Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.
When rumors about the so-called whitey tape surfaced, a friend who knows me well called up, clearly worried that the lie was true. I had to spend a good thirty minutes convincing her that I hadn’t turned into a racist, and when the conversation ended, I hung up, thoroughly demoralized.
We live by the paradigms we know.
Whatever deficits I might have arrived with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not procrastinate.
Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
What I’ve learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.
Meeting Nelson Mandela gave me the perspective I needed a couple of years into our White House journey – that real change happens slowly, not just over months and years but over decades and lifetimes.
I wanted Americans to understand that words matter – that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.
It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and I accommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them to ever believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids.
When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. it was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
When Barack was first elected, various commentators had naively declared that our country was entering a “postracial” era, in which skin color would no longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation apart.
Even white people were recognizing him now.
America, our moment is now,” Barack said. “Our moment is now.