Barack Obama Proposed To A White Woman Twice Before Michelle
As iconic as Barack and Michelle Obama’s relationship is…a new book is claiming that it’s a union that was thisclose to never even occurring.
According to Washington Post, a new biography is hitting the shelves that details Barack Obama’s drive and ambition before he began running for public office, and the long-term romance with a white woman that suffered because of it.
The new novel, “Rising Star” by David J. Garrow — the same biographer who won a Pulitzer prize for his biography on Martin Luther King — paints a picture of Barack as a man who made many sacrifices to get where he ultimately landed. One of which, his long term serious relationship with a Caucasian woman.
Garrow reveals the story of Barack’s relationship with Sheila Miyoshi Jager for the first time. Sheila and Barack lived together in Chicago in the years before he met Michelle, and asked her to marry him on two different occasions before the couple broke up for good — specifically because Barack knew that he needed to identify as a fully Black man, and having a white spouse would hurt his political prospects.
Obama believed that he had a “calling,” Garrow writes, and in his case it was “coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American.”
A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that “the lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”
Hmmm. Well, everyone has past relationships before they land on “THE ONE.” We’re pretty certain that things shook out the way they were supposed to be.
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