A viral social media post claims that Vice President Kamala Harris lied about being from Oakland, California. “Kamala — in a pathetic attempt at pandering — claims she came from ‘Oakland’ when she arrived at Howard University, and that all her friends were from Detroit,” the post says. “This is a total lie. Kamala came from the Canadian province of Quebec.”
The video shows Harris at a campaign stop in Detroit earlier this week. “When I got to Howard, when I went to college, coming from Oakland, my immediate fast friends were from Detroit,” Harris told the audience at Detroit’s Cred Cafe.
The post is misleading. While Harris did live in Quebec prior to enrolling at Howard in 1982, she was born in California and spent a plurality of her childhood there.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 1964 to Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, then international students who had moved to the area to pursue doctorate degrees at the nearby University of California, Berkeley.
Harris lived in the Berkeley area—which borders Oakland—until she was 2 years old. Between 1966 and 1970, Harris’ family spent brief periods in Illinois and Wisconsin after her father was hired for teaching roles at the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin.
Harris returned to the Berkeley area with her mother and sister after her parents separated in 1970. She remained in California—splitting time between her mother’s house in Berkeley and her father’s house in Palo Alto—until 1976, when her mother was hired at Jewish General Hospital and McGill University in Montreal.
Harris spent five years in Montreal between the ages of 12 and 17. She moved to Washington, D.C., in 1982 to attend college.
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