Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who has served as the junior United States senator from California since 2017. She is the Democratic vice presidential nominee for the 2020 election.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was elected attorney general of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.

She defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate.[5][6] As a senator, she has advocated for healthcare reform, federal descheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings.[7]

Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019.[8] She was announced as former vice president Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 election on August 11, 2020. She is the first African American, the first Asian American, and the third female vice presidential running mate on a major party ticket after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin, respectively.

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California.[12] Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated work in breast cancer research,[13] had arrived in the U.S. from India in 1958 as a 19-year-old graduate student in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley;[14][15] Gopalan received her PhD in 1964.[16] Her father, Donald J. Harris, is a Stanford University professor emeritus of economics, who arrived in the U.S. from British Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study at UC Berkeley, receiving a PhD in economics in 1966.

Along with her younger sister, Maya, Harris lived in Berkeley, California, briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called "the flatlands"[21] with a significant Black population.

Harris's childhood home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley
When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley[21] which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent Black.[22]

A neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children's choir. Their mother introduced them to Hindu mythology and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang.

As children, she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai) – on the southeastern coast of India – several times.[26] She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women's rights impressed her. Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life. Harris has also visited her father's family in Jamaica.

Her parents divorced when she was seven. She has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, other children in the neighborhood were not allowed to play with them because they were black.[26] When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital. Harris attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, and then Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.

After high school, Harris attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, she interned as a mail room clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[32][33] Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.

Harris then returned to California to attend law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law through its Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP). While at UC Hastings, she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association.[35] She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989[36] and was admitted to the California Bar in June 1990.