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Journalism of Courage
At one point during the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the former president called the vice president a Marxist — an ideological position that he claimed she had inherited from her father.
“She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Trump said. “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”
Donald J Harris is emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. He was born in Jamaica in 1938 to Oscar Joseph Harris and Beryl Christie Harris, and is a descendant of a slave-owner named Hamilton Brown on his father’s side, according to a 2018 essay he wrote for Jamaica Global.
Harris’s interest in economics was cultivated early — and he credited his two grandmothers for it.
His paternal grandmother, Christiana “Chrishy” Brown, through her day-to-day affairs in running a ‘dry-goods store’, as well as her political stance; and his maternal grandmother, Iris Finegan, who managed a sugarcane farm, which provided him with an “early intimate exposure to operation of the sugar industry at the local level of small-scale production with family labour and free wage-labour”.
Harris studied at the University College of West Indies where he obtained a BA from the University of London in 1960. He moved to the United States a year later as an Issa Scholar to pursue his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
He would complete his doctoral dissertation in “Inflation, Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth: A Theoretical and Numerical Analysis” in 1966.
After one-year stints at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Northwestern University as assistant professor, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an associate professor in 1968.
He met Shyamala Gopalan, the vice president’s mother, in 1962 at a meeting of Berkeley’s Afro-American Association. She was a Tamilian PhD student in the university’s Nutrition and Endocrinology department. They married two years later, and the couple had two daughters, Kamala and Maya Harris.
They divorced in 1971, and Shyamala won custody of the children a year later.
Kamala was seven when her parents divorced, and has repeatedly described her childhood as being raised by a single mother. She has also expressed her relationship with her father as “cordial but distant.”
In 1972, Harris became the first black scholar to be granted tenure in Stanford’s economics department when he joined there as professor.
The Stanford Daily in November 1976 described Harris as a Marxist scholar the university viewed as “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics”.
Harris is credited with integrating post-Keynesian economics into Development Economics, focusing on capital accumulation analysis and its implications on economic growth. His work questioned traditional assumptions about economic growth (for example, the implication that lower interest rates always lead to increased investment), and critically analysed economic traditions in the US and Caribbean economies, especially Jamaica.
He has more than a hundred publications, notably ‘Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution’ (1978) and ‘Jamaica’s Export Economy: Towards a Strategy of Export-led Growth’ (1997).
