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National News See other National News Articles Title: A Look at Kamala Harris’s ‘Middle Class’ Childhood Weekends in Palo Alto, Private School, Trips to Jamaica: 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.” 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.’ The report added, “She was indeed born in an Oakland hospital in 1964, but she did not settle in the city until she was in her 20s and working as a prosecutor in the county district attorney’s office.” 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. Poster Comment: Rule #16: Israel is allowed to break all the rules Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
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Israel calls up to 8000 reserves to enter conflict with Hezbollah The Israeli military announced Wednesday afternoon that two reserve brigades will be called up for deployment in Operation Northern Arrows. “In accordance with the situational assessment, the IDF is calling up two reserve brigades for operational missions in the northern arena,” the IDF said. “This will enable the continuation of combat against the Hezbollah terrorist organization, the defense of the State of Israel, and create the conditions to enable the residents of northern Israel to return to their homes.”
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