evidence: "Who is Kamala Harris?" Caroline Wanga, the CEO and president of Essence Ventures asked, as she began a "Chief to Chief" conversation, the live version of an interview published each month in Essence, the Black women’s magazine. The conversations are supposed to illuminate what makes the subjects human, their struggles and lessons learned, the moments of victory and defeat and what distinguishes Black women who lead. [...] Born in October 1964, Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother who met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The Harrises were committed civil rights activists during a time of radical political thought and activity and also, respectively, an economist and a breast cancer researcher. Harris was a toddler when Donald Harris’s academic career forced the family to decamp to Illinois, where Harris’s younger sister, Maya, was born. When Harris’s parents split up in the early 1970s, Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, moved Kamala and Maya back to Berkeley. The girls were raised with direct engagement with two cultures and a firm grounding in the realities of race in the United States. There were trips to an area Hindu temple, and lots of south Indian food which, with a few spice changes, Gopalan would often make into soul food.