Kamala Harris accused of entering law school under a hardship program she didn’t qualify for

Vice President Kamala Harris was reportedly admitted to U.C. Law San Francisco under a hardship program that she allegedly didn’t qualify for.

The Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP) “offers admission to approximately 50 high-achieving students each year—up to 20 percent of the class—who have experienced major life hurdles, such as educational disadvantage, economic hardship, or disability,” according to a UC Law SF Magazine article published in 2018.

The same report lists Harris as part of the school’s ’89 alumni who benefited from LEOP.

This, according to critic Laura Powell, a civil liberties attorney, is a big problem given that Harris was anything but disadvantaged.

“Kamala Harris’s mother came from the highest caste in India, but by moving to the U.S. and Canada, obtaining a prestigious degree, marrying a future Stanford professor, having a successful career as a cancer researcher, and sending her daughter to private schools, her daughter became unusually disadvantaged?” she wrote in a tweet Monday:

In another tweet, she offered proof of Harris’ privileged upbringing: A Los Angeles Times article from 2004 in which the current vice president’s mother, Shyamala G., recounted taking offense when some male college official assumed her daughter was from a poor background.

“What Shyamala G. Harris understood was that this man assumed her daughter must be an impoverished girl from the rough side of town, not a privileged child of foreign graduate students, whose academic pursuits led them to UC Berkeley,” the Times article reads.

Powell also drew attention to something Harris’ mother told a reporter in 2003 about their family’s upper-class status in India.

“We are Brahmins, that is the top caste,” she said. “Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.”

As noted by Powell, “‘high ranking,’ ‘upper class,’ and ‘top caste’ are not phrases you would use to describe the family of someone from an underprivileged background.”

True.

As for LEOP, it was, according to Powell, a veritable race-based affirmative action program.

“Students who claimed to be eligible for the LEOP because of some special hardship they suffered would have their claims of being disadvantaged verified via a phone call by members of the student organization associated with the applicant’s race,” she tweeted.

“The phone interviews were used by some students to screen out conservative candidates—to avoid future ‘Clarence Thomases,’ as one student explained. This would have been the process in place when Kamala Harris applied to law school in 1986. According to her resume, she also served as President of the ‘Black Law Student’s [sic] Association,’ so she likely participated in the process of selecting admittees to the LEOP program while she was a law student as well,” she added.

Responding to these findings from Powell, other critics were shocked, outraged, and disgusted.

Look:

Vivek Saxena

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