In late September 2024, numerous copy-and-pasted posts on several social media platforms attacked U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ declare that she grew up with a middle-class background by citing the very fact she spent her highschool years in a rich suburb of Montreal.
These posts typically contained photographs of at the very least one — if not all — of the next three mansions for example that time:
These photographs have been typically accompanied with some variation of this text:
KAMALA HARRIS – Grew up in Westmount Quebec, as she experiences a Center Class, Working Class Neighborhood.
The common dwelling gross sales worth in Westmount is $2,275,000, or $878/sqft. Once you purchase a house in Westmount, you possibly can count on to pay between $1,337,500 to $2,997,500.
Whereas it’s true that Harris lived in Westmount throughout her highschool years, none of those photographs depicts a house that Harris occupied. The pictures come from high-profile real estate listings or are of notable historic homes. Harris’ mom by no means owned property in Westmount.
As reported by The Washington Submit and other shops, Harris’ mom rented the higher flooring of a duplex on Grosvenor Avenue in Decrease Westmount, a location she picked to make sure her daughters may very well be educated on the English-speaking public highschool in that district.
On this story, Snopes explains the circumstances beneath which Harris grew up within the late Seventies and early Eighties and why her presence in Westmount doesn’t battle along with her descriptions of rising up middle-class.
What Was Harris Doing in Canada?
When Harris was 12 — in 1976 — she moved from Berkeley, California, to Montreal. Her mom, most cancers researcher Shyamala Gopalan, had taken a analysis place affiliated with McGill College there.
Harris first enrolled in a French-language college — a troublesome expertise, she described in her memoir. The subsequent 12 months, she enrolled in a bilingual, arts-focused college close to the McGill campus. After that, she attended the English-language Westmount Excessive College — one thing that required her mom’s residence within the space.
Harris arrived at Westmount Excessive at a time when each town and the college have been experiencing important political tumult attributable to new language legal guidelines. A lot of the English-speaking inhabitants left town, inflicting the closure of different excessive faculties to which the Harris household might need transferred, as described by The Washington Submit:
After years of deepening battle over the French-speaking majority’s therapy, a political occasion advocating political separation from Canada had lately taken energy. Tens of 1000’s of English-speaking households fled as stringent new language restrictions took impact.
[…]
The brand new regulation narrowed her academic choices as practically 100,000 English-speaking residents fled Quebec in 1977, in line with a New York Occasions report. By the account of a number of of Harris’s mates, the English-oriented highschool she was prone to attend within the fall of 1978 was amongst many slated for closure amid that upheaval.
The place Did Harris Dwell Throughout This Time?
The Washington Submit identified Kamala Harris’ high-school-era residence as “the second flooring of a duplex constructing on modern Grosvenor Avenue, a few 30-minute stroll from Westmount Excessive.” For a time, she shared her room with pal and classmate Wanda Kagan, who was struggling abuse at dwelling.
A photograph of the road utilized by the Submit featured a home, however because the featured dwelling shouldn’t be a duplex, it’s unlikely to point out the precise residence she lived in. There are, nevertheless, a number of duplex buildings in the area straight surrounding that home, in line with Google Road View, and this space is a roughly 30-minute walk from Westmount Excessive.
“They rented a part of a home in decrease Westmount, which is completely good however not particularly luxurious,” former Westmount Excessive pupil Andrew Phillips wrote in a Toronto Solar opinion piece.
Center Class in Westmount?
As described within the 2024 Toronto Solar story, Westmount Excessive retains, to this present day, a connotation of old-money wealth, despite the fact that that has not been its actuality since earlier than Harris arrived:
Westmount Excessive College is a public anglophone college that’s extra numerous and fewer privileged than its title suggests, with its connotations of previous Montreal cash. It drew from Westmount, the largely Black Little Burgundy to the south and past.
When she arrived on the college in 1978, the racial and financial demographics of the once-dominantly white and rich establishment have been altering quickly, as described by The Washington Submit:
The college was present process de facto integration. When trainer David Bracegirdle had began a couple of years earlier, he’d watched as limousines pulled up and dropped off college students on the principally White college.
As Harris arrived, Black college students, many from close by Caribbean-dominated communities, have been on the way in which to changing into about 40 p.c of the roughly 1,000 college students, making the college among the many most numerous in Quebec, in line with former college students and academics. Westmount was so crowded that some lessons have been held on the auditorium stage, in line with Bracegirdle.
Whereas the median dwelling worth in Westmount is — as these anti-Harris memes counsel — a lot larger than the nationwide common, these stats additionally spotlight the hazard of creating inferences from averages. As of 2020, Westmount had the highest income inequality of any location in Canada as reported by the CBC:
The Montreal space is dwelling to municipalities with probably the most excessive revenue gaps within the nation, in addition to Canada’s most equal communities, in line with a brand new evaluation of Statistics Canada information.
Earnings inequality, recognized for its corrosive results on well being, happiness and neighborhood ties, is worse in Westmount, Que., than in another place in Canada, in line with a rating assembled by the Native Information Information Hub at Toronto Metropolitan College.
The best incomes 10 p.c of households in Westmount made practically 11 occasions greater than the bottom incomes 10 p.c in 2020.
Such a distribution doesn’t preclude the existence of a center or decrease class in Westmount — it truly necessitates its existence. Harris’s descriptions of her time in Westmount, bolstered by these of her mates and fellow classmates, is constant along with her claims to rising up middle-class.
The Backside Line
Harris didn’t develop up in any of the palatial houses pictured in memes about her time in Westmount. She lived within the upper-floor of a duplex rented by her mom. Regardless of its old-money connotations, Westmount had loads of middle-class residents within the late Seventies — simply because it does right this moment.
