Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming is available everywhere tomorrow and having previously shared details about how her novel touches on hard times, such as her miscarriage, we now have passages of her novel that detail her growing up in Chicago. The 54-year-old lived in Chi-Town when the city was dealing with a lot of race-based issues. “Decline can be a hard thing to measure, especially when you’re in the midst of it,” she writes, via The Chicago Times.
“Every September, when (her brother) Craig and I showed up back at Bryn Mawr Elementary, we’d find fewer white kids on the playground. Some had transferred to a nearby Catholic school, but many had left the neighborhood altogether. At first it felt as if just the white families were leaving, but then that changed, too. It soon seemed that anyone who had the means to go was now going. Much of the time, the departures went unannounced and unexplained” until a “For Sale” sign appeared or a moving van pulled up," the novel reads.
The First Black First Lady explains how in high school, her worries if she could categorize them, would stem from not feeling like she was "good enough."
Her high school (Whitney Young) opened her eyes to the race class Chicago was going through. "At Whitney Young, I met white kids who lived on the North Side — a part of Chicago that felt like the dark side of the moon, a place I’d never thought about nor had reason to go to," she writes. “More intriguing was my early discovery that there was such a thing as an African-American elite. Most of my new high school friends were black, but that didn’t necessarily translate, it turned out, to any sort of uniformity in our experience."
