Barack Obama says his daughters, Sasha, 23, and Malia, 26, “go out their way” to succeed without using their famous last name.
While on The Pivot podcast the former President says his daughters take intentional steps avoid using their last name so that their work can strictly be judge based on skill.
Obama says his oldest daughter, Malia, would remove her last name when submitting films to film festivals and use her middle name, to avoid judgement based off her being an Obama. She opted to go by “Malia Ann” instead. “Her first film went to Sundance and all these fancy film festivals and she didn’t use Obama as a director on the credits,” Obama said.“I was all like, ‘You do know they’ll know who you are.’”
“And she’s all like, ‘You know what? I want them to watch it that first time and not in any way have that association,’ ” continued Barack.
Sasha also isn’t interested in using her famous last name. “I think our daughters go out of their way to not try to leverage that,” he said.
“The challenge for us is letting us give them any help at all,” Barack reiterated. “I mean they’re very sensitive about this stuff. They’re very stubborn about it.”
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