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Entertainment July 20, 2017
Obama's eldest daughter does it all!
Photo via Instagram / @thereal_maliaobamaMalia Obama is known for being former President Barack Obama‘s oldest daughter. However, there is so much more to Malia Obama than her famous last name.
Not only is she attending Harvard in fall 2017, she is also fluent in Spanish and excelled in sports during high school. Despite her impressive skill set and famous upbringing, her presidential parents instilled good values and gave her the opportunity to grow up like other kids her age.
Btu what do you really know about Malia? Here are 10 tidbits of her life you should know.
Malia Obama was born July 4, 1998, which makes her a Cancer. The former president’s daughter is 19-years-old.
The name “Malia” is Hawaiian, most likely stemming from her father’s childhood because he was born in Honolulu. Her name is a form of the name “Mary” in Hawaiian. However it also means “calm or gentle waters” and “peacefulness.”
She was born in Chicago, Illinois but she was in the White House for nearly half her life.
Barack Obama’s inauguration was in Jan. 2009, when Malia Obama was just 10 years old. His second term finished in 2017 when she was 18 years old.
However, she was pretty much like any other average child while living in the White House. Malia had an 8 p.m. bedtime, made her bed and cleaned her room. Her parents also required her to pickup after her Bo, the dog Obama promised her if he got elected.
Malia Obama probably gets annoying comments like “how’s the weather up there” because Barack’s daughter is 6 feet 1 inch, which makes the father-daughter duo the same height.
However, if this seems shocking because her family doesn’t look that tall in pictures, it’s because they are all really tall.
Her mother Michelle Obama is 5 feet 11 inches, and her 16-year-old sister is 5 feet 9 inches.
But height definitely wasn’t a disadvantage for Malia. In fact, her height gave her a major advantage when it came to varsity sports.
She won multiple high school championships and titles in tennis, volleyball and basketball. Barack Obama even stepped out of his role as Commander-In-Chief to coach her high school basketball team on the weekends.
Secret Service code names in the 2000s are merely keeping up with tradition. The practice of giving presidents, first ladies and prominent people code names was to maintain security before the highly-electronic communication age.
The Obamas all had special monickers. While the Secret Service deemed Malia Obama “Radiance,” her sister Sasha was “Rosebud,” her mother “Renaissance” and her father “Renegade.”
But giving Malia a code name and protecting her wasn’t the only job of the Secret Service. They also taught her how to drive.
“The Secret Service [taught her], actually, because they wouldn’t let me in the car with her,” Michelle Obama told TV host Rachael Ray in 2015. The former first lady also noted that at the time, she hadn’t driven herself in almost eight years.
Malia Obama differs from the average millennial.
In an age of Kylie Jenner‘s, there are very few Malia Obama’s. What does that mean? She doesn’t have any official social media accounts.
While reports online suggest Malia most likely still has private accounts, no one has found them yet.
Malia Obama was linked to Chance the Rapper’s younger brother, Taylor Bennet, in 2016. Rumor has it, Bennet was the reason Malia Obama stepped away from her usually innocent lifestyle and got branded as a bit of a wild child last summer.
Barack’s daughter was caught puffing on a joint, suggestively dancing and lifting up her skirt during the 2016 Chicago Lollapalooza, which she attended with Bennet.
However, her behavior wasn’t too out of the norm for most teens her age.
On the other hand, Bennet, who is also a rapper, had some serious run-ins with the law. He pleaded no contest to aggravated assault and battery in 2016 for a 2014 party altercation that left the victim with “bleeding on the brain.”
During her first week after leaving the White House, Malia Obama attended the Sundance Film Festival protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Jan. 2017. Her support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe didn’t go unnoticed.
“It was amazing to see Malia,” anti-DAP activist Shailene Woodley told USA Today. “To witness a human being and a woman coming into her own, outside of her family and outside of the attachments that this country has on her, but someone who’s willing to participate in democracy because she chooses to, because she recognizes, regardless of her last name, that if she doesn’t participate in democracy, there will be no world for her future children.”
Back in March of 2016, the Obama’s family trip to Cuba was historic. Tt was the first time in 88 years that a president visited the country.
However, Barack Obama soon faced trouble when he realized it was hard to communicate with people, like the chef in the photo above, without knowing much Spanish.
“My [Spanish] vocabulary is the equivalent of a two-year-old’s,” President Obama told ABC News. “It’s one of those things I’ve always said to myself that I’m gonna take care of. But … it turned out that, during the presidency, I didn’t have time to take Spanish lessons.”
Luckily, Malia Obama is fluent in Spanish and served as his translator for the duration of their trip.
After graduating from Sidwell Friends High School in 2016, Malia Obama decided to take a gap year. During this time, she did some world traveling with her family and had two enviable internships.
First, she put those Spanish skills to work and interned at the United States Embassy in Spain during summer of 2016.
Most recently, she started an internship with the Weinstein Company in 2017. Film producer and studio executive Harvey Weinstein co-founded Miramax, which produced films like “Pulp Fiction.”
However, it wasn’t her first film internship. Back in the summer of 2015, while she was still in high school, Malia Obama interned under Lena Dunham and worked on the HBO show “Girls.”
Taking after her mother and father who received law degrees from Harvard University in 1988 and 1991 respectively, Malia Obama will soon be donning crimson to pursue a Bachelor’s degree.
This is a pretty big accomplishment, since Harvard only admitted 2,056 out of 39,506 applicants.
With her background and knowledge she gained from her internships, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Malia Obama majored in film.
However, Malia Obama isn’t going to be the only famous freshman in fall 2017. “Black-ish” star 17-year-old Yara Shahidi will join her on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus.
Users went crazy on Twitter at the thought of the two famous ladies rooming together in the dorms and becoming friends.
Tweets read things like:
The idea of the two freshman becoming roommates isn’t that far-fetched. In fact, Michelle Obama wrote Yara Shahidi’s letter of recommendation. Michelle was impressed by Yara’s interest in the field of sociology because she earned a Bachelor’s degree in the subject from Princeton in 1985.
Malia Obama, you are seriously goals. Good luck at Harvard, girl!
