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Uncommon

I know many of you Millennials and those born in a time when kissin’ and lovin’ and baby-makin’ (if that’s on your radar) with people of whatever color or ethnicity you choose may not think it a big deal that a Jamaican man married a woman from southern India, and had two daughters, Kamala and Maya.

But in 1962, when these two met? Yeah, a very big deal.

https://www.nytimes.com/…/13/us/kamala-harris-parents.html

For her mother to be away from family, in the US, studying at UC Berkeley — science, no less — in the early ’60s! A brave and intrepid soul, for sure.

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Says Harris’s father of his soon-to-be-wife, “She was a tiny Indian scientist wearing a sari and sandals — the only other foreign student to show up for a talk on race in America. She was, he recalled, ‘a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men and women.’ ”

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And later in the article —

“Members of the study group that drew them together in 1962, known as the Afro American Association, *would help build the discipline of Black studies, introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and establish the Black Panther Party.*”

**

Berkeley, folks, in the ’60s was no joke. It was a hotbed of political activity and cultural revolution, Great Awakening style.

 

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