US VP Kamala Harris, daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, meets island’s leader

US Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose father emigrated from Jamaica, met the island nation’s prime minister on Wednesday at the White House, marking another historic moment for the first Black and Asian-American vice-president.

The meeting marked the first time since 1995 that a Jamaican leader has visited the White House.

Harris, in brief remarks during a photo opportunity with reporters, noted her Jamaican descent and trips to the island in her childhood as she welcomed Andrew Holness.

“We are acutely aware of the interconnection and interdependence between the United States and Jamaica,” Harris said, adding that she shared a “history with millions of Americans who have their roots through the generations in Jamaica”.

Holness said that Harris has been “a source of inspiration and great triumph for many in the Caribbean, in particular our young women in the region”.

Harris has had little known contact in recent years with her father, an 83-year-old Jamaican-born economist named Donald J. Harris, who was divorced from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, when she was a young girl. He criticised Harris publicly in 2019 when she made a joke about her heritage playing a role in her smoking pot when she was in college.

Harris does not mention Jamaica often in public but visited relatives there as a child. Harris wrote in her memoir that her late mother, who was born in India, raised her and her sister, Maya, as “black girls”, with the understanding that they would be viewed that way in the US.

Though her strained family relations have complicated Harris’ connection with her father’s homeland, her ascension to the vice-presidency has been greeted with pride in Jamaica, a Caribbean nation of about 3 million people with strong cultural and economic ties to the US.