Por Sakshi Venkatram – NBC News
When Kamala Harris talks about her South Asian identity, it is often in the context of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan. The same was true Thursday night during Harris’ speech on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention.
Gopalan, who passed away in 2009, left an indelible mark on the vice president, immersing her in Indian culture and social activism from an early age.
“My mother was 19 years old when she crossed the world alone“She taught us to never complain about injustice, but to do something about it,” Harris said during her speech at the Democratic National Convention.
New San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris (R) is sworn in as her mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, looks on, in San Francisco, January 8, 2004.George Nikitin / AP file
Gopalan was born and raised in the city of Chennai (then called Madras) in southern India. His grandfather was a civil servant and advocate of India’s liberation from the British. Gopalan had a similar activist bent. After moving to the Bay Area at age 19 and enrolling at the University of California at Berkeley, he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
Gopalan earned a PhD at age 25 and became a leading breast cancer researcher. At Berkeley, she met Harris’s father, Donald Harris, whom she married in 1963 and divorced in 1971.
Harris says that despite her mother’s success, her life as a new immigrant was often marred by racism.
Shyamala Gopalan Harris, 25, holds her baby, Kamala.Kamala Harris campaign via AP
“My mother was a brilliant 5-foot-tall brunette with an accent,” Harris said in her speech. “As the oldest child, I saw how the world treated her at times. But my mother never lost her cool.”
She is also the author of one of Harris’s most famous quotes.
“She was like, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of everything you’re living through and everything that came before us,'” Harris said in a speech last year, sparking a wave of memes and viral TikTok videos.
Harris began to emphasize her racial identity more when she launched her first presidential campaign in 2019. She explained how her mother’s roots They gave India a special place in their livesShe grew up eating traditional South Indian food and listening to her mother speak Tamil.
[Cómo la llegada de Harris despertó el voto de los jóvenes a favor de los demócratas]
“Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture,” he wrote in his memoir. “Any words of affection or frustration from my mother came out in her native tongue, which I find very appropriate, since the purity of those emotions is what I associate most with my mother.”
Harris said she often visited India as a child and that trips with her progressive grandfather shaped her early political consciousness. In recent years, she has continued to use her South Asian heritage as a touchstone, even recording a video of herself preparing a traditional South Indian dish, masala dosa, with actress Mindy Kaling.
But despite that, she said, her mother raised her with the idea that she and her sister They would move through the world as black women.In a 2015 interview, he recounted growing up attending both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple.
[Con Harris los demócratas prueban una nueva táctica contra Trump: reírse de él]
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” she wrote in her memoir. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure that we would grow into confident and proud black women.”
Harris attended Howard University, a prominent historically black university in Washington, D.C. There she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest black Greek-letter sorority.
She is not quick to speak about the racism she faced during her childhood, stating in the 2015 interview: “I don’t feel compelled to sing long ballads about my experiences with injustice.”
[Los creadores de contenido brillan en la Convención Demócrata junto a los medios tradicionales y las estrellas de Hollywood]
Similarly, he does not always respond when Donald Trump and other members of the right invoke his race or question the authenticity of his identity.
“I am black and I am proud of it”she said on The Breakfast Club podcast in 2020. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because I don’t understand that.”
