It’s a story about perseverance, yes, but also about a fair amount of luck
CHICAGO >> You may have heard that Michelle Obama’s best-selling book “Becoming” is a wellwritten and fascinating story of a working-class Chicago girl who overcame obstacles to make it to the White House.
I’m not here to say otherwise — I unabashedly loved this book.
The criticism isn’t for Michelle Obama. It’s for anyone who reads this remarkable story and walks away believing the dreaded cliche about every person of color who broke barriers: Skin pigment, gender and race or ethnicity won’t hamper those who work hard enough and persevere.
If only.
Clearly, the former first lady worked hard, sacrificed and endured after, for instance, her high school guidance counselor said she didn’t think the girl then known as Michelle Robinson was “Princeton material.”
But the portion of America that worries about how our young people of modest means, our young immigrants and our children of color will ever close the academic, earnings and life-expectancy gaps with their white peers should not overlook the many privileges that she enjoyed.
Both her parents worked and enjoyed a stable marriage. The Robinsons were working class, but they lived with their greataunt and uncle in a home the family eventually inherited. This gave them stability and allowed the Robinsons to make the kids the family’s sole focus.
The Robinson kids had all kinds of social capital. Their parents allowed them to manage their own affairs. They had piano lessons and recitals in downtown Chicago auditoriums given by their great-aunt — who, incredibly, long ago sued Northwestern University for discrimination after having been denied a spot in the women’s dorm.
They visited family in the South and in the majority-white, well-heeled suburbs of Chicago. They enjoyed great music, laughter, singing and — most important of all — the comfort of intact, nuclear families who lived in stable, safe neighborhoods with similar families. Michelle and Craig to thrived in a cocoon of well-cared-for peers. Michelle was a close friend with the daughter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the nation’s most influential black leaders.
Sure, Michelle remembers a classmate who once asked her, “How come you talk like a white girl?” But she wasn’t oddball among her peers for aspiring to attend college.
Absolutely none of this detracts from the indefatigable effort and discipline Michelle dedicated to everything from changing careers to become a hospital executive, realizing the dream of having children, and then managing a family in the insanity that is Chicago, and eventually, national politics.
However, her story isn’t the “poor South Side girl makes good” narrative offered by people who want her to be “proof” of the possibility of success for other young people of color.
As the Chicago teacher and education writer Ray Salazar put it in a recent essay on the Latino Rebels website, “My disappointment with Michelle Obama’s autobiography the path she documents cannot be followed in today’s world. Young people can and should find inspiration in her story. … But the truth is the world that created Michelle Obama does not exist today.”
Her path to success isn’t scalable right now.
That would require black and Latino students to have abundant stable and safe neighborhoods with plentiful jobs for their parents, good public schools and tightly knit communities with the resources and savvy to propel them.
Until that happens, it will be nearly impossible for any young person of color to attain spectacular Obama-level results