"It was a debate!"

A commenter from India wrote to Ann Althouse:

Nagarajan Sivakumar said...
Prof Althouse,
There are far worse things about Kamala Devi Harris than her fake smile and fake explanations to a partisan hack and alleged comedian.

How many times has this woman opened up on television about her Brahmin mother who is the single biggest reason for her successful life in the States today? Every one knows her fathers name Harris..but how many people know about her mother Shyamala Gopalan ?

Her mother was a true trail blazer.She was one of the earliest Indians who came to America on a student visa in 1957. This was a full 8 years before the US opened up legally in 1965 via the Immigration and Naturalization Act to non Caucasian immigration of any kind.Upto that point there seems to have been a quota system for legal immigration which generally preferred European or Canadian immigration.

An unmarried Brahmin woman relocating from India to a country as foreign as the United States more than 6 decades ago was unheard of.It simply never happened. But Shyamala Gopalan was made of sterner stuff and graduated with a Phd in nutrition and endocrinology from Berkley in 1965.She later on went into breast cancer reasearch and worked at Urbana Champaign and at the University of Wisconsin. I am pretty sure that liberal students in your campus would go nuts if they knew about this connection.

Donald Harris divorced Shyamala Gopalan in 1971.Her mother basically raised Kamala and her sister Maya as a single parent from the time they were in elementary school.She is the very epitome of what liberal feminists hail as the true heroines of America..the successful career woman/single parent who raised a family all by herself..an immigrant and breast cancer researcher who was an advisor to the NIH..

And yet...people barely know who she is.Even though Kamala has been in the political spotlight for more than a decade now.. Even today Harris is the name she goes by. Shyamala Gopalan is virtually unknown.

When she self identfies as a black woman, she cannot talk about her Brahmin mother..or deal with the fact that her mother came from a politically well connected family from India..Her grandfather PV Gopalan worked for the Indian Govt in the 60s.He was posted in Zambia by the Government which tried to engage Africa seriously as a leader of the Non Aligned Movement

Her mother was truly privileged to be able to pursue academic goals in the United States 6 decades ago, when 90% of the rest of India could barely afford three meals a day or a train ticket let alone airfare to the richest country halfway across the world

Given this background, Her sob story about being an underprivileged child that was bused to school to combat evil white racists..crashes and burns.

Kamala Harris is a clone of her mother when it comes to ambition and the drive to make it big in life.Unfortunately she greatly differs from her mother in actually being useful to humanity. Heres hoping that she doesn't cause any further harm to anyone than what she's already done.

Full disclosure: I lived in the US for 10 years and am now back home in India. Iam about 8 kms from where her Chitthi (Tamil for maternal aunt) lives in Chennai ..the hometown of Shyamala Gopalan.