2024-08-24 05:45:02
With Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, eyes are on her closest relationships, from her husband to her stepkids to her younger sister, Maya Harris.
Maya Harris took the stage during the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22 in Chicago. Maya Harris began her speech talking about the relationship between them and their late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and how proud she would be to see Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee.
“She raised us to believe that we could be and do anything, and we believed her,” Maya Harris said. “You see, Mommy understood the power and the possibility that come with knowing and showing who you truly are.”
“She knew that we could be the authors of our own story,” Maya Harris said, adding that her big sister “has been about fighting for each of us to have that freedom. And like so many Americans, Kamala knows what it’s like to be underestimated and be counted out.”
Maya Harris expressed that her sister, the vice president, is a leader who cares and fights for every one.
Maya Harris has been part of the vice president’s personal life and career. Maya Harris served as campaign chairperson during Kamala Harris’ first presidential campaign in 2020.
“I think most people who know Maya will tell you she’s one of the smartest people they know,” Kamala Harris told Politico in 2019.
Learn more about Maya Harris and their relationship below.
She and Kamala Harris have an ‘unbreakable’ bond from childhood
Kamala and Maya Harris’ parents, Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan met while graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. He was originally from Jamaica; she from India. They married and welcomed Kamala in 1964 and Maya in 1967.
The couple split up and their daughters lived with their mom. Kamala and Maya Harris relocated to Montreal when their mother got a new job at McGill University. The sisters were 12 and 9 at the time and didn’t speak French like their classmates.
“We leaned on each other,” Kamala Harris told The Washington Post. “We forged a bond that is unbreakable. When I think about it, all of the joyous moments in our lives, all of the challenging moments, all of the moments of transition, we have always been together.”
Like her sister, Maya Harris is a lawyer
After attending Stanford Law School, Maya Harris worked as a civil litigator then went on to become an adjunct law professor and Dean of Lincoln Law School of San Jose, per her bio.
Her focus has been on policy and civil rights, as well as racial and gender justice. Other career highlights include her work as a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and her time as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Maya Harris also served as the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California and was the vice president of democracy, rights and justice of the Ford Foundation.
She’s worked on two presidential campaigns
In addition to working on the 2020 presidential campaign, Maya Harris also worked as a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2016.
During that time, she led a group of policy experts and developed Clinton’s domestic policy.
Among her titles? Wedding officiant
When Kamala Harris married Doug Emhoff on Aug. 22, 2014, Maya Harris played an important role in the small ceremony: officiant.
She welcomed her daughter, Meena, when she was a teenager
Maya Harris welcomed her first and only child, a daughter named Meena, when she was a teenager.
While talking with E! News in 2021, she spoke about her experience as a young single mother, saying she was always “juggling work, juggling school.”
Describing her daughter as a “kind and caring and compassionate person with a sense of duty and responsibility,” Maya Harris said she’s proud of Meena Harris and is impressed that she is a “phenomenal, creative, trend-spotting, trendsetting entrepreneur.”
In the same interview, Meena Harris said she’s taken quite a few parenting cues from her mother.
“I approach parenting in the same way (as my mom did),” she said. “I think I’m borrowing and replicating and trying to carry on that legacy of how I was raised.”
Maya Harris’ daughter introduced her to her future husband
When she was only 4 years old, Meena Harris played matchmaker and introduced her mother to her future husband, Tony West. As the couple told Stanford Lawyer in 2010, Meena Harris played a game of hide-and-seek with West on the Stanford Law campus while he and Maya Harris were both students.
A few years after graduation, the duo started dating.
“We waited for the most inconvenient time to actually get together —he was in D.C. and I was in the Bay Area,” Maya Harris said. “It’s a family joke that Meena knew we should be together long before we did.”
She has two grandchildren
Maya Harris is the proud grandmother of two granddaughters named Amara and Leela. Over the years, she has posted several photos of her “grandbabies,” as she calls them.
While talking with E! News in 2021, Maya Harris applauded her daughter’s parenting skills.
“I will say the only thing that rivals being Meena’s mom and having been a mother and raising up a daughter, is being a grandmother,” she said. “It is all of the love that you feel for your own children, just like allllll the love, but without all the responsibility.”
Maya Harris went on to say she’s “overwhelmingly proud” of her daughter.
“Because you have taken … everything certainly that I felt that I had to give and could give as a mom and you’ve made it your own, both in terms of your career and in terms of your own parenting and now in terms of what you’re putting out into the world. And that is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful, wonderful thing. And that I think is literally the only thing that every mother could hope for in their children,” she said.
She has lupus and has written about her experiences
In 2020, Maya Harris wrote an essay for The Atlantic about her experience with lupus, an autoimmune disease.
“The physical effects of the disease are cruel, including excruciating joint pain, organ damage, dramatic hair loss, and debilitating fatigue— most of which I have experienced again and again, often for long stretches, throughout my life. And while lupus can be managed, it has no cure,” she wrote.
Maya Harris went on to explain that she had kept her condition “private” for three decades and had only told family and a “handful of close friends” up until that point.
Maya’s daughter wrote a book about mom and aunt
Meena Harris published a children’s book about her mother and aunt titled “Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea.”
When asked about her inspiration for the project, Meena Harris told Glamour she grew up with “these strong, brilliant women who showed me what it meant to show up in the world with purpose and intention.”
“My grandma was a single mom, my mom was a single mom, and then Kamala didn’t have kids of her own when I was young. I just idolized them — these incredible women who were all around me. Seeing (them) and hearing (their) stories was formative for me,” she said.
