Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., admitted last week that she smoked marijuana in college and joked about her family’s Jamaican heritage, prompting her father, former Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris, to issue a statement condemning her remark.
When asked in an interview with “The Breakfast Club,” if she had ever smoked marijuana, Harris replied: "Half my family's from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?"
She later admitted to smoking a joint in college, saying she “did inhale,” in an apparent reference to former President Bill Clinton’s remarks about using marijuana.
Her father, in a statement to Jamaica Online News, decried his daughter's use of a “fraudulent stereotype… in the pursuit of identity politics.”
"My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, 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," Donald Harris said.
"Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty."
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