Kamala Harris says her dad taught her to be fearless, but he’s been markedly absent from her public rise

Kamala Harris was on her 2019 memoir promotion tour when she joked around with radio host Charlamagne the God, the future vice president cheekily answering his question about whether she’d ever used marijuana.

“Half my family’s from Jamaica,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”

The man responsible for that half of the family, however – the politician’s father, economist Donald J. Harris – wasn’t laughing. Despite his virtual invisibility throughout Harris’ political rise, her father chose that moment to raise his head above the parapet.

He sent a letter to a media outlet in his native Jamaica, publicly scolding her like a naughty child.

“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.”

His daughter’s representatives made no comment at the time, at least not publicly, and the professor again went silent.

“I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media,” he wrote in an email reviewed at the time by POLITICO.

And it seems he stayed true to his word; there’s been nary a peep from the 85-year-old Stanford emeritus professor as his daughter’s White House campaign makes waves across America.

The weed brouhaha, however, seems a nod to a long-term fraught relationship between the two – even if the seeds for