Former President Obama said that he “couldn’t be prouder” of his daughters for joining the protests calling for racial justice over the summer.
Obama told People in an interview published Tuesday that his daughters Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19, participated in the summer demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s death after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for at least eight minutes.
The former president’s daughters, who are both college students, felt “the need to participate,” Obama said in his interview about his recent memoir “A Promised Land.”
“I didn’t have to give them a lot of advice because they had a very clear sense of what was right and what was wrong and their own agency and the power of their voice and the need to participate,” he 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,” he added.
Obama said his daughters didn’t get involved “in a way where they were looking for limelight,” adding, “They were very much in organizer mode.”
“I could not have been prouder of them,” he said.
The 59-year-old former president said his daughters asked him for advice about mobilizing people after protests broke out across the nation after Floyd died over police brutality toward Black communities.
“I think a couple of times they asked for sort of very specific suggestions about what would be the best way to communicate X or what would be the most useful thing that, if we were mobilizing a whole bunch of friends, to have an impact, what should we be doing?” he said.
“But they didn’t need to be encouraged,” he added. “Their attitude was — we’ve seen something wrong and we want to fix it, and we think we can fix it. And we understand that it’s not gonna take just a day or a week or one march to fix it. But we’re in it for the long haul.”
Obama said he doesn’t think either of his daughters will enter politics but said he expects “both of them are going to be active citizens.”
President Obama doesn’t foresee either Malia and Sasha going into politics like he did, but “I think both of them are going to be active citizens.”
“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.”