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 OBAMAHearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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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They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
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We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.
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The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
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I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere,
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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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It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.
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Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result
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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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Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.
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Everything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality—the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.
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Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others.
MICHELLE OBAMA