Thread by @LauraPowellEsq

Kamala Harris was admitted to law school under a program for students “who have experienced major life hurdles, such as educational disadvantage, economic hardship, or disability.”

Kamala Harris’s mother came from the highest caste in India, but by moving to the U.S. and Canada, obtaining a prestigious degree, marrying a future Stanford professor, having a successful career as a cancer researcher, and sending her daughter to private schools, her daughter became unusually disadvantaged?

Strange how that works.

In 1992, three years after Kamala graduated from Hastings Law School (a public university), there was a controversy after the dean of the law school realized the extent of student group involvement in admissions to the program for disadvantaged students (called LEOP).

Students who claimed to be eligible for the LEOP because of some special hardship they suffered would have their claims of being disadvantaged verified via a phone call by members of the student organization associated with the applicant’s race. The phone interviews were used by some students to screen out conservative candidates—to avoid future “Clarence Thomases,” as one student explained.

This would have been the process in place when Kamala Harris applied to law school in 1986. According to her resume, she also served as President of the “Black Law Student’s [sic] Association,” so she likely participated in the process of selecting admittees to the LEOP program while she was a law student as well.

While the program was advertised as a class-based affirmative action program—which Kamala Harris wouldn’t have qualified for—in practice it was based on race and politics, during her time.

In 2004, Kamala's mother recounted to an LA Times reporter how she was taken aback when an educator didn't realize Kamala came from a privileged background.

h/t @CardioNP

Several people have mentioned Kamala Harris failed the bar exam the first time she took it. I couldn’t find statistics for 1989, the year she graduated, but a letter to the law school paper in early 1992 says while the overall passage rate for Hastings graduates was 80.2%, only 55% of LEOP students passed. This was a big improvement over the earlier years—in 1977, only 16% of diversity admittees passed on the first try.

I made the reference to caste because this is how Kamala’s own mother has their family’s position in India to a reporter in 2003:

“We are Brahmins, that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.”

I do not claim to have a nuanced understanding of the topic, but “high ranking,” “upper class,” and “top caste” are not phrases you would use to describe the family of someone from an underprivileged background.