These five tumultuous years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris

From the article:

Indeed, one of the most profound events in Harris’s early life, by her own account, came in Montreal when a high school friend confided that she was being molested. Harris insisted that Wanda Kagan move into her home, and later said the incident led her to become a prosecutor.

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Her parents divorced in 1971, and six years later, her mother announced that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, would move with her to Montreal. Harris wrote in her memoir that the thought of moving in the middle of the school year “to a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was distressing, to say the least.” In Harris’s telling, her mother could not pass up a “unique opportunity” to teach at McGill University and conduct research at Jewish General Hospital.

The reason for the sudden departure went deeper, however, according to her mother’s close friend and fellow scientist Mina Bissell.

In effect, Bissell said, “she got fired” from the Berkeley position in a clash with a male chauvinist supervisor over credit for her research. Bissell stressed that it had nothing to do with the quality of her work. Rather, the supervisor thought the research “was important enough that he would give the job to himself rather than to Shyamala. So he fired her.” The supervisor and Shyamala are both deceased.

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Shyamala Harris found sanctuary at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, which had been created in the 1930s after doctors went on strike elsewhere over the hiring of a Jewish intern. Shyamala would probably have faced sexist and racist blowback at other hospitals, where the view would have been “What is this Indian woman doing here?” said Michael Pollak, a doctor who collaborated with her at Jewish General, which emphasized diverse hiring. “It was hyper-accepting. And she wanted to do her cancer research more than she wanted to pick a battle. She was strategic. Her battle was with cancer.”

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Most of the violence had ebbed by the time the Harris family moved in, but a political earthquake had just struck when the party of the French-speaking majority won the 1976 election. The Parti Québécois soon passed the Charter of the French Language, which made French the official language of business and signage, and enacted measures designed to restrict the ability of students to attend English-speaking schools.

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Harris was already homesick for California, and “it was made worse when my mother told us that she wanted us to learn the language, so she was enrolling us in a neighborhood school for native French speakers,” Harris wrote. The school, which she attended in early 1977, was called Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, for Our Lady of the Snows. Harris found it so difficult that she persuaded her mother to let her transfer to a school where she could learn in English — Fine Arts Core Education — for the 1977-78 academic year.

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As a result, Harris ended up at Westmount High in an area that one classmate described as “the Beverly Hills of Montreal,” with mansions and luxurious apartments on leafy thoroughfares. The school was undergoing de facto integration. When teacher David Bracegirdle had started a few years earlier, he’d watched as limousines pulled up and dropped off students at the mostly White school.

As Harris arrived, Black students, many from nearby Caribbean-dominated communities, were on the way to becoming about 40 percent of the roughly 1,000 students, making the school among the most diverse in Quebec, according to former students and teachers. Westmount was so crowded that some classes were held on the auditorium stage, according to Bracegirdle.

(This is the second she had the experience of attending a recently-integrated school. The first time was in Berkeley.)

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In May 1980, when Harris was in 10th grade, the province prepared to vote on whether Quebec should gain political sovereignty — giving it the right to enact its own laws — while retaining economic ties to Canada. The city was plastered with posters that said “Oui” or “Non,” with the vast majority of those in Westmount opposing the measure.

Derek Leebosh, a Westmount classmate, said the political wars would have played out before Harris.

“All of a sudden she was a minority within a minority within a minority,” Leebosh said. “You’re a Black minority within the English. The English is a minority community within Francophone Quebec, which is a minority in Anglophone North America. And during this period, language laws are being passed. It’s very emotional; there’s lots of demonstrations. That’s all going on in the background.”

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By the time Harris completed her years at Westmount, she had transformed from the reserved Californian into one of the school’s more outgoing personalities, remembered for greeting anyone who walked by.

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Harris later wrote that there was no question she wanted to return to the United States for college. She left Quebec and headed to Howard University […]