Parenting & Family Quote by Jack Kingston

The line reads like trivia, but it’s really a credential being quietly slid across the table. By invoking Ethiopia and Haile Selassie, Jack Kingston isn’t just locating his childhood on a map; he’s borrowing the gravity of history to project worldly authority. “I used to live” suggests immersion rather than tourism, a formative experience that supposedly inoculates him against the charge that he’s speaking abstractly about foreign policy, Africa, or development. The name-drop of Selassie is doing heavy lifting: it compresses an era of imperial pageantry, Cold War geopolitics, and impending upheaval into a single proper noun that signals “I was there before it was complicated.”

The subtext is political: authenticity. American politicians routinely lean on personal biography as a substitute for expertise, and this sentence is built to preempt skepticism. It implies access, proximity, and perspective without having to spell out what was learned or how it shapes any actual policy position. That omission matters. Ethiopia under Selassie can be narrated as modernization or repression, stability or inequality; the quote keeps it neutral enough to be usable in almost any argument.

Contextually, it’s a familiar move in domestic politics: reach for an international anecdote to sound less provincial, especially when discussing migration, aid, or U.S. leadership abroad. The risk is that it treats a complex country as a backdrop for the speaker’s self-making, turning Ethiopian history into a résumé line rather than a lived reality for Ethiopians.