Father-daughter relationships are commonly fraught. So it is with Kamala Harris and her father, Donald Harris. It may speak volumes about her perception of men.

Donald Harris, a Jamaican-born economist and Stanford professor, was integral in the lives of his two daughters. He supported them financially and emotionally despite separating from their mother. As time unfolded, however, Kamala Harris drifted away. Her father barely makes even cameo appearances in her public life.

Donald Harris did not abandon Kamala Harris after divorcing her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, in 1972 and losing a custody battle. He guided and financed her education. He remained an engaged father.

Kamala Harris rarely talks about her father publicly, but she mentioned him in her August speech at the Democratic National Convention. Recalling a childhood moment in the park with her family, she said Donald Harris told her to “Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.”

The candidate is carrying that lesson into her campaign, but her public profile most closely aligns with her mother. She became the Ursa Major in her life after the divorce. Kamala Harris credits Shyamala Gopalan Harris for her activism, intellect, character and ambitions. Her father is a cipher.

The father-daughter alienation found expression in a public spat after she was asked in a 2019 interview to respond to those who believed she opposed legalizing marijuana: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

Donald Harris was offended. He publicly rebuked his daughter for misrepresenting his Jamaican heritage. “My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he said in a statement at the time. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

The estrangement between the two suggests more a transactional relationship than the loving and intimate one that Kamala Harris shared with her mother, who died of colon cancer in 2009.

Donald Harris was not an absentee father. He did not go AWOL when his daughters needed him. But did he emotionally shortchange them? Did they become resentful and silently turn on him? Did Kamala Harris extrapolate from her unhappy relationship with her father to all men?

The child is father to the adult, with adult personalities shaped by childhood experiences. The arms-length relationship Kamala Harris had with Donald Harris in her youth may have coarsened her political persona and poisoned her concepts of masculinity and the paternal role.

Fondly do we hope — urgently do we pray — that father and daughter may reconcile or diminish their distance. Like the double helix, their lives are inextricably intertwined.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.