Barack Obama reveals Sasha and Malia were part of protests against police brutality: 'Couldn't be prouder'
This year, the Black Lives Matter slogan echoed louder than ever, after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a White policeman. Protests erupted in different states as well as other countries in support. In an interview with People magazine to promote his memoir, 'A Promised Land'
Former President Barack Obama said his two daughters Malia and Sasha, marched at the Black Lives Matter protest, in a manner that avoided publicity. "They had a very clear sense of what was right and what was wrong and [of] their own agency and the power of their voice and the need to participate," Obama said. "Malia and Sasha found their own ways to get involved with the demonstrations and activism that you saw with young people this summer, without any prompting from Michelle and myself, on their own initiative."
"They didn't do it in a way where they were looking for limelight," he said. "They were very much in organizer mode, adding, "I could not have been prouder of them." The girls have avoided the limelight since growing up in the public eye during their father's presidency. Obama said they both noticed something wrong and wished to 'fix it', and that's what motivated them to take action. "They're reflective of their generation in the sense they want to make a difference and they think about their careers in terms of: How do I have a positive impact? How do I make the world better?" he said. "What particular paths they take in doing that, I think, are going to change and vary between the two of them."
"I think they're going to want to have an impact and their friends feel the same way," he said. "It's interesting when you talk to them in groups, the degree to which, compared to young people when I was coming out of college or you know even 20 years ago, I think people were much more focused on their finances and the perks of a job. And these kids are really focused on — how can I do something that I find meaningful, that resonates with my values and my ideals? And that, I think, is an encouraging sign for the country."
Obama's book 'A Promised Land', focuses on his political life from his time in Chicago through the killing of Osama bin Laden during his presidency. The book also serves as a record of his rise to the nation's top elected office, as well as his first two years on the job. Apart from that, it also provides an insight into his thinking about his policies, political as well as his personal life. It also reveals his long and hard battle for healthcare reform. Some of these excerpts have also been released for people to read.
"Each time I met a parent struggling to come up with the money to get treatment for a sick child, I thought back to the night Michelle and I had to take three-month-old Sasha to the emergency room for what turned out to be viral meningitis,” he wrote. The excerpt was published in the New Yorker.
“I remembered the terror and the helplessness we felt as the nurses whisked her away for a spinal tap, and the realization that we might never have caught the infection in time had the girls not had a regular pediatrician we felt comfortable calling in the middle of the night,” he continued. “Most of all, I thought about my mom, who had died in 1995, of uterine cancer."