[ifinnegan]

““When I was growing up, Kwanzaa was a special time. Friends and family members would fill our home. We would listen to the elders tell stories and watch them light the candles on the kinara,” Harris said.

—

Yeah, her Canadian Indian family I’m sure did this. /s

[dfwgator]

““When I was growing up, Kwanzaa was a special time. Friends and family members would fill our home. We would listen to the elders tell stories and watch them light the candles on the kinara,”

While she was getting high listening to Tupac.

[PIF]

Hindu Indian family

[jjotto]

Kwanza is bigger in India and Jamaica, and apparently in Canada. Who knew?

[daniel1212]

"Yeah, her Canadian Indian family I’m sure did this. /s"

She was born in 1964 and the Swahili seven principles of Kwanzaa were developed in 1965, a year before Kwanzaa itself, thus her Indian family must have been very early adopters!

But for more research from WP, her father met his future wife Shyamala Gopalan, her mom, through the civil rights movement, and who introduced Harris and her younger sister to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang. As children, she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai) several times. She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant and whose progressive views on democracy and women's rights impressed her.

But Harris and her younger sister Maya lived in Berkeley, California, and was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley as part of Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation program, and which school became 40 percent Black after the desegregation plan went into effect.

Her parents divorced when she was seven. When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital. Harris attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, then F.A.C.E. School, and finally Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981. Harris has said life imprisonment without parole is a better and more cost-effective punishment than the death penalty, and has estimated that the resultant cost savings could pay for a thousand additional police officers in San Francisco alone.