A poor girl’s rise to White House press office
The White House behind a stop sign in Washington, DC.
What you need to know:
- Karine Jean-Pierre’s parents met and married in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but moved to Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where Karine was born on August 13, 1974.
- Her mother was a home healthcare aide with a meagre earning as a house cleaner, while her father worked as a handyman.
Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work and the Promise of America is a gripping and fascinating memoir.
It shares Karine Jean-Pierre’s enthralling and relentless struggle to overcome childhood obstacles that seem insurmountable, leading her to serve several elite political figures, before her success culminated in the coveted White House press secretary role.
Karine’s parents met and married in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but moved to Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where Karine was born on August 13, 1974.
Her mother was a home healthcare aide with a meagre earning as a house cleaner, while her father worked as a handyman.
Before Karine was born, her elder brother Donald, who had been left in the care of her grandmother in Haiti, died of neglect and malnutrition.
Karine’s family moved to Paris, France, where xenophobic Parisians repeatedly groused to her mother about how the country was overrun with immigrants.
When Karine was five, her mother, who worked from 6.30am to 10.00pm daily, managed to save $10,000 to move her family to New York City.
They joined their relatives who lived in a vibrant Haitian community on 212th Street in Queens Village.
Late bloomer
Karine was a late bloomer and struggled to read as she only spoke French and moderate Creole, a Haitian blend of French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and West African tongues.
She did not learn to read fluently until the third grade after her younger sister Edwine and brother Chris were born in 1982 and 1984 respectively.
Between the ages of seven and 10, during her babysitting stays at home with her siblings, Karine was sexually violated repeatedly by her cousin, Eduardo, when her parents were at work.
The sexual assaults eventually caused a traumatising tide of panic attacks in her adult life.
Her parents always informed anyone who cared to listen that Karine would become a doctor. Eager to fulfil that, she enrolled in the New York Institute of Technology to study premedical course as an undergraduate.
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It was a private research university in Old Westbury, Long Island, less than half an hour from her home.
She took the medical college admissions test, the standardised entrance exam taken to gain access to medical school.
Her scores were not good enough and she retook the tests after she enrolled in a prep class but failed the second test too.
The cover of White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir.
She was dejected and attempted suicide. By now her parents had bought a home on Long Island in New York through a mortgage.
Karine drove her newly purchased BMW into the garage, locked herself in after closing the garage door and the door leading into the kitchen.
She then turned on her car ignition and waited to suffocate from the smoke from the exhaust system. She was rescued and awakened from unconsciousness by her sister Edwine.
The day after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Karine began her master’s programme in public administration at Columbia University in Manhattan.
As co-president of her class, she discovered her talent in moulding political policy.
After graduation, she mailed her résumé to the office of New York City Council member James Gennaro, who was impressed by how Karine demonstrated an interest in environmental advocacy. She was employed as a director of legislative and budget affairs.
A year later, she resigned from her position after she was poached by Councilman James Sanders, the New York City Council member who made her his understudy and deputy chief-of-staff.
She felt obliged to work for Sanders because he represented Far Rockaway Queens district, where her mother opened a salon and worked as a home healthcare aide.
During the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2004, Karine was mesmerised as she watched a relatively unknown Illinois state senator, Barack Obama. He was running for US Senate and delivered a reverberating speech. Karine was so inspired, she successfully headed Sanders’ re-election campaigns in 2005.
Presidential campaigns
Sanders’ wife (they were still newlyweds), uncomfortable with Karine’s rising star, protested against her hiring as his chief-of-staff after he won his re-election.
Heartbroken, Karine moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in February 2007, to work on John Edwards’s presidential campaign.
After Edwards was defeated in the Democratic primaries by Obama, she moved back to New York City in 2008 to work for successful and controversial congressman Anthony Weiner, before leaving in July 2008 to serve as the Southern regional director of the Barack Obama campaign.
After Obama’s victory on November 4 the same year, 32-year-old Karine was appointed to the presidential inauguration committee.
On January 21, 2009, a day after Obama’s inauguration, she began serving as Obama’s regional political director.
She was based four blocks from the White House, earning $120,000 annually, $48,000 more than what she earned in her previous job.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Karine served as chief-of-staff of vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, before being selected as White House principal deputy press secretary by President Joe Biden.
On May 13, 2022, she walked triumphantly into the Press Briefing Room to glittering adornment, becoming the first black person to serve as White House press secretary.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
