The key family history JD Vance and Kamala Harris have in common

The ordinary person’s primary objection to the presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris ought to lie in what she has done during the Biden administration (presiding over an annual 6% inflation rate, a record multi-million influx of illegal immigrants, etc.) and what she has advocated when pandering to the Democratic base (endorsing the full-scale elimination of private health insurance and fracking for example).

Former President Donald Trump has instead honed in on the dumbest rationale to attack Harris for who she is. Trump questioned why, after “only promoting Indian heritage,” the de facto Democratic presidential nominee “happened to turn black.”

It’s an idiotic political strategy to distract from Harris’s genuinely radical and incompetent record and, instead, question her immutable identity. But Trump also missed the real tragedy in the reason why Harris grew up with far less influence from her black heritage than her Indian-American upbringing: The historic and family-shattering misandry of family courts.

Harris’s father is Donald Harris, a Jamaican-American economist, and her late mother was Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian-American biomedical researcher. The pair met while attending the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, when Gopalan was a Ph.D. candidate and Donald Harris was a master’s student, at the university’s Afro-American Association, the study group that would eventually establish the Black Panther Party. Although Gopalan would later maintain that she originally intended to move back to India, she married Donald Harris in 1963. Kamala Harris was born a year later, and her sister and close adviser, Maya Harris, was born in 1967.

Gopalan and Donald Harris’s marriage began to fall apart as their careers took off, with Kamala Harris eventually writing in her memoir that her parents “stopped being kind to one another” by the time she was just 5 years old. Gopalan and her daughters moved with Donald Harris to the Midwest when he scored limited professorship stints at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and then at Northwestern University, but Gopalan moved with her daughters back to the Bay Area in 1970 while Donald Harris was working a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin. Right when Donald Harris returned to the Bay Area to join the University of Stanford’s economics department in 1972, Gopalan filed for divorce.

While the vice president does celebrate her origins as the daughter of a marriage born of the Civil Rights Movement, she mostly glosses over her father in speeches and memoirs. Kamala Harris credits her mother, who was Hindu, for ingratiating her with black American culture. Gopalan brought her daughters to predominately black Baptist churches and immersed them in the community of the black academics she had befriended at Berkeley. The girls spent summers and weekends with their father in Palo Alto and occasional jaunts to Jamaica, but Meena Harris, Kamala Harris’s niece, insisted Donald Harris “was not around after the divorce.”

The truth may be a little more complicated. Gopalan, who went on to become a prolific cancer researcher and brought her then-school-aged daughters with her as she worked at Quebecois universities, died of the disease in 2009, and Donald Harris rarely makes public statements. When he made his only major public remark during Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid in 2020, condemning her joke about smoking marijuana because she is half-Jamaican, Kamala Harris demurred in her response, further confirming a familial rift. But in an essay about his attempts to teach his daughters, granddaughter, and great-grandchildren about their Jamaican heritage, Donald Harris revealed that his relative absence from his daughters’ lives was far from a decision of his own making.

“This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972 when, after a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’ was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!),” wrote Donald Harris in a 2019 blog post. “Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.”

Similar to too many biracial children of divorce, a family court made the decision for Kamala Harris as to which culture would influence her more. While Gopalan clearly succeeded at awakening her daughter’s racial awareness as a black woman, Kamala Harris’s black father was legally limited in his ability to parent his own child. It’s a story common in plenty of biracial families, perhaps due to racial animus or xenophobia, but most likely due to the misandrist doctrine of the “tender years” fallacy.

A well-intentioned but dramatic overcorrection from the historical assumption that both wives and children were the legal property of a husband under common law, the tender years doctrine, adopted in American law throughout the 19th century, assumed that mothers should have sole or primary custody of children in their younger years. Although countless states have overturned the doctrine as unconstitutional and nominally now require courts to consider the best interest of the child, a technical transformation that occurred shortly after Donald Harris and Gopalan divorced, only recently have states mandated that individual judges default to joint custody when ruling on physical custody of children. The result is that family courts still tend to be heavily biased against men at the cost of children.

Going back to a 1989 Massachusetts custody allocation, the Department of Justice found that even when fathers actively sought out custody of their children, they only received joint physical custody 46% of the time and primary physical custody 29% of the time. In 2007, researchers in the North Carolina Law Review found that when mothers filed as plaintiffs seeking primary physical custody, they were granted it 81.5% of the time. But fathers filing as plaintiffs for primary physical custody were only rewarded with such in 33.7% of cases. Fast forward to 2016, and a government study of Washington state found that of contested custody disputes, three-quarters of mothers received majority custody. Misandry in the courtroom also translates into actual danger for children. Whereas the overwhelming majority of fathers who committed domestic violence were (correctly) granted zero residential time with their children, some 70% of mothers who had committed domestic abuse were rewarded residential time.

A less technical but more recent review of nationwide data by popular parenting scheduling tool Custody X Change found that in situations where both parents want custody over a child, fathers receive barely a third of custodial time. Ironically enough, purple states lead the way in correcting the problem, as the majority of arrangements studied were 50/50 joint custody agreements between parents. Only 40% of arrangements in blue states and 22% of arrangements in red states gave equal time to both mothers and fathers.

Ironically enough, Trump’s own running mate may have this origin story in common with Kamala Harris. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) famously did not reconnect with his own biological father, Donald Bowman, until he was an adolescent. Although Vance grew up believing Bowman was simply a deadbeat father who waived away his parental rights to allow Vance’s new stepfather to adopt him, again, the truth may have been more complicated.

“For the first time, I heard his side of the story: that the adoption had nothing to do with a desire to avoid child support and that, far from simply ‘giving me away,’ as Mom and Mamaw had said, Dad had hired multiple lawyers and done everything within reason to keep me,” Vance wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

Bowman said he only gave up because he “worried that the custody war was destroying” his son.

Statistically speaking, Kamala Harris lost far more than a deepened understanding of the Jamaican half of her heritage when a court decided to deprive her father of her custodial crime. Studies across the board seem to indicate that all children, Kamala Harris and Vance included, benefit emotionally, behaviorally, psychologically, and physically from co-equal parenting. That’s a less exciting political take to make, but for the Generation X and millennial children of the baby boomers and the 60s, the tales of Kamala Harris and Vance are all too common.