From protesting a policy that banned children from playing on the lawn in Montreal to her mom’s ‘coconut tree’ comment, here are 8 things you might not know about the U.S. Vice President
As U.S. Vice President, Kamala Harris is simultaneously in the world spotlight and also just outside of it, serving as second-in-command to commander-in-chief Joe Biden.
Now, with Joe Biden’s decision Sunday to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House and endorse her as his replacement, she is now very much in the public eye. Here are several things you may not know about the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
She spent some formative years in Montreal
Her yearbook entry describes her favourite pastime as “dancing with Midnight Magic,” a dance troupe she founded with her friend Wanda Kagan. It also lists her favourite saying as: “Naw, I’m just playing,” and gives special thanks to her mother, who died in 2009 at the age of 70.
Little is made of Harris’s Canadian connection — the White House website does not even mention it — but it did come up in a 2021 call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when she was said to have “recalled fondly” her years in Montreal. (Trudeau also attended high school in Montreal, at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf.)
She organized a demonstration at age 13
Not only was the protest successful, but the organizational partnership continued. Maya was chair of her sister’s 2020 presidential campaign, and is expected to play a role in her new bid for the White House.
She’s not very close to her father
Still alive at age 85 is her father Donald Harris, a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He married Gopalan in July of 1963 and they had two daughters, Kamala and Maya. But the couple divorced when Kamala was just seven years old.
Fazzari added: “It’s a bit unusual, but it could be what he wants, and she (Kamala) is respecting it.”
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris had put it more bluntly in a 2003 interview. “My father is a good guy,” she told SF Weekly, “but we are not close.”
Barack Obama once called her ‘the best looking attorney general’
In 2013, during a fundraising event, then-president Barack Obama heaped praise on then-attorney general Harris, saying in an off-camera remark: “She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”
To laughter from the crowd he added: “It’s true! C’mon.”
She’s not a fan of being ‘the female Obama’
Harris has been referred to on occasion as “the female Obama,” since both she and the former president look good on camera, are biracial, and had to teach people how to pronounce their names
Asked by a reporter at the time about carrying on Obama’s legacy, she was blunt: “I have my own legacy.”
She collects Chuck Taylor sneakers
Asked for more travel tips, she said: “I always carry socks and a scarf to wrap around my neck because planes are very cold, and my husband loads up my iPad with shows and movies I can watch when I’m traveling at the end of the week, and I’m exhausted. I just totally binge-watched Stranger Things on a plane.”
Fans are showing their support with coconuts
Noting that “none of us just live in a silo” and “everything is in context,” she continued with a remark about her mother.
“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris then laughed and added: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The comment continues to resonate, with various Democratic governors, senators and other supporters adding coconuts to their social media profiles in a show of solidarity with Harris.
She has no biological children but she does have stepchildren
Harris is not exactly shy when it comes to her stepchildren. In her first speech as Joe Biden’s running mate in August of 2020, she noted: “I cannot wait for America to get to know my husband, Doug, and our amazing kids, Cole and Ella.”
Cole (named after jazz musician John Coltrane) and Ella (named after jazz musician Ella Fitzgerald) are the product of her husband Douglas Emhoff’s first marriage, which ended in 2008. Harris married him in 2014, when the youngest of the children was already 20, so she wouldn’t have known them while they were growing up, and she doesn’t have any children of her own. That said, the stepkids do call her “Momala.”
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