It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
MICHELLE OBAMAEveryone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.
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The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
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a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.
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The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. What’s better for us? Barack called to the people gathered in the room. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
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Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
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I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
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just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
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Even white people were recognizing him now.
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failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
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His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
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And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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We live by the paradigms we know.
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But as I’ve said, 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.
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Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
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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.
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Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses, swapped back and forth and over again.
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What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
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We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
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The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.
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The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
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I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
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Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.
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Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
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Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
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The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
MICHELLE OBAMA