White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Has Made History—And Waves
- At the time, Jean-Pierre, who had worked in the Obama administration, was the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org and a political pundit.
- Her next moves would be swift: In 2020 she joined the Biden campaign as a senior adviser and later became Harris’s chief of staff.
- About a year and a half into the Biden presidency, she was introduced as the White House press secretary—the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the position.
Jean-Pierre is a realist. For all the history she’s made in her career, she expects she will best be remembered for her fracas with the protester that went viral. “It’s going to be on my tombstone,” she says, with cheery resignation. The day after the onstage clash, Harris called Jean-Pierre to see how she was holding up. “How I was doing!” Jean-Pierre remembers. “I said, ‘Please get security.’ She was like, ‘I’m calling to check in on you!’ ” But Jean-Pierre repeated herself. Get security.
That quality of directness—blunt, with a touch of compassion—is Jean-Pierre’s currency at the briefing podium. She meets the White House press corps almost daily—favoring bright colors and bold eye shadow when she does—and, while she’s more reserved than some of her predecessors and less likely to respond to provocation with a social media–ready retort, she has sharpened her own technique: disarm with a smile, then lay out the facts at hand.
In one example, when House Republicans earlier this year prepared to block the president’s plan on student-debt relief, Jean-Pierre, 49—who has been open about the debt she accrued in graduate school (some $25,000, despite a partial scholarship)—kept her feelings in check. “Will Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had $183,000 of her own business loans forgiven, vote to deny debt relief to the 92,000 student borrowers she represents?” Jean-Pierre wondered aloud. “Will Representative Vern Buchanan, who had over $2.3 million of business loans forgiven, vote to deny student debt relief for 95,000 of his own constituents?”
President Biden has emphasized to Jean-Pierre that when she speaks, her audience is as much the American people as it is the press corps, and so that afternoon she went on: “To the more than 40 million eligible student borrowers who are eagerly waiting to learn about the fate of their debt relief, I urge you to tune in to today’s vote to watch which Republican lawmakers shamelessly vote against debt relief for you—after having their own loans forgiven.”
Jean-Pierre never planned to work in politics. Born in Martinique to Haitian parents, she moved with her mother and father to Paris as a baby, and then to New York, where relatives had settled in Queens Village. Later, they landed in Long Island. Her sister, Edrine, was born when she was seven. Her brother, Chris, arrived not long after. (Her parents also had a son named Donald, who died before Jean-Pierre was born.) Jean-Pierre couldn’t read until the third grade. Her parents—consumed with multiple jobs—had assumed she would learn in school. She did not.
Determined to help her siblings avoid the same fate, Jean-Pierre set up a classroom in the basement when she was in middle school. Her brother remembers her teaching him not just how to read and write, but “how to articulate emotions, how to speak.” When her sister took dance classes, Jean-Pierre handled drop-off and pickup. It was about this time that her parents started handing her bills to decipher. “I was like the third parent,” she says. “I had big responsibilities.”
But fulfilling those obligations meant learning to compartmentalize. In her memoir, Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the Promise of America, Jean-Pierre writes of silence as a tool of survival. She records instances of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin. She didn’t tell her parents. (A relative noticed how she flinched when the cousin walked in the room, and put a stop to it.) She describes a suicide attempt in college: Her sister found her in her car with the exhaust on and shook her awake. Jean-Pierre threw her urine-soaked khakis in the trash and never discussed the incident—or what drove her to it—with her parents. She had known she was gay since childhood, but the book recounts only one agonizing attempt at coming out to her mother. (“I could see the revulsion on her face,” Jean-Pierre writes.) Decades would pass before she and Jean-Pierre discussed it again.
- In high school, Jean-Pierre joined the team.
- She became a standout cross-country runner, too, breaking records on Long Island.
- Her vegetarianism baffled her meat-eating parents and she briefly considered becoming a nun, the better to evade any question of romantic attraction.
- After graduation, she enrolled in the New York Institute of Technology—a private university on Long Island—and loaded up with pre-med classes.
- She trained as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that would prove useful in her eventual career in rapid response.
- She worked for a spell at Estée Lauder.
- She took a gig in conservation, protecting the nests of piping plovers.
- In 2001 she enrolled at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, thinking she might pursue environmental studies. The week she began classes, the Twin Towers fell.
Jean-Pierre studied under the urban policy expert Ester Fuchs, PhD, whose class told a narrative of American progress. “The view essentially was, ‘Okay, our institutions work,’ ” Fuchs says. Jean-Pierre—one of two Black women in the course—wasn’t so sure. “She asked the hard questions,” Fuchs says. “Her concern was always for what we call the promise of America. She believed in it, but she saw where it wasn’t working.”
- After graduation, she worked for New York City Council members.
- In 2007 she headed for North Carolina to work for presidential candidate John Edwards and met Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy campaign manager.
- When Edwards’s run imploded, O’Malley Dillon moved to Barack Obama’s staff and offered Jean-Pierre a job.
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