Shyamala Gopalan was the mother of Kamala Harris. Shyamala (December 7, 1938 – February 11, 2009) was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology.
Donald J. Harris is the father of Kamala Harris. He is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, originally from Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica. Of Jamaican descent, Harris was born on August 23, 1938, to Beryl Christie Harris (née Finegan) and Oscar Joseph Harris. He grew up in the Orange Hill area of Saint Ann Parish, near Brown's Town. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts from the University College of the West Indies in 1960. In 1963 he came to the United States to earn a PhD from University of California, Berkeley which he completed in 1966. He met his future wife, Shyamala Gopalan through the civil rights movement. Harris was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1966 to 1967 and at Northwestern University from 1967 to 1968. He moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an associate professor in 1968. In 1972, he joined the faculty of Stanford University as a professor of economics. He directed the Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies in 1986–1987. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil in 1990 and 1991 and in Mexico in 1992. In 1998, he retired from Stanford becoming a professor emeritus.

Maya Harris is the younger sister of Kamala Harris. She was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and Montreal. She had her only child Meena Harris at the age of 17. Harris completed a Bachelor of Arts at University of California, Berkeley and earned a J.D. degree from Stanford Law School. She works as a lawyer, public policy advocate, and a television commentator. Harris married lawyer Tony West in July 1998.
Meena Harris is the niece of Kamala Harris. She was born in Oakland, California in 1984. Harris completed a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. She is a lawyer and children's book author. She founded a campaign to raise awareness on social policy issues. Her 2020 children's book is based on the life story of her mother and aunt. Harris and her husband Nikolas Ajagu have two daughters.
P. V. Gopalan (1911 – February 1998) was the maternal grandfather of Kamala Harris. Gopalan was a career civil servant, eventually serving as Joint Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Rehabilitation. He was later deputed to the Government of Zambia and lived in Lusaka as Director of Relief Measures and Refugees, to help Zambia manage an influx of refugees from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Gopalan and his wife Rajam were from Tamil Nadu state and had wed in an arranged marriage. They had four children. Their eldest daughter Shyamala became a scientist in the United States and Canada. Their son Balachandran received a PhD in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and returned to an academic career in India. Their daughter Sarala is an obstetrician who practiced in the coastal city of Chennai, India. Their youngest daughter Mahalakshmi is an information scientist, who worked for the Government of Ontario.
Gopalan Balachandran, the uncle of Kamala Harris, studied at St. Xavier's College Calcutta, University of Calcutta and the Imperial College London. He obtained a PhD in Economics and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1978 with dissertation devoted to Financial regulation of decentralized economies. He was a consulting fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhi. He was married to Rosamaria Orihuela Basurto in 1980.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela is the first cousin of Kamala Harris. She is an Indian Mexican born in Mexico to Rosamaria Orihuela and Gopalan Balachandran. She started formal education in New Delhi and moved frequently between India, Mexico, and the United States. After moving to Oakland, California for college in 2001, Balachandran Orihuela's aunt, Shyamala Gopalan, helped her cope with race relations in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and later influenced her intellectual trajectory. Balachandran Orihuela graduated from

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Kamala Harris is of Jamaican descent on her paternal side and of Indian descent on her maternal side. Donald J. Harris wrote in an account of his family ancestry that the Harris name comes from his paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, a land owner and agricultural produce exporter, and that his paternal grandmother "Miss Chrishy" (née Christiana Brown) was a descendant of both enslaved Jamaicans and Hamilton Brown, a plantation and slave owner. However, Snopes, a fact-checking website, rated this claim as unproven pending further research. In July of 2019, Snopes noted that Harris made errors in some of the vital dates he provided for births and deaths of his grandparents. The following year, PolitiFact stopped short of Snopes's unproven rating, and again reviewed the validity of the story, saying about the Stanford professor emeritus's claim that he is the descendant of the slave owner, "I would be inclined to believe him."

Harris' maternal ancestral home is the village of Thulasendrapuram in India, in which her grandfather P. V. Gopalan was born.