Joe Biden Picks Kamala Harris as Vice President | Biden's VP pick Kamala...

Epic News Joe Biden Picks Kamala Harris as Vice President | Biden's VP pick Kamala Harris biracial roots

US Senator Kamala Harris - a potential Democratic vice-presidential candidate - is known as a prominent African-American politician. But she has also embraced her Indian roots. "My name is pronounced "Comma-la", like the punctuation mark," Kamala Harris writes in her 2018 autobiography, The Truths We Hold. The California senator, daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father, then explains the meaning of her Indian name. "It means 'lotus flower', which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flowers rising above the surface while the roots are planted firmly in the river bottom." Early in life, young Kamala and her sister Maya grew up in a house filled with music by black American artists. Her mother would sing along to Aretha Franklin's early gospel, and her jazz-loving father, who taught economics at Stanford University, would play Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane on the turntable. Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris separated when Ms Harris was five. Raised primarily by her Hindu single mother, a cancer researcher and a civil rights activist, Kamala, Maya and Shyamala were known as 'Shyamala and the girls'. Her mother made sure her two daughters were aware of their African-American background. Image copyrightTHE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES Image caption Senator Kamala Harris and her sister, Maya Lakshmi Harris, are close "My mother understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women," she wrote. "Harris grew up embracing her Indian culture, but living a proudly African-American life," wrote the Washington Post last year. When she ran for a senate seat in 2015, the Economist magazine described her as the "daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and a Jamaican economics professor, she is the first woman, first African-American and first Asian attorney general of California". The 55-year-old senator says she has not grappled with her identity and describes herself simply as "an American". Profile: Who is Kamala Harris? Who will Biden pick as his running mate? Diplomat and lightning rod - Biden's Susan Rice dilemma In many ways, say people who know her, Ms Harris straddles both communities effortlessly. In a video with Indian-American comedian and actress Mindy Kaling, posted to the senator's Youtube page during Ms Harris's presidential run, the two cook Indian food together and chat about their shared south Indian background. Kaling says that while not everyone knows about that half of Ms Harris's heritage, other Indian-Americans she meets often bring up the fact. "It's like our thing we're so excited about, to have you running for president," says Kaling. Kaling asks Ms Harris whether she was raised eating south Indian food. Ms Harris reels off names of Indian dishes made at home: "Lots of rice and yogurt, potato curry, dal, lots of dal, idli". She also says when she visited her mother's home in India, her grandfather would cheekily ask for French toast - made with eggs - when her vegetarian grandmother was out. In her book, she writes about making Indian biryani - and spaghetti Bolognese - at home. When Ms Harris got married to Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, in 2014, "in keeping with [our] respective Indian and Jewish heritage", she put a flower garland around her new husband's neck and he stomped on a glass. Ms Harris's public image has been more tied to her identity as an African-American politician, especially recently during the current conversation around race and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. But Indian-Americans also view her as one of their own, her candidacy suggesting a potential wider recognition of the Indian and South Asian communities in the country. It is clear that her late mother was a big inspiration for Ms Harris. Gopalan was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai, the oldest of four children. She graduated from the University of Delhi at the age of 19, and applied to a graduate programme at Berkeley, "a university she'd never seen, in a country she'd never visited". She left India in 1958 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology, and later became a breast cancer researcher. ------------- Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.” If you have any issues please contact me directly at email on my about page. “All the videos, songs, images, and graphics used in the video belong to their respective owners and I or this channel does not claim any right over them.