On "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
I am becoming a writer, an anti-racist, a wife.
What are you becoming?
Becoming is the thoughtful, beautifully written memoir by Michelle Obama, former first lady. It is brimming with honesty and hope. The book starts with some of her earliest childhood memories and takes us through present day (2018) when it was published. (The follow up documentary by the same name on Netflix, follows her post publication, attending book tours, talks, and interviews, and is a great punctuation to the book.) Obama candidly discusses reservations about her husband running for office and being away from his young family. She uses her childhood growing up in the South Side of Chicago to provide the context for her outlook and why she believes so strongly in education, self-reflection and, of course, hope. She doesn’t suggest that if people hope for the best that it will happen, rather she challenges her reader, and larger audiences, to finish school, to vote, to be an active participant in your community, and to let the hope for one’s successes drive their ambition. She tells us all about the struggles and triumphs campaigning, the insane lifestyle in the White House, and transitioning her young daughters into the most normal life possible, despite motorcades to school and basically an in-house restaurant in the kitchen. (As someone with a finicky bladder, and an unfairly excessive thirst, something that stuck with me was regulating water intake while campaigning because there’s “no bathrooms” on the road.)
Given the Black Lives Matter Movement unfolding with unprecedented energy (for my generation), I wanted to write a review of this memoir through the lens of our current political landscape. Though I’ve read many Black authors, mostly novels, I haven’t done so with the ulterior focus on systemic racism in the US. Among a long list of other books written by Black authors, both fiction and non-, this memoir was one of the first books I picked up with this reframed mindset.
Ms. Obama’s memoir discusses how race and racism have influenced her life and perspective at various points, however, this book is not about racism. This book is not about a girl growing up and becoming a successful lawyer and businesswoman, wife, mother, the first lady despite racism. It’s about a woman who has acknowledged diversity and made her own way, not letting it define her. It’s an important distinction that deserves recognition. While many white people begin to make space for black authors, artists, influencers, etc. in their lives, it’s easy to forget that racism doesn’t define a person of color any more than it defines a white person, even if it does affect us all to varying degrees. “Black woman” doesn’t define Michelle Obama, though I would argue that “Michelle Obama” does, indeed, define “Black woman,” and also, simply, “woman.”
One of the very first examples of Obama acknowledging and rejecting racism, is in a story she recounts about her high school guidance counselor discouraging her from applying to Princeton. Obama writes,
“It’s possible, in fact, that during our short meeting the college counselor said things to me that might have been positive or helpful, but I recall none of it. Because rightly or wrongly, I got stuck on one single sentence the woman uttered. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, giving a perfunctory, patronizing smile, ‘that you’re Princeton material…’ failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed” (66).
What we don’t know about the counselor is her age, race, educational background, whether she was racist, or sexist; we don’t know what influenced her opinion. What we do know is that Michelle’s older brother, Craig, was already a student at Princeton. The constants, or controls, were the same for Michelle and Craig in both family life and educational background. Discounting test scores and GPA, what made Craig Princeton material, as a Black man, that Michelle didn’t have as a black woman? Is it that she was female? Did the guidance counselor not know about Craig, making this just blanket disparagement? We’ll never know.
By recounting this memory, Obama opened the door to speculation and questions about what made her, as a young Black woman, not “Princeton material,” but never specifically argued that it was because she was Black, or a girl, or from the South Side, or any other potential bias. What this tells us about Obama is that she understands and acknowledges prejudice, something that we all experience at some point in our lives (even if we do prosper from white privilege), and rejected that prejudice from having any power on her life. She had the grades, the discipline, and ambition to apply to, and be accepted by Princeton University. Michelle’s parents raised her to be inquisitive, independent, and driven, making this a defining moment of her memoir, as it is one of the first times she was told she couldn’t do something for no particular reason. (And then went ahead and did it.)
While she was there, she noticed for probably the second time in her life, the racial disparity in the classroom. After her South Side Chicago neighborhood saw the “white flight” of white people, and really anyone with financial means, moving out of the neighborhood to more affluent suburbs in the 1970’s, her own class became less and less diverse. She includes a demonstrative set of photographs showing her kindergarten class with an even distribution of white and black kids (I don’t know each kid’s specific race, but from face value there is a contrast in skin color amongst half of the students). By the time Obama is in 5th grade, her class photo has but one seemingly white child, plus a white teacher.
By the time she arrives at Princeton, she has returned to a racially homogenous classroom, except now it was a majority white kids. She describes it, saying,
“Princeton was extremely white and very male… Black students made up less than 9 percent of my freshman class. If during the orientation program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice… As with anything, though, you learn to adapt” (72).
Through the guidance of her older brother, she discovered a welcoming community in the “Third World Center, a poorly named but well-intentioned offshoot of the university with a mission to support students of color” (73). She refers to the TWC as a “kind of home base,” where she met other students of color, some of whom became lifelong friends, and attended parties and co-op meals. She volunteered under the mentorship of her boss, Czerny Brasuell, who also later introduced Obama to Manhattan for the first time, another pivotal moment in the memoir.
Brasuell laid the groundwork for the path Obama found herself on throughout her life and career. With encouragement from Brasuell, Obama started an after-school program for the children of black Princeton faculty and staff, looking after them, playing, and making a point to provide healthy snacks.
It was here that Obama learned the value of community outreach and participation, something that would drive her career and her (reluctant) life in politics in the future. She learned that by uplifting other Black people around her in a predominantly white environment, she would be able to learn the tools she needed to succeed in law school and beyond, that she could share with her daughters, and her audience, primarily Black women and girls, during her book tour and interviews and talks. In the book, she says of overcoming adversity, “This is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy” (75). It is the energy and the unrelenting determination that she so often describes in her stories; this common theme that threads the three sections of this memoir together.
One of the topics that I found most relatable that had me fist pumping on the couch in all kinds of “Yes!” and “Me too!” epiphanies, was discussing her early career and how it slowly revealed itself to be unfulfilling. After graduating Princeton, Obama went on to Harvard Law and upon graduation, took a well-paying job at a prestigious law firm in downtown Chicago. To her shock, she failed the Bar exam the first time, passing it on a second try after having studied with extra vigor. She passed and found herself propelled on the upward trajectory of life in a law firm, with partner as the ultimate achievement. Already, she was starting to doubt herself, why she had pushed so hard to go to law school and what she was doing at this law firm. She was feeling unfulfilled. She writes,
“I can admit now that I was driven not just by logic but by some reflexive wish for other people’s approval, too… This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly” (91).
As I get older and tuck away years of corporate experience under my belt, sharing battle wounds with other women friends, this idea of pleasing others and looking back on life with doubt and disappointment is a common scar tracing across our histories. Without any evidence, empirical or otherwise, I posit that this is more common to women, who have been bred to please everyone; our parents as children, our men and children in adulthood. Also every other single person that we interact with ever. I would guess that men don’t internalize this need to please others to the degree that women do, to the point they regret or question the choices they made in their lives and profession.
After meeting her soon to be husband, Barack Obama, who was full of deep, cerebral intellect, read voraciously, was an active community organizer, and involved with local and state politics, Ms. Obama writes,
“…I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine… This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I had no concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. Somehow, in all my years of schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful” (132).
Whether it is through a partner who challenges us, or our own values that become stronger and more significant, countless women find themselves in a role, professionally or personally, that they realize one day does not fit the bill. It is a challenge: can I afford to take a lower paying job? Will my passions provide time for my family? Can I afford more schooling? Am I qualified? Self-doubt, and internalizing the doubt of others (like Ms. Obama’s high school guidance counselor) is a major contributor to unfulfilled dreams and passions. For someone who is Black in this country, that is another factor. “I’d never been someone who dwelled on the more demoralizing parts of being African American. I had been raised to think positively” (117), she says. It was this positive thinking, and the support of her husband, that she was ultimately able to “swerve,” as she calls it into a lower paying but more fulfilling role. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to make this kind of professional move, and yet, again, despite the outside world believing she had less privilege, she did not appear to give that thought much equity.
I rated this book 5 stars on Goodreads because it was a fascinating history of a woman who started life in the South Side of Chicago and then ended up in the White House as the First Lady. While this review was more intensive on the first two sections (yes, I did read the whole book), the second half is more narrative driven about her time and life in the White House, which was also extremely interesting from a more voyeuristic stance.
If you’ve read this book, please comment below and let us know what you think!
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Fabulous review on this book; perfect and insightful to a T especially on Michelle’s “value” perspective. This is the first book of many that I’m reading while having an anti-racist perspective and Michelle provides the reader multiple opportunities to deeply fathom this standpoint which in this day and age with the Black Lives Matter Movement is quintessential with understanding the positive direction our country needs to move towards with equality and justice. Thanks for the review!!