Addressing the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night in Charlotte, N.C., California Attorney General Kamala Harris told a crowd of 20,000 that she wants an “America where opportunity is open to everyone … where everyone plays by the same set of rules.” The first big boost to her career, however, came not because of her legal prowess but because her boyfriend was California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once called Harris “the Speaker’s new steady.” He went on to become the first black mayor of San Francisco.
As Brown’s time as speaker drew to a close in 1994, he named Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that came with a $72,000 annual salary. Brown had previously appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.
She “was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
It seems that sleeping her way to the top is not Kamala’s favorite conversation gambit. She prefers to whine about growing up in racist Stanford and Berkeley.
From today’s Los Angeles Times:
Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald J. Harris, met as graduate students at UC Berkeley. They divorced when Harris was 5.
“My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters,” said Harris, whose birth in 1964 came two weeks before Californians voted to allow racial discrimination in housing. “But that’s not to the exclusion of who I am in terms of my Indian heritage.”
Steeped in Indian culture, Harris and her sister, Maya, now a civil rights lawyer and senior policy advisor to Hillary Rodham Clinton, visited family in Madras on occasion. Harris remembers Aretha Franklin’s gospel rendition of “Young, Gifted and Black” as a soundtrack of her youth in a black middle-class neighborhood in the flats of Berkeley. Her parents often joined civil rights protests.
“I grew up going to a black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple,” Harris recalled as she sipped an iced soy latte at a Berkeley coffee house.
On weekends, the girls would visit their father in Palo Alto, where he was an economics professor at Stanford University.
“The neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with us because we were black,” Harris said. “We’d say, ‘Why can’t we play together?’ ‘My parents — we can’t play with you.’ In Palo Alto. The home of Google.”
Harris tells crowds that even liberal Berkeley waited nearly two decades before carrying out the Supreme Court’s 1954 mandate to desegregate public schools. Her elementary school class in the 1970s was only the second one to integrate Berkeley schools with busing, she recalled.
Harris spent her high-school years in Montreal, where her mother worked as a breast cancer researcher at a McGill University hospital. After Howard University, Harris got her law degree at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
The Los Angeles Times does not bother to get other sources to back up her tales of oppression. Count me as skeptical about some of her stories of suffering. You really think kids in Palo Alto would not play with black kids?
In my childhood, the only people who thought it was ok to hate people purely on the basis of race were blacks. I never recall anyone from my childhood even say the idea that we can’t play with black kids.
