The vice president has virtually erased Berkeley, Calif., her hometown, from her campaign biography. The residents of “the People’s Republic” say they get it.
High above an arena packed with Democratic delegates in Chicago last week, a video introduced the life story of Kamala Harris to the world.
“Behind me is where it all began,” said her childhood friend, Stacey Johnson-Batiste, standing in front of a charming yellow, two-story home where Ms. Harris grew up in a small apartment above a nursery school.
But where was that exactly? The screen simply read “East Bay,” as in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area that sprawls over 1,400 square miles and is home to nearly three million people. Ms. Harris called the area just “the bay” in her speech on Thursday night. Other speakers throughout the week referred to Ms. Harris as hailing from Oakland, the East Bay’s largest city.
The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif.
That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron.
The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days.
“Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!” said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. “We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.”
In other words, maybe not a great way to lure the country’s middle-of-the-road voters to the Democratic ticket.
Ms. Harris began downplaying her Berkeley roots years ago when she first prepared to run for statewide office in California. 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.”
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign said the campaign had no comment.
Ms. Harris is hardly the first politician to be selective about her biography; leaning into key events or places to match a political message is a timeworn tradition. George H.W. Bush hyped his Texas background, though he had grown up in Connecticut, and Al Gore touted his roots in Tennessee and not his childhood home: the Fairfax hotel in Washington, D.C. For Ms. Harris, whose family moved frequently, the matter is less about inaccuracy than emphasis and omission.
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.
Her birth certificate lists an apartment building near the University of California, Berkeley campus, where her parents were pursuing Ph.D.s. It sat just a half-block south of People’s Park, the campus land taken over by activists in 1969, just a few years after the Harris family moved out of the building.
When Ms. Harris was a toddler, her family moved to the Midwest where her father, Donald Harris, taught briefly at universities in Illinois and Wisconsin. After her parents split up, Ms. Harris returned to Berkeley when she was 5, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and her sister, Maya, and eventually settled into the little yellow house in the “flatlands,” then a working-class part of the city with a large population of Black families.
Ms. Harris’s mother was steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland. Ms. Harris attended Berkeley public schools and was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in a more upscale neighborhood in the hills of north Berkeley as part of a voluntary program to integrate schools.
Ms. Harris moved to Montreal when she was 12 and to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University, returning to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland. She settled in the area as an adult.
(Montreal fared even worse than Berkeley at the convention. The city’s name was completely excised from Ms. Harris’s retelling of her childhood, while Berkeley was mentioned just once, by Oprah Winfrey.)
The vice president’s shifting descriptors of her hometown have been noticed by local people clued into associations with each place: Berkeley (radical lefty and weird), Oakland (working-class and a hub of Black politics) and the East Bay (could be anything, really).
“I’d be willing to bet a lot the reason they’re not saying Berkeley is just because of the stereotype,” said Charles Wollenberg, a historian who has written a history of Berkeley. He added that he did not think the amorphous term “East Bay” was an ideal substitute. It could apply to dense, diverse cities or roomy suburbs.
“Even if you knew what the East Bay was,” he said, “it could be Oakland or Walnut Creek.”
Ms. Harris has, at times, done her part to puncture those stereotypes. In her 2019 memoir, she described Berkeley, now home to about 120,000 people, as far more complex and multilayered than its national reputation. Her neighborhood, she wrote, was filled with “working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another.”
And she wrote about the Rainbow Sign, a Black arts and cultural center in Berkeley where she was exposed to a lively mix of poetry, art and oratory and learned that “artistic expression, ambition and intelligence were cool.” The city back then was about a quarter Black and had just elected its first Black mayor. More recently, housing in the city, including in the once-working-class neighborhood where Ms. Harris grew up, has become so expensive as to price out many of the types of working families she wrote about.
But Berkeley’s role in her public story shrunk as her ambitions grew. 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.)
In the 2019 speech kicking off her first presidential run, Ms. Harris stood before a crowd of around 20,000 people in downtown Oakland. Her very first words were: “I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.”
Several former aides to Ms. Harris during her early career said they did not recall any discussion about the changes.
Not surprisingly, Berkeley and Oakland, both solidly Democratic cities, want to claim Ms. Harris as their own.
One of Ms. Harris’s longtime friends, the former Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, is delighted to see the vice president hype up Oakland, using East Bay lingo to say she is “hella proud of this daughter of Oakland.”
“We love that she claims Oakland,” she said. “Unapologetic warriors for justice, that’s the Oakland brand.”
Even as the mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguín, countered — “She’s a daughter of Berkeley!” — he was also self-aware.
“Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,” he said. “But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.”
Still, residents of Berkeley know their Harris landmarks.
High above an arena packed with Democratic delegates in Chicago last week, a video introduced the life story of Kamala Harris to the world.
“Behind me is where it all began,” said her childhood friend, Stacey Johnson-Batiste, standing in front of a charming yellow, two-story home where Ms. Harris grew up in a small apartment above a nursery school.
But where was that exactly? The screen simply read “East Bay,” as in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area that sprawls over 1,400 square miles and is home to nearly three million people. Ms. Harris called the area just “the bay” in her speech on Thursday night. Other speakers throughout the week referred to Ms. Harris as hailing from Oakland, the East Bay’s largest city.
The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif.
That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron.
The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days.
“Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!” said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. “We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.”
In other words, maybe not a great way to lure the country’s middle-of-the-road voters to the Democratic ticket.
Ms. Harris began downplaying her Berkeley roots years ago when she first prepared to run for statewide office in California. 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.”
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign said the campaign had no comment.
Ms. Harris is hardly the first politician to be selective about her biography; leaning into key events or places to match a political message is a timeworn tradition. George H.W. Bush hyped his Texas background, though he had grown up in Connecticut, and Al Gore touted his roots in Tennessee and not his childhood home: the Fairfax hotel in Washington, D.C. For Ms. Harris, whose family moved frequently, the matter is less about inaccuracy than emphasis and omission.
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.
Her birth certificate lists an apartment building near the University of California, Berkeley campus, where her parents were pursuing Ph.D.s. It sat just a half-block south of People’s Park, the campus land taken over by activists in 1969, just a few years after the Harris family moved out of the building.
When Ms. Harris was a toddler, her family moved to the Midwest where her father, Donald Harris, taught briefly at universities in Illinois and Wisconsin. After her parents split up, Ms. Harris returned to Berkeley when she was 5, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and her sister, Maya, and eventually settled into the little yellow house in the “flatlands,” then a working-class part of the city with a large population of Black families.
Ms. Harris’s mother was steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland. Ms. Harris attended Berkeley public schools and was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in a more upscale neighborhood in the hills of north Berkeley as part of a voluntary program to integrate schools.
Ms. Harris moved to Montreal when she was 12 and to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University, returning to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland. She settled in the area as an adult.
(Montreal fared even worse than Berkeley at the convention. The city’s name was completely excised from Ms. Harris’s retelling of her childhood, while Berkeley was mentioned just once, by Oprah Winfrey.)
The vice president’s shifting descriptors of her hometown have been noticed by local people clued into associations with each place: Berkeley (radical lefty and weird), Oakland (working-class and a hub of Black politics) and the East Bay (could be anything, really).
“I’d be willing to bet a lot the reason they’re not saying Berkeley is just because of the stereotype,” said Charles Wollenberg, a historian who has written a history of Berkeley. He added that he did not think the amorphous term “East Bay” was an ideal substitute. It could apply to dense, diverse cities or roomy suburbs.
“Even if you knew what the East Bay was,” he said, “it could be Oakland or Walnut Creek.”
Ms. Harris has, at times, done her part to puncture those stereotypes. In her 2019 memoir, she described Berkeley, now home to about 120,000 people, as far more complex and multilayered than its national reputation. Her neighborhood, she wrote, was filled with “working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another.”
And she wrote about the Rainbow Sign, a Black arts and cultural center in Berkeley where she was exposed to a lively mix of poetry, art and oratory and learned that “artistic expression, ambition and intelligence were cool.” The city back then was about a quarter Black and had just elected its first Black mayor. More recently, housing in the city, including in the once-working-class neighborhood where Ms. Harris grew up, has become so expensive as to price out many of the types of working families she wrote about.
But Berkeley’s role in her public story shrunk as her ambitions grew. 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.)
In the 2019 speech kicking off her first presidential run, Ms. Harris stood before a crowd of around 20,000 people in downtown Oakland. Her very first words were: “I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.”
Several former aides to Ms. Harris during her early career said they did not recall any discussion about the changes.
Not surprisingly, Berkeley and Oakland, both solidly Democratic cities, want to claim Ms. Harris as their own.
One of Ms. Harris’s longtime friends, the former Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, is delighted to see the vice president hype up Oakland, using East Bay lingo to say she is “hella proud of this daughter of Oakland.”
“We love that she claims Oakland,” she said. “Unapologetic warriors for justice, that’s the Oakland brand.”
Even as the mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguín, countered — “She’s a daughter of Berkeley!” — he was also self-aware.
“Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,” he said. “But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.”
Still, residents of Berkeley know their Harris landmarks.
