2016 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic<\/a>, Obama said, “…there is no doubt that as a mixed child, as the child of an African and a white woman, who was very close to white grandparents who came from Kansas, that I think the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity, or judge me on the basis of merit\u2014that kind of working assumption is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle.” <\/p>\nHe elaborated, “There is a little bit of a biographical element to this. I had as a child seen at least a small cross-section of white people, but the people who were closest to me loved me more than anything. And so even as an adult, even by the time I\u2019m 40, 45, 50, that set of memories meant that if I walked into a room and it\u2019s a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age\u2014I\u2019m not walking in thinking, Man, I\u2019ve got to show them that I\u2019m normal<\/i>.” <\/p>\n
“I walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents,” Obama explained, “And I see the same Jell-O mold that my grandmother served, and they\u2019ve got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we\u2019re okay.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.buzzfeed.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barack Obama is of Luo, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German and Swiss heritage. In a 2016 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic, Obama said, “…there is no doubt that as a mixed child, as the child of an African and a white woman, who was very close to white grandparents who came from Kansas, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2209077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[370851,309616,357956,21788,426579,239358,426580,426581,382649,21889,342324,426582,426583,426584,312296,23067,426585,426586,346675,426587,426588,346155,316491,29279,426589],"class_list":["post-2209076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-asian","tag-black","tag-black-content","tag-chrissy-teigen","tag-comtent","tag-dib-celebs","tag-dib-swarm","tag-frames-and-formats-best-of-2021","tag-henry-golding","tag-kamala-harris","tag-kj-apa","tag-latinx","tag-lifestyle-eod-sprint","tag-lifestyle-eoy-sprint","tag-mariah-carey","tag-meghan-markle","tag-mixed-race","tag-multiracial","tag-obama","tag-progreflow","tag-scalequiz","tag-tracee-ellis-ross","tag-white","tag-zendaya","tag-zoe-kravtiz"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/62-Mixed-Race-Celebrities-Who-Have-Actually-Talked-About-Their-Multiracial.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2209078,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209076\/revisions\/2209078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2209077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}