On a sunny day in January 2019, some 20,000 massed around Oakland City Hall, eagerly waiting to watch Kamala Harris announce her run for U.S. president.
“Oakland, are we proud that we are Kamala Harris’ hometown?” called out then-Mayor Libby Schaaf, introducing the candidate from the podium. Applause erupted. “She has got Oakland’s progressive values and a vision of inclusion.”
The celebration raised some eyebrows in Berkeley, the neighboring city where Harris actually lived and went to school as a child.
Harris was born at Kaiser hospital in Oakland but spent the beginning of her life in the smaller city to the north, where her parents met as graduate students and Civil Rights Movement activists. After a short stint in the Midwest, Harris returned to Berkeley for elementary school. She left again at age 12 for Montreal. She lived in Oakland later, as a young adult and prosecutor starting her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
Harris wrote extensively about her early years in Berkeley in her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold. And she’s spoken often about her experience as a first grader participating in Berkeley Unified’s landmark school integration experiment in the late 1960s. But during her short-lived 2019 primary campaign, she associated herself more with Oakland.
This time around, Harris seems to be taking a different tack, not focusing on either city. Thrust into the candidacy four months before the election, Harris didn’t have much time to plan out how she would tell her story this time around. And her first campaign rally was in Wisconsin, not California.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when her childhood home on Bancroft Way appeared on the screen, its location was labeled “East Bay,” not “Berkeley.” Harris’ upbringing was frequently recounted during the jam-packed four-day affair, but the name Berkeley was mentioned only once. Oakland was uttered five times — but just once onstage by the candidate, referencing her career, not her youth.
Like Harris, I was born in an Oakland hospital, grew up in Berkeley and live (or lived, in her case) in Oakland as an adult. While I’ve never considered myself “from” anywhere other than Berkeley, I don’t pretend to know how the vice president identifies and what she truly feels is her hometown. As with most people in the region, her life wasn’t confined within one city’s limits; she went to church and protests in Oakland.
And as a Black and South Asian girl growing up in redlined Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, Harris’ experience was undoubtedly different in many ways than mine was as a white child in the 90s and 2000s.
Litigating where Harris is from is not really the point, anyway. And when I tried to do that on X a few weeks ago, many people were unhappy about it, reading a lot more into my fact-checking than I’d intended it to say. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I know well, people from both Berkeley and Oakland are fiercely (and righteously!) proud of our respective hometowns. A presidential candidate who’s from here, and possibly the first Black female president at that, means a lot to people who support her.
But we can learn something about our political climate — and how Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco figure into national narratives around big issues confronting our society — by looking at how candidates talk about their backgrounds.
Harris has at times embraced one of these cities over the other, linking her life story and reputation to the values of Oakland or what Berkeley instilled in her. And others have tied her to San Francisco’s political culture, for good or for ill. Most recently, Harris seems to be deliberately toning down the Oakland and Berkeley talk altogether. There are likely a number of strategic reasons why.
Bringing the East Bay to a broader audience
“Kamala Harris’ story begins in a middle-class neighborhood in the East Bay,” the video blared at the DNC this month.
When the nominee took the stage in Chicago, she repeated a version of the sound bite.
“Before she could afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay,” Harris said of her mother. “In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands — we lived in the flats. A beautiful, working-class neighborhood.”
Four years earlier at the 2020 DNC, however, she had described being pushed in a stroller at protests on “the streets of Oakland and Berkeley.”
“At the convention, Harris needed to introduce herself as a three dimensional person to voters newly tuning into this race,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political communications strategist for progressives. “At the same time, she needed to make herself relatable to Americans across places, in the face of tired right-wing attacks about our corner of the country.”
Painting with a broad Bay Area brush could be her attempt to connect with a wider audience. Notably, Harris in her DNC speech also mentioned her time in Illinois and Wisconsin, even though she rarely brings up her Midwestern years when talking about her childhood.
But both of those locations happen to be swing states, and she was speaking from a podium in Chicago, pointed out Shenker-Osorio. Harris was telling voters that she “gets Americans across places, backgrounds, races and genders,” she said.
Harris inevitably had a different strategy during her 2020 run than in this election, said Jim Ross, a Bay Area political consultant. The first time, she was running in a Democratic primary, trying to appeal to progressives. It was a safer bet to link herself directly with Oakland or Berkeley, considered liberal bastions. In a general election, “she’s talking to a broader audience of voters, who are much more moderate,” Ross said.
The old photos and housing in Harris’ West Berkeley stomping grounds — like the pictures shown at the convention — could look to national voters like a “typical middle-class upbringing and neighborhood,” Ross said. Or at least that’s what the campaign is likely aiming for. That desire could have also played into her decision to launch in Oakland in 2019.
Whereas Berkeley in the 1960s is associated with “the Free Speech Movement and the ‘Bezerkeley’ thing” — radical, pot-smoking hippies — Oakland “is kind of a tough, blue-collar city, which I think she wanted to embrace,” Ross said.
Harris has undoubtedly given thought to these associations. In her memoir, she writes that strategists thought she’d lose the 2015 race for California attorney general because of her ties to “wacky San Francisco.” Harris worked in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was elected DA in 2004, serving until 2010.
Harris faces extra pressure to demonstrate her relatability, according to Shenker-Osorio.
“Women, and especially women of color, have to prove they get ‘everyday Americans,’” she said.
Growing up immersed in Black pride in Berkeley and Oakland
In her memoir, Harris writes in detail about her childhood in Berkeley, where she and her sister were enfolded into their parents’ community of intellectuals and activists. Harris listened to them and their close friends passionately discuss politics and literature in a living room on Harmon Street. And her mother brought them weekly to the Rainbow Sign, a Berkeley Black cultural institution on Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way) that drew the likes of Maya Angelou and Nina Simone.
Harris writes that she lived on the “boundary between Oakland and Berkeley.” By no stretch of the imagination was her Bancroft apartment geographically close to the border; it’s directly west of downtown. But it may have felt like that as a child, getting whisked to protests in Oakland and living a couple of blocks away from a Black Panthers free breakfast program location. “We would see Huey [Newton] all the time,” friend Carole Porter told ABC.
West and South Berkeley had far more Black residents and working- and middle-class families at the time. Decades later, Berkeley’s Black population would steadily decline as families moved away or were priced out of the city. Living in a segregated neighborhood, Harris might have felt less of a kinship with the rest of Berkeley — though she was famously bused to North Berkeley for school.
“The Bay Area was home to so many extraordinary black leaders and was bursting with black pride in some places,” Harris wrote.
Dorothy Lazard, author and former director of the Oakland History Center, grew up in Oakland around the same time as Harris. For Lazard, the city was her entire world. She rarely even left East Oakland when she lived there — and back then, it had a thriving business district.
But for many people living in Berkeley or Oakland at the time, there was a “sieve-like border,” Lazard said. For Harris, “I would imagine growing up in that milieu of intellectuals and activists, she was probably back and forth.” At UC Berkeley, for example, her parents were part of a landmark Black study group, the Afro American Association. Among its members was Oakland community college student Huey Newton, who’d soon co-found the Black Panther Party.
Regardless, “I feel like Oakland can absolutely claim anyone who was born within its borders, no matter how much or little time she spent here,” said Lazard, who was so moved to see local representation at the DNC that she cried throughout the week while watching it.
Harris writes that her mother bought a house in Oakland when Harris was in high school in Canada, the first home her family owned. Later, when she worked in the Alameda County DA’s office, she bought her own condo in Oakland by the lake, according to the SF Standard.
Berkeley and Oakland, political boogeymen of the right
Harris chose to open her memoir with a scene from inside Oakland’s René Davidson Courthouse, a landmark of the criminal justice system and protests on the shore of Lake Merritt. During her 2020 run, she seemed to focus on defending her decision to become a prosecutor to wary progressives, trying to prove her liberal bonafides. For some Democratic voters, particularly many in communities of color, prosecutors are seen as agents of a system founded on racial injustice, with a history of over-policing in their neighborhoods.
“I have spent almost every day since working, in some way or another, on reforming the criminal justice system,” Harris wrote about her election as San Francisco district attorney. “The courthouse was supposed to be the epicenter of justice; but it was often a great epicenter of injustice.” Some progressive in the Bay Area, however, felt her record revealed a much more conservative bent.
In 2024, a lot has changed. As the right tries to paint Harris as a “weak-on-crime liberal,” she’s been more keen to boast about her days as the DA. After all, she’s running against a convicted felon.
When Harris became the nominee, many in the Bay Area braced for a skewering of our cities by the Trump campaign and right-wing media.
“The primary thrust of their critiques is that California is a crime-ridden, immigrant-infested, over-taxed dystopia being overrun by homeless hordes and drag queens… and, obviously, the Bay Area is the belly of this unholy beast,” wrote East Bay historian Liam O’Donoghue in July. Oakland has long been the subject of negative press, and its national — and international — image has especially taken a hit over the past year or two.
Some of these fears have come true. But Ross, the political strategist, said Republicans still seem to largely be “lurching” for the right line of attack.
“I don’t think they’ve figured out exactly how to message against her yet,” he said. Trump has claimed Harris destroyed San Francisco, saying it used to be a wonderful city 15 years ago. “Of course, that’s exactly when Kamala was the DA in San Francisco!” said Ross.
“One of the problems you have,” he continued, “is, can you really be blamed for the conditions of a place you grew up in?”
If Harris wins the election, Lazard said she hopes the new president might take steps to support the cities she from — and share some good stories about us, perhaps. She’s hopeful that Oakland representation in the White House will also inspire more people at home to get involved in their communities and leadership, and work to make their city “a great place to live for a greater number of people.”
