No, this is not a picture of Kamala Harris with her parents

What is the claim? 

An image of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris posing with two other people is being shared to claim that both her parents are Indian and Harris is misrepresenting her African American roots. 

The image, shared on Facebook more than 400 times, shows Harris standing next to a woman in a saree and a man in a suit. Examples of such claims are here and here.

A post claiming to show Kamala Harris with her parents. (Source: Facebook/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, we found the claim to be false. The image does not show Harris with her parents but instead posing with attendees at a 2016 fundraising event. 

What we found 

A reverse image search led us to a photo (archived here) shared by Pratham USA, an Indian charity group with chapters in the U.S. that works on children's education in India. 

According to the write-up shared with the image, it was taken on August 27, 2016, at a charity gala in Palo Alto, California, with Kamala Harris, the then California State Attorney General, in attendance. 

A reverse image search of this led us to this video (archived here) on Pratham's X (formerly Twitter) account. The man in the image is Suneil Parulekar, Pratham SF Bay Area Board Member. 

A keyword search led us to an image of the other woman in the viral photo, identified as Rohini Parulekar, attending another Pratham USA event (archived here). We also found Rohini and Suneil Parulekar's names on Pratham USA's individual donor list (archived here). 

A comparison of the viral image with the other images. (Source: Facebook/Pratham USA's X account/NRIInternet) 

According to Kamala Harris' autobiography The Truths We Hold, her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was an Indian-American cancer researcher from Tamil Nadu, and her father, Donald Harris, is a Jamaican-American economist of African descent. 

A post uploaded to Harris' Instagram account (archived here) from July 2019 shows her with her mother and sister. The Stanford University website also has a picture (archived here) of Harris' father, who is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. A comparison of these photos of Harris' parents shows they don't match the two individuals from the claim. 

A comparison of the viral image with her parents. (Source: Facebook/Kamala Harris' Instagram/stanford.edu)

We also found images of Harris with her mother in reports by NBC News, Marie Claire, and NPR, that don't match the woman in the claim. 

Logically Facts has contacted Pratham USA for a response to get more clarity about the now-viral image. This check will be updated when we receive it. 

With the U.S. elections approaching, many misleading claims about the racial identity of the 2024 Democrat presidential nominee have been shared online, which have been debunked by Logically Facts. You can read some here and here.

The verdict 

Posts that claim to show a photo of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris with her parents, questioning her Jamaican ancestry, actually show attendees she posed with at a charity gala in 2016.

Follow Logically Facts' coverage and fact-checking of the U.S. Election 2024 here.