Weekends in Palo Alto, Private School, Trips to Jamaica: A Look at Kamala Harris’s ‘Middle Class’ Childhood

Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to portray her upbringing as “middle class” and even working class — touting a summer job at McDonald’s and claiming to be from Oakland, a blue-collar city with a large black population.

For example, during a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harris said, “I grew up a child of a mother who worked very hard. She raised me and my sister and she saved up. And by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy a home.”

On September 13, she posted on X, “Let me be clear: I will always put the middle class and working families first. I know where I came from.”

When asked during the presidential debate if Americans were better off than they were four years ago, she responded, “I was raised a middle-class kid.”

However, a close look at her childhood shows that Harris and her younger sister grew up with many opportunities that many “middle class” children do not have, such as living abroad, private school education, and growing up in some of the wealthiest locales in the world.

But Harris has downplayed her privilege throughout her political career.

On August 31, she described herself as “a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at McDonald’s.”

But while she was born in the Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, at the time, her graduate school parents lived in Berkeley, California — a predominantly white, liberal elite enclave in the San Francisco Bay Area home to UC Berkeley, one of the top public universities in the world.

In fact, that is where her “working mother” — the daughter of an Indian diplomat — and father met as graduate students. Harris’s own father even wrote that Kamala was “born” in Berkeley.

According to a New York Times report, Harris began “downplaying her Berkeley roots years ago when she first prepared to run for statewide office in California.” It said:

Today, she often describes herself with the somewhat vague label ‘daughter of Oakland,’ a phrase that ties her to a working-class city with less stigma — and counters Donald J. Trump’s preferred branding, ‘San Francisco liberal.’

Yet Harris has tried to tie herself to Oakland, claiming in her memoir that as a child, she lived on “the boundary between Oakland and Berkeley.” However, The Oaklandside, a local news site, reported, “by no stretch of the imagination was her Bancroft apartment geographically close to the border; it’s directly west of downtown.”

Harris has also talked about being bused to an elementary school in North Berkeley as part of a racial integration program, as evidence of her alleged disadvantaged background. However, she has left out that she actually attended a private school before taking part in the busing program.

Kamala’s Early Childhood

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, at a time when Berkeley was a hotbed for civil rights and anti-war activism.

Her parents were both members of a black student activist community known as the Afro American Association, which would establish the Black Panther Party, according to the Times.

When she was born, her parents lived on 2531 Regent Street, only a few blocks away from the UC Berkeley campus, according to local news site The Berkeleyside. (That apartment was even farther from the “border” with Oakland than the one on Bancroft Way that she lived in later). The family then moved to an apartment on 1945 Milvia Street — also near the campus and nowhere near the border with Oakland.

Then, in 1966, when Harris was about two, her family moved to the midwest. After her father got a job teaching at the University of Illinois, they settled in Urbana, Illinois, according to USA Today. In 1967, they moved to Evanston, Illinois, where her father taught at Northwestern University. Then in 1968, they moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where her father taught and her mother did cancer research at the University of Wisconsin. According to her father, between Illinois and Wisconsin he also taught at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Harris’s parents separated while they were in Wisconsin, when she was about five years old. Harris, her mother, and sister moved back to Berkeley, California, where her mother continued cancer research at UC Berkeley. Her father remained in Madison until 1972, before teaching at Yale University in Connecticut and then moving back to California to teach at Stanford University. Both Yale and Stanford are two of the nation’s most elite private universities.

It was at this time that Harris’s mother moved into the yellow apartment building on 1227 Bancroft Way that was prominently featured in her political campaigns. While it was closer to Oakland than the previous apartments her parents lived in, it was not near the boundary with Oakland, as The Oaklandside reported.

In her memoir, Harris would describe the neighborhood as a “close-knit neighborhood of working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another.”

She would talk about how her “single mother” struggled to raise her and her sister, relying on the help of neighbors. Harris said in another recent interview:

My mother, you know, worked long hours and our neighbor helped raise us. We used to call her — I still call her our second mother.

Harris typically does not mention that their downstairs neighbor actually ran a daycare center where she and her sister would go after school — a convenience that many working mothers do not have.

Harris Attended a Private School Before Being Bused

It was also during this time that Harris was bused to the Thousand Oaks Elementary School in the wealthier North Berkeley area. As she wrote in her memoir:

I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation, with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other. At the time, all I knew was that the big yellow bus was the way I got to school.

However, Harris was not like other “working-class black children” in her neighborhood.

Before Harris took part in the busing program, she actually attended kindergarten at a private school called the Berkwood School, according to The Berkeleyside. According to the school’s website, tuition was $29,800 for the 2023-2024 school year.

It was also around this time that Harris was taking ballet lessons from a world-famous Russian ballerina named Madame Bovie at her 1805 Grove Street studio in North Berkeley — which The Berkeleyside reported was only about a mile away from Harris’s mother’s apartment.

And according to USA Today and The Berkeleyside, Harris and her sister would spend weekends and summers with their father in the nearby city of Palo Alto — one of the richest and most exclusive zip codes in America and known as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.” It was also not very diverse. In 2010, it had less than a one-percent black population.

Harris and her sister would also take “frequent visits” to Jamaica, where their father came from a privileged family of former slaveowners. They would also take trips to Chennai, India, to visit her mother’s family.

Harris has minimized the role her father played in her upbringing, writing in her memoir that he “remained a part of our lives.” Meanwhile, she played up the role her mother had, writing, “it was really my mother who took charge of our upbringing. She was the one most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”

According to reports, Harris’s mother — despite not being black — deliberately immersed her children in black culture.

Historian Charles Wollenberg told the San Francisco Gate that Harris’s mother “introduced the kids to their Indian family and heritage but primarily raised them as members of Berkeley’s highly politicized Black community,”

The Berkeleyside reported that Harris’s mother would also bring them to Rainbow Sign, a black cultural arts center that would “help shape her political imagination.”

The Oaklandside reported Harris and her sister were “enfolded into their parents’ community of intellectuals and activists,” where she grew up listening to them discuss politics and literature, according to her own memoir.

This immersion abruptly ended, however, when Harris was about 12, and her mother got a job teaching at the Jewish General Hospital at McGill University, one of Canada’s top universities, and they moved to Montreal, Canada.

Harris Lived in One of the Most Upscale Neighborhoods in Montreal

In Montreal, Harris lived in one of the most upscale neighborhoods, with homes worth more than a million dollars, according to exclusive reporting by Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris. There was no racial hostility in Montreal, Morris reported.

Harris spent the next approximately six years in Canada, first attending a French-language primary school called Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, which according to the school’s website, is in a “beautiful neighborhood.”

Next, Harris would attend the alternative public school Fine Arts Core Elementary School, located near the McGill University campus. She would then attend and graduate from Westmount High School, one of the top public high schools in Montreal.

It was only about a year after they moved to Montreal, when Harris was about 13 years old, that her mother purchased her first home back in Oakland.

Harris has said her mother saved for “many years” for a down payment on the home, which she described as “a one-level dark-gray house on a cul-de-sac, with a shingled roof.”

However, what Harris has not said was that the home was located in the hills of Oakland by a golf course — one of the wealthiest and most beautiful areas of Oakland. That three-bedroom, two-bathroom home is now worth an estimated $914,881, according to a posting on Redfin.

After graduating from Westmount High School in 1981, Harris then attended Vanier College in Canada — likely paying the higher international student rate — before enrolling in Howard University in Washington, DC, in 1982.

As to why she decided to go to Howard University, a historically black university, a close friend of hers, Derreck Johnson, told the New Yorker that Harris in her late teens “fell in” with a group of friends who were also bound for historically black colleges.

“We all went to private school, we all were educated, we all were very much parented, but we knew kids that weren’t,” Johnson told the New Yorker.

“The idea of the struggle was embedded in us from our mothers, who told their stories,” he said.

Harris Allegedly Works at a McDonald’s — by a Beach or State Park

It was around this time — the summer between her freshman and sophomore year at Howard in 1983 — that Harris allegedly worked at a McDonald’s in California.

Harris first mentioned the alleged job at McDonald’s at a campaign rally in Las Vegas in 2019, when she was “trying to show an understanding of middle-class struggles,” according to the Associated Press.

Campaign aides earlier this year claimed the job was to help her pay her way through college, but they later had to admit it was just for “extra spending money,” according to Politico.

Harris has never provided evidence she worked at McDonald’s, but her campaign has since said she worked at one in Alameda, California.

There are only two McDonald’s in Alameda — one is located across from a beach and the other one is near a state park and a different beach. The Harris campaign did not respond to a query from Breitbart News of which one she worked at.

It is also unclear why Harris would work at a McDonald’s in Alameda when her mother’s home was located at 3945 Turnley Avenue and there is closer McDonald’s at 6300 E. 14th Street in Oakland.

And though Harris was allegedly working at McDonald’s to earn extra spending money, her family did not appear to be struggling financially.

At the time, her father was a professor at Stanford University, her mother was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, and her younger sister was enrolled at the nearby private Catholic high school — Bishop O’Dowd — where tuition for one year currently costs $25,340.

After graduating from Howard University in 1986, Harris moved back to California to attend law school at UC Hastings in San Francisco — one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in.

At UC Hastings, she took part of the Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP), which helped students from “disadvantaged communities navigate the stringent demands of the first-year curriculum,” according to a Politico profile.

With both parents at the time being professors at the nation’s top universities, it is not clear how she considered herself “disadvantaged.”

Harris graduated from UC Hastings in 1989, with a job lined up in the Alameda County deputy district attorney’s office. After she passed her bar exam on the second try, she began working as Alameda County deputy district attorney at around age 25.

Harris would soon begin her own history of buying property in posh locales.

Harris Buys Her First Condo — Overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland

In 1993, when Harris was around 29 years old, she would purchase a one-bedroom 1,125-square-foot condo in Oakland overlooking Lake Merritt for $116,000, according to the San Francisco Weekly Standard. The unit had floor-to-ceiling windows and a rear courtyard.

It was also around this time that Harris would meet and date the powerful California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, 60, and become known as his “frequent companion,” according to a 1994 Los Angeles Times report.

Brown would appoint Harris in May 1994 to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which then paid $97,088 a year, and in November of that year, appoint her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that then paid $72,000 a year.

According to the New Yorker, Harris was paid about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. Brown would also give her a BMW, a trip to Paris, and bring her to the Academy Awards, according to the New York Post.

In 1998, she sold her Oakland condo for $152,000 a few months after she began working in San Francisco at the district attorney’s office, according to the San Francisco Weekly Standard.

It is not clear where she lived next, but around 2002, when she ran for San Francisco district attorney, she bought a two-level condo in San Francisco’s trendy South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood for $299,000, according to the San Francisco Weekly Standard. (A Wall Street Journal report says she bought the property in 2004 for $489,000).

The condo was located near the glitzy Moscone Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and later, Twitter’s headquarters.

During her campaign for district attorney, she would consciously try to downplay her “aura of privilege,” according to The New Yorker. The outlet reported:

Countering the aura of privilege projected by her appearances in the society pages, Harris established her campaign headquarters in Bayview-Hunters Point, a forlorn part of San Francisco that was once a naval shipyard. ‘It’s the hood,’ Amelia Ashley-Ward, the publisher of the Sun-Reporter, the city’s oldest black newspaper, told me. ‘Right above her offices, you had the public housing. And there was always crime. But she was right there in the hood. She would walk up and down the street, the liquor stores, the bars, and talk to people.’

Harris reportedly sold the condo in 2021, for $860,000.

Harris Upgrades to Million Dollar Condo in D.C., Five Million Dollar Home in Los Angeles

In 2017, when Harris became a U.S. senator, she purchased a luxury condo for $1.775 million in the upscale West End neighborhood in Washington, DC, next to Georgetown, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.

According to the Architectural Digest, her condo had a heated rooftop swimming pool, rooftop gardens, floor-to-ceiling windows, custom Italian cabinetry, and spa bathrooms with teak shower floors. The building concierge runs errands for residents, such as picking up coffee and prescriptions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Architectural Digest reported that Harris entered her term as vice president owning three properties, but quickly sold two of them after she was sworn in. She sold her condo in West End for $1.85 million, before moving into the vice president’s official residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, still own a mansion in Brentwood, California, that is estimated to be worth $5 million.

But despite Harris’s childhood in Berkeley, Palo Alto, Canada, Jamaica, and India, she has consistently described herself as from Oakland.

In her memoir — the ironically named The Truths We Hold — she wrote about her campaign for freshman class representative of the Liberal Arts Student Council at Howard University:

It was my very first campaign. No opponent I’ve faced since was as tough as Jersey Girl Shelley Young, and that says a lot, coming from a person from Oakland.

She also wrote about how, as California attorney general, she took off her earrings before taking a phone call from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, writing, “I took off my earrings (the Oakland in me) and picked up the receiver.”

As the Times reported, Harris’s mentions of Berkeley would shrink as her political ambitions grew. The paper reported:

In 2008, just before she announced her run for California attorney general, the mention of Berkeley was taken out of her bio on her political website, which referred to her as a ‘California native’ before turning to ‘born and raised in the East Bay’ and, at points, ‘born in Oakland.’ (She has mentioned Berkeley a few times in speeches over the years to allude to the civil rights movement or her experience in school busing programs.).

Harris would even launch her failed 2020 presidential bid from Oakland.

“In the 2019 speech kicking off her first presidential run, Ms. Harris stood before a crowd of around 20,000 people in downtown Oakland,” the paper wrote. “Her very first words were: ‘I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.’”

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