United States President Joe Biden announced Thursday the appointment of Karine Jean-Pierre as the next White House spokeswoman, awarding this high-profile post to an openly lesbian, black woman for the first time.
Jean-Pierre will replace Jen Psaki, under whom she served as deputy, effective May 13, according to a White House statement in which Biden said he was “proud” of the appointment.
The president also praised the “experience, talent, and honesty” of his future spokeswoman.
“She will be the first black woman and the first openly LGBTI person to hold the position of White House press secretary,” Psaki tweeted on her behalf, who had anticipated from the beginning that she would leave the position during her mandate.
And she added: “She will give voice to many, but she will also make many dream big.”
She will be the first black woman and the first openly LGBTQ+ person to serve as the White House Press Secretary. Representation matters and she will give a voice to many, but also make many dream big about what is truly possible.
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) May 5, 2022
According to US media, Psaki would join the progressive-oriented channel MSNBC.
Biden wished her “the best”
“Jen Psaki has set the standard for returning decency, respect and decorum to the White House briefing room,” the president said in the statement, thanking her “for raising the bar, communicating directly and candidly with the American people, and keeping your sense of humor in doing so.
Jean-Pierre, 44, is the first black woman to take on the role of White House spokeswoman.
This Francophone, who shares her life with a CNN journalist, with whom she has a daughter, also becomes the first lesbian to take on this tremendously exposed role.
Born in Martinique to Haitian parents who later immigrated to the United States, Jean-Pierre worked on both Barack Obama’s campaigns (2008 and 2012) and then Joe Biden’s in 2020, before joining his team at the House. White.
A graduate of the prestigious Columbia University, Karine Jean-Pierre has often explained how her family’s path, emblematic of the “American dream”, had been decisive for her career.
She grew up in New York, where her father worked as a taxi driver and her mother as a live-in caregiver.
“I am everything Donald Trump hates,” she explained in 2018, referring to the former Republican president, a New York real estate mogul, in a video for the MoveOn organization, from which she was once one of its main figures.
By: AFP
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