Biography - Kamala Harris

Who is Kamala Harris?

Kamala Harris is a politician, attorney, and author by profession and American by nationality. She has served as the junior United States Senator from California since 2017 and is a member of the Democratic Party. She became the 49th vice president of the United States in 2021.

Kamala Harris – Age, Parents, Siblings

Kamala Harris’s birth took place on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, USA. She was born Kamala Devi Harris to a Tamil-Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer scientist, and a Jamaican father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor.

She is not the only child of her parents and has a sibling, a sister named Maya Harris who is now an MSNBC political analyst. Growing up, she frequently visited her extended family in Chennai. Her parents divorced when she was seven years old and her mother was granted custody of the children. At the age of 12, she along with her mother and sister moved to Montreal, Québec, Canada.

Education, Ethnicity

There she attended Westmount High School, graduating in 1981. She then attended Howard University where she majored in political science and economics.

Harris also earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in 1989. For further education, in 1990, she enrolled at the State Bar of California.

Her ethnicity includes Indian, Jamaican, and African.

Kamala Harris – Boyfriend, Husband, Children, Divorce

Harris was in a relationship with Willie Brown in the mid-1990s. Brown is a Speaker of the California State Assembly. Her then-boyfriend had appointed her to a job at the California Medical Assistance Commission.

Kamala Harris is a happily married woman. She married Douglas Emhoff on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California. Emhoff was a partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office. She and her husband have no children together. However, from her marriage to Emhoff, she does have two step-children.

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Kamala Harris – Career

In politics

Harris served as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, from 1990 to 1998. In 2000, she was recruited by San Francisco's elected City Attorney, Louise Renne to join her office.

In the 2003 election, she won against Terence Hallinan and became the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, and was re-elected in 2007.

While at the office, the overall felony conviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006. She also created a special Hate Crimes Unit which focused on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools.

On January 3, 2011, Kamala Harris became the first female Jamaican-American, Indian-American attorney general in California and was re-elected on November 4, 2014.

She announced her intention to run for Boxer's Senate seat and in the November 2016 election, she defeated Loretta Sanchez with 62 percent of the vote. She resigned shortly before being sworn in as Senator on January 3, 2017.

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2020 presidential candidate

On January 21, 2019, she officially announced her candidacy for President of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election. On January 20, 2021, she became the 49th vice president of the United States with Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.

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Books

In addition to all her political efforts, she is also known as an author. She has written two non-fiction books and one children's book.

Her first book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer was published in 2009 while her next two books Superheroes Are Everywhere and The Truths We Hold: An American Journey were published in 2019.

Kamala Harris – Net Worth, Salary

According to Forbes, her net worth and annual salary have been estimated at around $6 million and $157k respectively.

Kamala Harris – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook

On social media, Kamala Harris is active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with several hundred thousand followers. She also has an official website kamalaharris.org.

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