Kamala Harris Is Not From Oakland

The other stolen valor

Oakland, this afternoon

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon driving around Oakland, documenting the blight: tent encampments, street prostitutes, a gully filled with wrecked cars, rows of decaying RVs walling off public sidewalks clogged with four-foot piles of garbage. The city has fallen into such a state of dysfunction that it’s a political liability for Governor Gavin Newsom’s presidential aspirations, which is why he has put Oakland’s criminal justice system into a state of quasi-receivership.

From this perspective, it’s bizarre that Kamala Harris has associated her brand so closely with this town. But of course, it’s obvious why she has.

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland but raised in Berkeley, which is where I grew up. The fact that she was born in Oakland is all but meaningless. If your parents were living in Berkeley when you were born, as Harris’ were, there were, and are, two hospitals with Labor & Delivery units a short drive away: Berkeley’s Alta Bates Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland facility. If your parents’ employers offered them health care coverage through Kaiser’s HMO, Kaiser is where they’d deliver you. If not, they’d probably go to Alta Bates. Half of my friends growing up were born at Kaiser Oakland; I was born at Alta Bates. Nobody claimed to be “from Oakland” because they were born at Kaiser. We were all just Berkeley kids.

Harris was a Berkeley kid, too. She grew up in West Berkeley — “the flatlands” — which, at that time, was largely working-class and racially diverse, with a big black population and lots of immigrants. She was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, near where I grew up, in the bougie part of town. Her parents were struggling graduate students — not exactly coal miners, but not investment bankers, either. If Harris wants to boast about her humble origins, she’s entitled to. It’s not dishonest.

But she’s not “a girl from Oakland, California,” as her running mate describes her, and as John McWhorter, Senator Alex Padilla, and the Golden State Warriors seem to believe. This is not a matter of opinion; like anywhere else, Berkeley and Oakland have city boundaries, and you’re either in one or you’re in the other. Sure, from ground level, the two merge seamlessly into each other, like any neighboring cities do. But that doesn’t make it a question of personal preference. Imagine being from Yonkers and calling yourself “a daughter of the Bronx.” Geographically, you’re in the ballpark, but we all see what you’re doing there.

Berkeley and Oakland might be right next to each other, but as cultural signifiers, they’re a world apart. Oakland evokes the rough-and-tumble imagery of other historically blue collar “chocolate cities” like Detroit, Baltimore, or St. Louis. Berkeley brings to mind other fancy, pointy-headed, bleeding heart college towns like Cambridge, Ithaca, and Ann Arbor.

After decades of conservative lampooning of just such places as “bastions” of “latte-sipping liberals” and “tenured radicals,” there’s nothing worse for a liberal Democratic politician running for national office than to be saddled with that association. Oakland, by contrast, is like the urban, liberal equivalent of a West Virginia holler: it bestows a politician with instant street credibility. This is, obviously, why Harris keeps invoking it.

To be fair, later in life, after living in Montreal, Harris worked at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. During that time, she lived in Oakland. But that no more makes her a “daughter of Oakland” than my living in Brooklyn and Manhattan for a few years after college makes me a “New Yorker.” Other places Harris has lived include Urbana and Evanston, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin. If that’s news to you, it’s because she never talks about them, just like she never talks about Montreal, where she lived the most formative years of her life: high school. Aside from Wisconsin being a swing state, these places do her no obvious political favors. Oakland does.

Oakland is a disaster, but Harris never held an elected office that bestowed her with responsibility for its condition, so unlike the governor, it isn’t a political liability for her. She can leverage its cultural authenticity without associating her career with the shit hole it has become. It’s a very convenient situation: she can be unburdened by what it is. And thanks to a pliant media, her public image is likewise unburdened by what she is: a girl from Berkeley.

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Update: It appears that Harris’ mother did live in Oakland briefly in the 1980s. But by then Kamala was 20 years old and attending college in Montreal (before transferring to Howard). So it makes no difference to my argument.