Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to portray her upbringing as “middle class” and even working class — touting a summer job at McDonald’s and claiming to be from Oakland, a blue-collar city with a large black population.
For example, during a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harris said, “I grew up a child of a mother who worked very hard. She raised me and my sister and she saved up. And by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy a home.”
On September 13, she posted on X, “Let me be clear: I will always put the middle class and working families first. I know where I came from.”
When asked during the presidential debate if Americans were better off than they were four years ago, she responded, “I was raised a middle-class kid.”
However, a close look at her childhood shows that Harris and her younger sister grew up with many opportunities that many “middle class” children do not have, such as living abroad, private school education, and growing up in some of the wealthiest locales in the world.