I know that many readers will open @MichelleObama ‘s #Becoming to read about her time on the campaign & in the White House. But the part to which I was most drawn was the first part about her growing up on the Southside of Chicago w her family.
Not enough has been written about the lives of Black girls and boys like Michelle (and me) - children of working class parents striving in big cities during this brief period of promise - in the decade and a half after the passage of the major civil rts statutes.
We were cildren who saw struggle and promise as embedded in daily life. And it shaped our bone deep sense of what might be possible in this country tempered by strong and unshakeable pragmatism about the existence of barriers.
