Now that she is running for president in a political moment when victimhood is currency, Vice President Kamala Harris paints herself as being brought up on the “streets” — complete with fake accents as part of her bit.
However, unfortunately for that narrative, the politics editor at Breitbart News (me) happens to have grown up in the same neighborhood Harris lived in from when she was 12 to 18 and can report that calling herself “middle class” is definitely a stretch.
On Labor Day, Harris put on one of her myriad fake dialects to address a working-class crowd in Detroit, Michigan.
However, it is virtually impossible for Harris to have organically adopted that accent — or “code switch,” as the propagandists at the Associated Press refer to it — given that not only did she not grow up anywhere near the working class, she actually grew up in one of the most upscale enclaves in Canada, a commonwealth nation with distinctly non-American English.
When Harris was 12, she left Berkeley after her mother was hired to work with McGill University, doing breast cancer research at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital — the hospital in which I was born. Local doctors described her mother as a “pioneer.”
The neighborhood Harris grew up in is called Westmount, a majority-English neighborhood in the French province of Quebec.
She would have definitely experienced segregation living there but not the kind she has claimed in the last few years to have lived through in her bizarre, obviously mostly-made-up origin story in which she claims to have been of a modest background and somehow had some sort of involvement with the civil rights movement.
Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart News
There is no racial hostility in Montreal. Some racial political discourse has been imported from America in more recent years, but that would not really be a part of the cultural awareness or experience of someone who stopped living there before 2020.
Montreal is actually a “melting pot” in terms of racial and ethnic diversity and has always had a unique ability to accept immigrants of all backgrounds, races, and religions while maintaining its French culture due to a series of language and culture laws it began implementing in the 1970s.
In a story about Harris’s roots and personal experience, the only segregation she would have experienced would be economic segregation, as Montreal is the most economically segregated city in Canada, according to a study from the University of Toronto.
And, in that city, Harris grew up in the poshest neighborhood, which, at the time she lived there, was not only the nicest neighborhood in Montreal but was the richest one in all of Canada — far from the struggle of the “streets” Harris now purports to have been down with.
According to an op-ed that her best friend from her time at Westmount High School penned, Harris lived with her mother and sister Maya on Grosvenor Avenue in a Victorian home. As her friend explains, Harris enjoyed “family dinners and a stable life.”
This is the street Harris grew up on. These homes list for, minimum, more than $1-2 million CAD (~$750,000-$1.5 million USD):
Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart News
That tracks with most people’s lifestyles in that neighborhood. It is one of the luckiest places someone could live. Harris implying that it is the “streets” is an ironic joke many who grow up there make.
This is the main street crossing through the middle of the neighborhood, an avenue that bears the same name:
This is the street, Redfern Ave., that Harris’s high school is on the corner of:
Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart News
This is the library at the edge of Westmount Park, where she could have studied or borrowed books and would have walked by to get to and from home and school each day:
Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart News
This is where Harris would have spent time and where many or most of her classmates lived:
Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart News
Harris has contrived a persona and has heralded policies based on what is politically convenient at any given moment to exploit opportunities for herself to get ahead, and it has kind of worked (so far). Extremely fortunately for her, she has found herself running for president in a moment when the media and elites are at their absolute dumbest and laziest, won’t bother to analyze policy, and, instead, sum up a candidate’s entire identity and worldview solely on physical traits, like race. So, she takes advantage of this moment — using her race as some sort of tool to give the opposite impression of the immense privilege (as you can see) she really comes from and deflecting from her lack of connection to or solutions for the real working class.
There is nothing wrong with being from this neighborhood, as you can see. It is beautiful. The people are happy. It is safe and a wonderful place to grow up. However, Harris’s “lower-middle class” pandering bit does not work.
Time for a new bit.
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her at ejmorris@breitbart.com or follow her on Twitter.