Kamala Harris's claim to be raised a 'middle class kid' includes private schools, lavish trips abroad

WASHINGTON, DC - Just a “middle-class” upbringing, right Kamala? 

Kamala Harris has repeatedly asserted her 'middle-class' upbringing, a claim that is contradicted by the facts. She has stated that she worked at McDonald's during a summer, a claim that lacks any supporting evidence. She also presents herself as hailing from Oakland, California, a 'blue collar' community with a large minority population, which is not entirely accurate. 

In a recent foot massage interview by billionaire Oprah Winfrey, Harris told Winfrey and the audience, “I grew up a child of a mother who worked very hard. She raised me and my sister, and she save up. And by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy a home.” Harris suspiciously gives the impression she grew up in a single-mother household. All of that is a lie, according to Breitbart News.

 Harris has continued the ruse, writing in a September 13 post on X, “Let me be clear; I will always put the middle class and working families first. I know where I came from.” 

Breitbart reports that Harris’s upbringing does not have the hallmarks of coming from a middle-class family. A closer look shows that she and her sister had many opportunities that middle-class families cannot avail themselves of. Among those were living abroad, going to private school, and living in some of the toniest locations in the world. 

Harris claims to be “a daughter of Oakland, California,” which is true to the point that she was born at the Kaiser Hospital in that city. However, her parents, who were attending graduate school, lived in Berkeley, a primarily white, liberal city in the Bay Area home to the far-left UC Berkeley, considered one of the top universities worldwide. It is NOT Oakland. 

Her “working mother,” whose father was an Indian diplomat, met her father as graduate student. In fact, her father, writing in The Diaspora, said that Kamala Harris “was born” in Berkeley. 

According to The New York Times, it wasn’t until Harris set her sights on statewide office in California that she began “downplaying her Berkeley roots.” 

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, a “San Francisco liberal.” 

The Times report said, “She [Harris] 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.” 

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

During a presidential debate in 2019, Harris blasted her then-opponent, Joe Biden, by claiming she was bused to an elementary school in North Berkeley as part of an integration program, leaving the impression that she had a disadvantaged background. Harris, however, attended a private school before participating in the busing program. Not too many “middle-class kids” attend private schools. 

According to The Berkeleyside, when Harris was growing up, she lived only a few blocks away from UC Berkeley. The family eventually relocated to another apartment, nowhere near the border with Oakland and again close to UC Berkeley. 

USA Today reported that in 1966, Harris and her family settled in Urbana, Illinois, after her father got a teaching job at the University of Illinois. The next year, they moved to Evanston, Illinois, after her father got a position at Northwestern University. Finally, in 1968, they relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, where her father taught and her mother was a researcher at the University of Wisconsin. Harris’s father said between gigs in Illinois and Wisconsin, he taught at Cambridge University in England. You know, typical “middle-class kid.” 

When she was five, Harris’s parents separated, and she, her mother, and her sister moved back to Berkeley, where her mother conducted cancer research at UC Berkeley. Her father stayed in Madison until 1972 when he relocated to Connecticut and taught at Yale. He later moved back to California, where he taught at Stanford. Yale and Stanford are two of the country’s most prestigious private universities. 

Harris prominently features a yellow apartment building at 1227 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, in her political campaigns. However, contrary to her claims that it was “near the border” with Oakland, as The Oaklandside reported, it was nowhere near that boundary. 

Harris painted her 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 waxed poetic about how her “single mother” struggled to raise her and her sister, claiming she relied on neighbors to help. 

“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 wrote in her memoir. 

Harris omits the fact that her neighbor ran a daycare center where she and her sister would go after school, a convenience not often afforded to working mothers, especially those in the “middle class.” 

Harris attended kindergarten at Berkwood School, a private institution whose current tuition is $29,800/year, according to The Berkeleyside, citing the school’s website. 

Harris also attended private ballet lessons from a Russian ballerina named Madame Bovie at her North Berkeley studio. 

As part of her “middle-class” upbringing, Harris and her sister would spend weekends and summers with their father in Palo Alto–a wealthy and tony city known as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley " and with a reputation as one of the richest and most exclusive zip codes in the US, according to USA Today and The Berkeleyside. 

Part of her “middle-class” upbringing also saw “frequent visits” to Jamaica, where her father was born, the son of “privileged” slaveowners. They would also take trips to India to visit her mother’s family. A “typical” middle-class family. 

Despite Harris downplaying the role her father played in her upbringing while up playing the role her mother played in her upbringing, according to San Francisco Gate's interview with historian Charles Wollenberg, Harris’s mother appeared to deliberately immerse Harris and her sister in black culture. 

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,” Wollenberg told the outlet. 

The Oaklandside reported that Harris and her sister grew up listening to friends of their parents, who came from the radical world of academia, where they would discuss politics and literature, as Harris wrote in her memoir. 

When Harris was twelve, her mother got a job in Montreal, Canada, teaching at McGill University, one of Canada’s most prominent universities. According to Breitbart's Deputy Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris, Harris lived in one of the “most upscale neighborhoods” in Montreal, where homes worth over a million dollars were standard. She also wrote that there was no racial hostility in Montreal. 

She spent six years in Canada, attending a French-language primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, located in a “beautiful neighborhood,” according to its website. She then attended an alternative public school near the McGill University campus. Finally, she attended and graduated from Westmount High School, one of the top public high schools in Montreal. She was a typical “middle-class kid.” 

Harris claimed her mother saved “many years” to purchase a home, which she described as a “one-level, dark gray house on a cul-de-sac with a shingled roof.” She left out a couple of important details, however. The house was in the hills by a golf course in one of the wealthiest areas of Oakland. According to Redfin, that home is worth just under one million dollars. 

After graduating from high school, Harris attended Vanier College in Canada before enrolling at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1982. A friend of Harris said she enrolled at Howard because she “fell in” with some friends who were also attending 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,” her friend, Derrick Johnson, told the New Yorker. 

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

As one way to claim her “middle-class” bonafides, Harris claimed in a 2019 campaign rally that she has worked at a McDonald’s between her freshman and sophomore years at Howard, with the Associated Press saying was to “show an understanding of middle-class struggles.” 

The Harris campaign explained earlier this year that the job was to help pay her way through college; however, they later admitted it was for “extra spending money,” according to Politico. Harris has never provided evidence that she ever worked at McDonald’s, however. They later claimed she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California. Alameda has two such restaurants–one near a state park and another across from a beach. The campaign didn’t respond to a request from Breitbart to specify which one she allegedly worked at. 

It is also curious why she would work at a McDonald's in Alameda since there are others much closer to her mother’s home in the Oakland hills. While the campaign claimed she worked at McDonald’s to earn extra spending money, her family was quite well off—so well off that she attended law school at UC Hastings in San Francisco after graduating from Howard. 

In a Politico profile, they wrote that Harris took part in a program for “disadvantaged communities,” the Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP). Since her parents worked as professors at top universities at the time, it is unknown how Harris was considered “disadvantaged.” 

After graduating, she began working as Alameda County deputy district attorney when she was 25. 

According to a 1994 Los Angeles Times report, Harris purchased a condo in Oakland overlooking Lake Merritt for $116,000 in 1993 when she was 29 years old. That was also when she began dating a married man, California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, 31 years her senior. 

Brown lavished Harris with gifts over the next several years and appointed her to several high-paying positions on the taxpayers’ dole. The New York Post reported that he bought her a BMW, paid for a trip to Paris, and took her to the Academy Awards. 

Despite her public personal as being the recipient of privilege, Harris began her campaign for district attorney, giving the impression that it was a facade. According to The New Yorker:

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.” 

As Harris started to climb up the political ladder, her claims to be from Oakland began to take hold, attempting to hide her upbringing as a child of privilege and giving the facade that she grew up “middle class.’ As The Times reported, Harris appeared to make a deliberate attempt to remove Berkeley from her background: 

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).” 

To continue the facade, Harris announced her failed 2020 presidential campaign 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 Times wrote. “Her very first words were: ‘I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.’” 

Yup, just like “Scranton Joe,” we have “Oakland Kamala.”