Fact-checking ‘Kamala Harris Facts’

A list recently shared across social media is titled "Kamala Harris Facts," but many are wrong or missing context. 

"Raised in Canada, not California," the post says. "Not African American — Indian & Jamaican. Political career started out of affair with married man. Imprisoned over 2,000 Black for minor drug charges and held them past their release date for free county labor resource. In some respect, slave labor. Descendant of Hamilton Brown, one of the largest slave owner/traders in Jamaican history. Only a Democrat can run on those credentials!"

(Screengrab from Instagram)

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Let’s dig into what we know. 

"Raised in Canada, not California"

Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old and when she was about 12, she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal after her mother, a scientist, took a research position at the Jewish General Hospital and a teaching role at McGill University, according to Vox and the Los Angeles Times.

Harris moved back to the United States after graduating in 1981 from Westmount High School in Quebec, the Toronto Star reported.   

Claims that she can’t run for president because she "was raised in Canada" are inaccurate. Constitutional scholars have told PolitiFact it matters only where she was born: the United States. The 14th Amendment, an 1898 Supreme Court decision and a 1952 statute make clear that anyone born in the country is qualified to run for president.

"Not African American — Indian & Jamaican"

Harris is the daughter of an immigrant mother from India, Shyamala Gopalan, and an immigrant father from Jamaica, Donald Harris. 

When Harris and President Joe Biden campaigned together as running mates in summer 2020, they highlighted the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy: The first Black woman and the first South Asian American to be nominated for national office by a major party in the United States. 

Back then, social media users criticized her for identifying as "African American." PolitiFact consulted experts in Caribbean and Africana studies, political science professors and anthropologists about the pushback. 

Several experts told us that the implication that Jamaicans aren't African or connected to Africa is wrong on its face.

According to a 2011 Jamaican census report, 92.1% of Jamaicans are Black, with genetic studies showing that the vast majority are descendants of people from sub-Saharan Africa.

"Jamaica is a country where more than 90% of the population is of African ancestry," said Judith Byfield, a professor at Cornell University who teaches Caribbean and African history. "So the idea that because her dad is Jamaican, she has no African ancestry, is completely false."

"Political career started out of affair with married man"

Claims Harris was the mistress of Willie Brown, who later served as San Francisco’s mayor, also gained traction after she became the vice presidential nominee. 

The couple dated in 1994 and 1995, Reuters reported. It wasn’t a secret and it happened more than a decade after Brown separated from his wife. He was legally married at the time but had reportedly been estranged from his wife since 1981, according to Reuters, which cited a People magazine story.

Harris obtained a political science degree from Howard University and a law degree from University of California, Hastings. By the time Harris began dating Brown, she had been a prosecutor for several years.

Brown was California State Assembly speaker around the time he and Harris dated, and he appointed her during that time to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the former California Medical Assistance Commission.

In a 2019 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle — headlined, "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" — Brown acknowledged his appointment may have influenced her career, but he did not differentiate it from ways his actions may have affected other politicians’ careers.

"I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker," Brown said in the op-ed. "I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians." (Pelosi is no longer speaker of the U.S. House and Feinstein has since died.)

Harris went on to beat an incumbent for San Francisco district attorney in a 2003 election with 53% of the vote. She retained the seat with 98% of the vote in another election four years later, running unopposed. And she went on to win subsequent elections for California attorney general and U.S. Senate. Her political career, in all, spans 21 years.

"Imprisoned over 2,000" Black people for minor drug charges

We’ve previously written about Harris’ prosecutorial history. So have other fact-checkers. In 2020, for example, Agence France-Presse tackled a similar claim that Harris had jailed 1,500 Black men for marijuana charges. 

Admissions to California state prisons for marijuana and hashish admissions when Harris was California’s state attorney general from 2011 through 2016 is higher than 1,500, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation data: 1,974 during that period. But that figure is for all inmates, not just Black men, Agence France-Presse reported, noting that it had reached out to the corrections and rehabilitation department seeking more detailed statistics only to learn there was no breakdown for marijuana offense admissions by ethnicity and gender. 

USA Today recently reported that Harris has advocated for decriminalizing marijana, but her previous positions on the issue were tougher, leading to criticism that she aggressively prosecuted such suspected drug crimes when she was California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney.  

During the Democratic presidential debate in 2019, then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, attacked Harris for putting more than "1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations."

CBS News fact-checked the claim, noting that, as attorney general, Harris wouldn’t have personally prosecuted drug cases.

The Mercury News, fact-checking the same claim, reported that the attorney general’s office doesn’t directly prosecute most drug cases in the state.

"Descendant of Hamilton Brown, one of the largest slave owner/traders in Jamaican history"

In 2018, Harris’ father wrote in an essay, Reflections of a Jamaican Father,  that he is the descendant of Hamilton Brown, an Irish man who enslaved people in Jamaica through his paternal grandmother Christiana Brown. We found a user-created lineage on FamilySearch that seemingly connects Brown to the Harris family, but we couldn’t corroborate it with official records. FamilySearch is a free family tree database run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It’s important to note that anyone can edit the family trees on FamilySearch, even people who aren’t members of that family. A spokesperson for the service told PolitiFact when last we wrote about this that the community self-governs but recommended referring to original source documents before coming to any final conclusions.