Concept Paper, Becoming. Michelle Obama (2018).

Abstract

This review of the book Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018) combines a discussion of a highly popular political memoir together with insight into Ms. Obama’s educational and legal professional trajectories and her important family roots in the “Great Migration” from the Jim Crow South to Southside Chicago. The publisher announced that over 3 million copies had been sold within weeks of its November, 2018 release. Reviews of the book abound, including most notably a review by Isabel Wilkerson, the Chicago Bureau Chief of the NY Times who is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” That review captures the historical aspects of the memoir extensively, remarking poignantly that the book depicts Ms. Obama’s “improbable journey from there to the White House.” Wilkerson states that added to this poignancy, the term “first lady” is a linguistic gender anomaly for an African American woman because “the very idea of a black woman as first lady of the land, well, that would have been unthinkable….” “There were restrooms for ‘white ladies’ and often, conversely, restrooms for ‘colored women.’” This review, therefore, focuses on the anomalies of the racial history that led Michelle Obama to defy stereotypic expectations, graduate from an elite magnet Chicago High School, complete her education at Princeton and Harvard Law School, work at Sidley Austin and public interest jobs, and become the first black woman to become first lady. One major point of the book is that the public really never knew or tried to know the black working-class community where Ms. Obama grew up and her mother Marian Robinson says it best in speaking about the potential of Chicago Southside youth, “The South Side is filled with kids like that.”