Photo Essay — Kamala Harris’s ‘Middle-Class’ Upbringing in Westmount, Canada
by Emma-Jo Morris
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.