US Vice President Kamala Harris paid heartfelt tribute to her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night.
Harris, who formally accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to challenge Republican rival Donald Trump in the November election, became the second woman to do so for the party.
In her speech, Harris described her mother, saying, “My mother was a brilliant 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent. As the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But my mother never lost her cool.”
Harris frequently references her South Asian heritage through the lens of her mother and has often shared the close bond they shared, describing Gopalan as a source of inspiration.
“She was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women’s health, and she taught Maya (Kamala’s sister) and me to never complain about injustice, but do something about it. She also taught us to never do anything half-assed,” Harris remarked.
She further added: “Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”
Who Was Shyamala Gopalan?
Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer specialist, was originally from Chennai, Tamil Nadu. She emigrated from India at the age of 19 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
Gopalan was among the early waves of Indian immigrants to the United States. “Anybody with a South Asian background, you’ll know that this was early, early, early,” Harris noted at an event with the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies in May.
Gopalan met Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who was studying economics at the University of California, Berkeley, during the civil rights movement. They married in 1963 and had two daughters: Kamala and her younger sister, Maya.
Donald Harris is now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who made significant contributions to breast cancer research, passed away in 2009.
Though she never witnessed her daughter’s rise to California’s attorney general, US senator, and vice president, Kamala Harris credits her mother as the driving force behind her journey.
Gopalan was, however, a strong supporter during Harris’s first political campaign for San Francisco District Attorney, spending every weekend at the campaign headquarters, per US-based daily NPR.
After their divorce, Gopalan raised Kamala and Maya, nurturing their pride in their South Asian heritage. She frequently took them on trips to India and expressed her emotions in Tamil, as Kamala detailed in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
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