Harris' Dad: Ancestors 'Must Be Turning in Their Grave'

He accuses her of perpetuating Jamaican stereotype
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 21, 2019 9:45 AM CST
Harris' Pot-Smoking Joke Not Sitting Well With Dad
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., attends a campaign event in Portsmouth, NH, on Monday.   (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

"Half my family's from Jamaica, are you kidding me?" Kamala Harris joked in an interview earlier this month while admitting she'd previously smoked pot and "inhaled." The 2020 Democratic candidate is now getting a tongue-lashing from an angry Jamaican: her own father. "Myself and my immediate Jamaican family ... wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty," Donald J. Harris says in an unsolicited statement sent to Jamaica Global Online, which previously published a family history essay by him.

The Stanford economics professor adds that his parents and grandmothers "must be turning in their grave right now to see their family's name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics." The campaign of the California senator, raised by her mother following her parents' divorce when she was young, had no comment, per Politico. (Harris is a focus of President Trump's campaign advisers.)

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