Vice President Kamala Harris claims to be a “daughter of Oakland.” But while she was born in an Oakland, California, hospital in 1964, her parents lived in Berkeley at the time, where they stayed for just two years before moving first to Urbana, Illinois, then Evanston, Illinois, then Madison, Wisconsin.
Harris did not return to the Bay Area until 1970, when her mother chose to live, again, in Berkeley. Her parents had divorced by this point, and Harris and her sister would often spend weekends with her father in Palo Alto.
If you think all these cities have something in common, you are correct: They are all college towns. Harris is the daughter of two highly educated immigrant parents with illustrious academic careers. If Harris is from anywhere, it’s the faculty lounge.
It is unclear if either of Harris’s parents were football fans, which would have made the annual “Big Game” between the California Golden Bears and Stanford Cardinal awkward. Either way, Harris was not even in the United States when Berkeley radio announcer Joe Starky shouted, “The band is out on the field! He’s going to go into the end zone!” when the Bears ran back the kickoff against Stanford to beat John Elway in 1982. Harris was in Canada at the time, where she had been since she moved there for high school in 1976.
Harris never even lived in Oakland until after law school when she took a job with the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1990. She lived there for just three years, however, before her boyfriend, the powerful Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (who has a cameo in Godfather III) gave her a $97,000 job in Sacramento. Nice work if you can get it.
“She’s only doing what all politicians do,” MSNBC columnist Robyn Autry wrote defending Harris’s biographical fiction. “Naming a place of origin that signals her politics. Yes, Harris gains bona fides from being associated with a city that symbolizes Black working class grit and activism, and not the image of white elitism and radicalism associated with San Francisco but especially Berkeley.”
Telling people where we are from absolutely communicates a message. I remember my first paying gig in Washington, D.C. I was working for a lobbying firm at the height of the tech bubble (1999). Every client had an idea about how the government could be made better by the internet. After one such client meeting, one of the partners turned to me and said, “You always tell everyone you’re from Oakland. Couldn’t you just say San Francisco?”
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I couldn’t. I was offended. My parents may have met on the campus of San Francisco State in 1968. My favorite baseball team may have been the San Francisco Giants (Will Clark had his big rookie year before Mark McGwire), and my favorite football team may have been the San Francisco 49ers (the Raiders were in LA when I was growing up), yet it just did not feel right saying I was from San Francisco. I wasn’t. I was from Oakland. There is a difference.
For some people, like Harris, fudging that difference is just part of life in Washington. For some of us, it means something more.