to gather village women together, educating them about contraception. My grandfather P. V. Gopalan had been part of the movement to win India’s independence. Eventually, as a senior diplomat in the Indian government, he and my grandmother had spent time living in Zambia after it gained independence, helping to settle refugees. He used to joke that my grandmother’s activism would get him in trouble one day. But he knew that was never going to stop her. From them, my mother learned that it was service to others that gave life purpose and meaning. And from my mother, Maya and I learned the same.”

Shyamala graduated from the University of Delhi when she was 19 years old in 1958, and immigrated to America to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at University of California Berkeley, where she met Donald J. Harris. “She and my father met and fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement,” Kamala writes in her memoir. “Her marriage—and her decision to stay in the United States—were the ultimate acts of self-determination and love.” Shyamala and Donald divorced in the early 70s.

She earned her PhD in nutrition and endocrinology in 1965, and worked as a breast cancer researcher at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin, Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, McGill University Faculty of Medicine, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She died in 2009 of colon cancer; Shyamala was 70 years old.

READ MORE ON KAMALA’S MOM:

• Shyamala Gopalan Taught Her Daughters Resilience

Kamala’s husband: Douglas “Doug” Emhoff

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Emhoff at a White House Pride event in 2023.

Douglas Emhoff (b. October 13, 1964) is the son of Jewish parents Barbara Kanzer and Michael Emhoff. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in the New Jersey suburbs. He has two siblings, Jamie Emhoff and Andy Emhoff. At age 17, his family moved to Southern California, and he graduated from Agoura High School. He attended California State University, Northridge, graduation with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication in 1987, then received his Juris Doctor from USC Gould School of Law in 1990.

In 1992, Doug married Kerstin Mackin (b. 1967); they divorced in 2008. They have two children, Cole Emhoff (b. 1994) and Ella Emhoff (b. 1999) (see below), named for John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. In 2013, he was set up with Kamala on a date by her best friend, Chrisette. Kerstin and Kamala are friends, with Kamala writing in her memoir, “we sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little two functional.” Kamala and Doug married in August 2014, in a ceremony officiated by Kamala’s sister Maya. “In keeping with our respective Indian and Jewish heritage, I put a flower garland around Doug’s neck, and he stomped on a glass.”

Doug is the first Jewish spouse of an American president or vice president, and the first ever Second Gentleman. He currently teaches at Georgetown Law.

READ MORE ABOUT DOUG:

• Meet Kamala Harris’s Husband Douglas Emhoff
• A Husband and a (Second) Gentleman
• Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff Wears Ralph Lauren

Kamala’s stepson: Cole Emhoff

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Cole Emhoff in November 2023.

Cole Emhoff (b. September 15, 1994) is the only son of Doug and Kerstin Emhoff. He graduated from Colorado College in 2017, and currently works as an executive assistant at Plan B Entertainment.

On October 14 2023, he married Greenley Littlejohn, who works as a global product development manager at Brand I.D. in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science in retail merchandising in 2017. Greenely’s dad, Jeffrey Littlejohn, is a Professor of History at Sam Houston State University (SHSU).

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Kamala officiated Greenley and Cole’s wedding. “It meant so much for so many reasons,” Harris said. “It was so wonderful that the kids asked me to do it. For us, we think of marriage as being not just between these two people, but the coming together of families. So it was very much with that spirit that we all participated.”

She added, “I love my husband. I love our marriage. I want for those two [Cole and Greenley] to have a loving marriage where they are best friends and they know that it’s not just them against the world, that our family supports them. That the community of people that came together at the wedding supports [them].”

READ MORE:

• Kamala Harris Relationship With Her Stepchildren

Kamala’s stepdaughter: Ella Emhoff

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Ella Emhoff attends the 2022 CFDA Awards.

Ella Emhoff (b. May 29, 1999), the only daughter of Doug and Kerstin, is a model and fashion designer. Ella attended Parsons School of Design, where she majored in fine arts, and graduated in 2017. In 2021, she signed with IMG Models. IMG’s president, Ivan Bart, said, “It’s not really about shape, size or gender any more. Ella communicates this moment in time. There’s a cheekiness and a joy she exudes.”

“Growing up, I never saw myself as someone stylish, at all,” she told Elle in 2021. “Obviously, I loved fashion and cared a lot about it. But I was really into doing my own thing and being really comfortable in my own body, you know? I never saw myself as a ‘fashion person.’ And I don’t know if my classmates did either! So now… [it feels] strange. But it also makes me feel really good, because I was able to stick with my true instincts when it came to style, and it actually I paid off!” She added, “It’s not the actual clothes you’re wearing. It’s the confidence you have, and the ability to live your life, in those clothes. In April 2022, she launched her own knitwear line, and in October 2023, she launched a knitting club.

Though her father is Jewish, Ella doesn’t identify as Jewish. “Ella truly has no qualms with the faith, but she does not want to speak on behalf of Judaism, as she does not celebrate herself,” a spokesperson said in 2021.

READ MORE ON ELLA:

• Ella Emhoff Hosts a Knitting Club in NYC
• Ella Emhoff Launches Knitwear Line
• Ella Emhoff at the Inauguration

Kamala’s sister: Maya Harris

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Maya Harris in 2018.

Maya Harris (b. January 30, 1967), is the younger daughter of Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris. She welcomed daughter, Meena Harris (see below), in 1984.

Maya received her Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, and then attended Stanford Law School, receiving her Juris Doctorate with distinction in 1992. After graduating, she clerked for District Court Judge James Ware, then worked in civil and criminal litigation. She became a law professor, teaching at University of San Francisco School of Law, U.C. Hatings College of the Law, and New College of California School of Law.

Maya also worked at PolicyLink, the Ford Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for American Progress. In 2016, she was a senior policy advisor on Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign, helping to draft the platform, and in 2020, she was chairwoman of her sister’s campaign for president.

READ MORE ON MAYA:

• Maya Harris Is More Than Kamala Harris’s Sister
• The Harris Sisters Are a New Political Dynasty

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Tony West, left, and Kamala Harris look up the poll results with family Maya Harris, Meena Harris and parents Frank and Peggy, 2010.

In July 1998, she married Tony West (b. 1965), her Stanford Law classmate, though they didn’t begin dating until after graduating. West, the son of Margaret “Peggy” Reddick and Franklin “Frank” Delano West, is from San Francisco. He graduated from Harvard in 1987 before attending Stanford Law, and after graduating, he started working in Democratic politics. He started working for the Justice Department in 1993, and in 1994, was appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for the Northern District of California.

From 2001 to 2009, he was a partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP. In 2009, President Obama appointed West to serve as Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice Civil Division, and in 2013, he became Associate Attorney General. After leaving the Obama administration, he became a vice president at PepsiCo, and starting in 2017, he became General Counsel at Uber. He Instagrams as @meenasdad.

Kamala’s niece: Meena Harris

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Meena Harris in 2023.

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Meena Harris (b. October 20, 1984) is Maya Harris’s only daughter; Maya had her when she was just 17 years old. Growing up in Oakland, Meena attended Bishop O’Dowd High School. She graduated from Stanford in 2006. In 2012, she received her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.

In 2017, Meena founded Phenomenal, a consumer and media company that “elevates the stories of women and underrepresented communities through entertainment, digital content, brand partnerships, book clubs, and more.” She also authored children’s books, including Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, about her mom and aunt, and is a Tony-award winning producer for A Strange Loop. She also produced Suffs.

In 2014, Meena married Nikolas “Nik” Ajagu, who worked as the Global Head of Partnerships at Facebook until 2019. Nik and Meena met back in 2007 while they both worked at Facebook. They have two daughters: Amara Ajagu (b. 2016) and Leela Ajagu (b. 2018).

In the acknowledgements in her memoir, Kamala writes, “Meena, I remember you at two years old, walking around the house, literally in my shoes. Now you’re a leader in your own right who has forged an important path and whose advice I cherish. Thank you for everything, especially for my baby nieces, Amara and Leela, and their amazing dad, Nik.”

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.

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Kamala Harris’ Parents: All About Her Mom Shyamala Gopalan and Dad Donald J. Harris

Kamala Harris’ parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald J. Harris, met as students at UC Berkeley

By Alex Gurley – Updated on July 23, 2024 10:02AM EDT – People magazine

Alex Gurley – Alex Gurley is a contributing writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2022. Her work has previously appeared in Just Jared and Buzzfeed.

Kamala Harris’ parents, Donald J. Harris and Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, came to the United States to pursue their dreams — but never envisioned a future where their daughter would one day become vice president.

Over 60 years ago, Donald and Shyamala arrived in Northern California to study at the University of California, Berkeley. They had grown up on opposite sides of the world — Donald in Jamaica and Shyamala in India — but crossed paths thanks to their shared interest in civil rights.

The pair first met in 1962 while attending a study group for Black students, and their connection was instant, according to The New York Times. Just a year later, they were married. The couple welcomed daughter Kamala in 1964, followed by daughter Maya in 1967.

While Kamala’s parents pursued their careers after graduation — relocating to the Midwest where Donald landed his first teaching job — their marriage faltered, and by 1972, they filed for divorce. Shyamala moved back to Northern California and took on the primary responsibility of raising their children — and became the most influential person in Kamala’s life.

Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009, but Kamala still speaks of her fondly. After she was elected vice president in 2020, Kamala thanked her mother, crediting Shyamala with her success in her victory speech.

“To the woman most responsible for my presence here today, my mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who is always in our hearts,” she said. “When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn’t quite imagine this moment, but she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible.”

Now, as Kamala seeks the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination after President Joe Biden announced his departure from the race, she hopes to continue honoring her family’s legacy.

Here’s everything to know about Kamala Harris’ parents, Donald J. Harris and Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris.

They met while studying at the University of California, Berkeley

Donald and Shyamala were born across the globe from each other but met by chance when they were both studying at UC Berkeley.

Shyamala was raised in India, and at the time, there was little opportunity for women who wanted to study science. She applied to UC Berkeley to pursue a degree in biochemistry and her dreams of curing cancer. Despite never having left India, her father agreed to pay for her first year of tuition using some of his retirement savings, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Donald grew up in Jamaica — before the country gained independence from the U.K. — and had attended British-run schools all his life. By the time he decided to pursue a doctorate in economics, he was looking for something different and was drawn to the U.S., which appeared to be a “lively and evolving dynamic of a racially and ethnically complex society,” he recalled to The New York Times.

When Donald and Shyamala arrived on campus around the same time, they joined a Black students’ study group, later known as the Afro-American Association. Although Shyamala was not Black, she grew up as a British colonial subject in India and as a person of color, and members told The New York Times that she was “accepted as part of the group.”

During one of these meetings, Donald and Shyamala crossed paths for the first time. After he gave a speech about growing up under British colonial power in Jamaica, she introduced herself.

“This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming. At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history,” he told the outlet.

Donald and Shyamala married in 1963

After meeting for the first time, Donald quickly became Shyamala’s first-ever boyfriend. While she had initially planned to return to India after finishing school, things changed when the couple tied the knot only a year later.

“I came to study at UC Berkeley. I never came to stay. It’s the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came,” Shyamala told SF Weekly in 2003.

They were involved in the Civil Rights Movement

As their relationship blossomed, the couple became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Donald was convinced that he needed to attend UC Berkeley because he had read about student activists on campus who were fighting for civil rights. Through the years, Donald and Shyamala took part in marches and protests and shared their stories around the school.

In a speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Kamala said that her parents “fell in love in that most American way — while marching together for justice in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.”

After starting a family, Donald and Shyamala continued their involvement in the movement. They took Kamala to events, with the vice president later sharing that they gave her a “stroller’s-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble’ ” on the streets of Oakland and Berkeley.

“My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am,” Kamala wrote on Instagram in 2020. “They laid the path for me, as only the second Black woman ever elected to the United States Senate.”

Shyamala was a prominent breast cancer researcher

After Shyamala earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from UC Berkeley, she became a distinguished breast cancer researcher.

According to her obituary published in the San Francisco Chronicle, she began her career conducting research at the school’s zoology department and its cancer research lab. She published numerous notable research papers and spent time at many of the top research institutions in the U.S. and around the world.

Shyamala worked at the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin and abroad in France and Italy. She spent 16 years at McGill University’s Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital in Canada. During the last decade of her work, she returned to UC Berkeley to conduct research within the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

During her career, Shyamala made “substantial contributions to the field of hormones and breast cancer” and received numerous honors. The cancer advocacy organization Breast Cancer Action wrote that her work “transformed the medical establishment’s understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue.”

She was also a National Institutes of Health peer reviewer and served on the President’s Special Commission on Breast Cancer.

Donald is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University

Following Donald’s graduation from UC Berkeley in 1966, he became an economics professor. He worked at several universities in the Midwest before returning to Northern California to work at Stanford University.

While he was only scheduled to stay at the university for two years as a visiting professor, students campaigned for the department to make more of a commitment to “radical political economics.” Donald, who was described as a “Marxian economist” by The Stanford Daily in 1974, was asked to remain at the school as a full-time professor in 1975.

Donald went on to teach at Stanford for more than two decades, during which he traveled around the world. He served as an associate fellow and a faculty fellow at Cambridge University and as a visiting professor at Yale University, among others. In 1998, Donald retired from his job at Stanford and retained the title of professor emeritus.

Throughout his career, Donald was also involved in policy work in his native Jamaica. He served as an economics policy consultant to the country’s government and an economics adviser to multiple Jamaican prime ministers. In 2021, he was honored with the Order of Merit, Jamaica’s third-highest honor, for “his outstanding contributions to national development,” according to the Jamaica Observer.

In addition to his other honors, Donald has published numerous academic papers and books, including Jamaica’s Export Economy: Towards a Strategy of Export-led Growth and “A Growth-Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and Medium Term.”

They welcomed two daughters

Donald and Shyamala welcomed their first child, Kamala, on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California.

A few years later, they celebrated the arrival of their daughter, Maya, on Jan. 30, 1967, in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois.

Donald and Shyamala divorced in 1972

When Kamala was nearly 5 years old, she knew her parents’ marriage was ending. Donald was teaching at Northwestern University in Illinois and when he was hired at the University of Wisconsin, Shyamala moved back to Northern California with their two children before the couple divorced in 1972.

In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, Kamala wrote that she knew even as a child that her parents “loved each other very much, but it seemed like they had become like oil and water.”

“Had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young,” she wrote.

Shyamala went on to raise Kamala and Maya “mostly on her own.” In her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech, Kamala said her mother “worked around the clock to make it work” — packing their lunches in the early morning and helping them with homework when she returned from work.

As she was far from family, members of their community rallied around her, many of whom she had originally met through the Afro-American Association. One former classmate introduced Shyamala to his aunt, Regina Shelton, who became a huge part of Kamala’s life.

Kamala referred to Shelton as her “second mother” in her 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, and when the politician took the oath of office to become California’s attorney general, she laid her hand on Shelton’s Bible, she told PopSugar.

While Kamala and Maya were primarily raised by their mother, they saw their father on weekends and during the summer after he moved back to Northern California to work at Stanford.

They often traveled with their children around the world

Throughout her childhood, Kamala visited different countries with her family. Before the divorce, Donald brought Kamala and Maya to his native Jamaica to engage in “life there in all its richness and complexity,” a memory he recalled fondly in an essay for Jamaica Global Online.

The economist shared details about one of their trips to Orange Hill, Jamaica, in 1970. “We trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, up-hill and down-hill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy,” Donald wrote.

Following the divorce, Shyamala ensured the girls had a culturally enriched life, often bringing them home to India and destinations around Europe. In India, Kamala spent time with family and joined her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, to discuss politics with his friends.

“I remember the stories that they would tell and the passion with which they spoke about the importance of democracy,” she said during a speech at the education nonprofit Pratham USA’s New York Gala in 2018.

Kamala continued, “As I reflect on those moments in my life that have had the most impact on who I am today — I wasn’t conscious of it at the time — but it was those walks on the beach with my grandfather in Besant Nagar that had a profound impact on who I am today.”

Shyamala died in 2009

Shyamala died at the age of 70 of colon cancer on Feb. 11, 2009.

As she was not able to fulfill her “dying wish” of returning home to India after receiving her diagnosis the year prior, Kamala scattered her mother’s ashes in the ocean near her mother’s hometown, according to The New York Times.

“Though I miss her every day, I carry her with me wherever I go,” Kamala wrote in her memoir, an excerpt of which was published in The New York Times. “I think of the battles she fought, the values she taught me, her commitment to improve health care for us all.”

She added, “There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’s daughter.”

Kamala has called her mother one of the greatest inspirations in her life

As Kamala was primarily raised by her mother, she had a profound impact on her life. The vice president has often referenced Shyamala in speeches and on social media, once calling her mother the “greatest source of inspiration in my life.”

In her DNC nomination acceptance speech, Kamala reflected on all the values that her mother instilled in her.

“My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives,” Kamala said. “She raised us to be proud, strong Black women, and she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage. She taught us to put family first — the family you’re born into and the family you choose.”

She continued, “Even as she taught us to keep our family at the center of our world, she also pushed us to see a world beyond ourselves. She taught us to be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people. To believe public service is a noble cause and the fight for justice is a shared responsibility. That led me to become a lawyer, a district attorney, attorney general and a United States Senator.”