Kamala Harris Uses Kendrick Lamar Song as Epigraph in New Memoir

Kamala Harris quotes Kendrick Lamar in the opening of her new campaign memoir, 107 Days.

As part of its epigraph, Harris features some lines from Lamar’s “DNA.” “I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA,” reads the page, followed by another bar from the song, “I was born like this.”

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The other quote on the page comes from Italian software expert Alberto Brandolini, which reads, “The amount of energy necessary to refute bull s**t is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

This isn’t the first time that the former Vice President referenced Lamar’s music. In June 2024, Harris appeared in a pre-taped segment at the BET Awards in which she mentioned the rapper’s famous Drake diss, “Not Like Us.”

In a taped FaceTime call with Taraji P. Henson, Harris and the actor (who hosted the show) spoke about the then-upcoming election. “Women’s reproductive rights are on the line, our Supreme Court is on the line,” Henson said. “Our basic freedoms are being tested Madame VP! I know you’ve been traveling across the country. What have you been hearing?”

“Yeah, girl, I’m out here in these streets, and let me tell you — you’re right, Taraji, there is so much at stake in this moment,” Harris responded. “The majority of us believe in freedom and equality. But these extremists, as they say — ‘they not like us.’”

Elsewhere in her memoir, Harris revealed how she was “angry and disappointed” when Joe Biden called her a few hours before her presidential debate with Donald Trump to suggest that some powerful friends of Biden’s brother didn’t want to support her.

“His brother had told him that those guys were not going to support me because I’d been saying bad things about him,” wrote Harris. “He wasn’t inclined to believe it, he claimed, but he thought I should know in case my team had been encouraging me to put daylight between the two of us.”

“Joe then rattled on about his own former debate performances. ‘I beat him the other time; I wasn’t feeling well in that last one,’” she added. “He continued to insist that his debate performance hadn’t hurt him much with the electorate. I was barely listening.”

Harris then reflected on her frustration with Biden after that call. “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” she wrote. “Distracting me with worry about hostile power-brokers in the biggest city of the most important state.”

Harris’ 107 Days releases on Sept. 23.