Who knew that Michelle Obama might never have been First Lady? A new book reveals Barack Obama twice proposed marriage to a white woman earlier.
The New York Daily News notes: “A 25-year-old Obama asked Sheila Miyoshi Jager — now a professor at Oberlin College — to marry him well before Michelle Obama became his other half, according to Pulitzer Prize winner David J. Garrow’s biography, ‘Rising Star.’”
“In the winter of ’86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” Jager told Garrow, said The Washington Post.
The New York tabloid added context: “Black Chicago politicians at the time could come under scrutiny for having a non-black spouse — and as ‘the marriage discussions dragged on and on,’ Jager said, Obama’s preoccupation with ‘race and identity’ began to overshadow their relationship.”
The book says the couple lived together in Chicago.
“When Jager’s parents frowned upon their tying the knot due to Obama’s career prospects and her being two years younger than he was, she allegedly told him, ‘not yet.’”
Turns out that Jager also published a book — but not about Obama. It’s called “Brothers at War.”
“It’s a book about the Korean War,” she says, “but it looks at not just the operational history of the war, but it also looks at the relationship between the military and society, and it looks also at memories of war.”