an ethnic minority; a fifth of them were the children of immigrants or asylum
seekers. I was drawn to it because it was a diverse school with limited financial
resources and yet had been deemed academically outstanding. I also wanted to
make sure that when I visited a new place as First Lady, I really visited it—
meaning that I’d have a chance to meet the people who actually lived there, not
just those who governed them. Traveling abroad, I had opportunities that Barack
didn’t. I could escape the stage-managed multilateral meetings and sit-downs with
leaders and find new ways to bring a little extra warmth to those otherwise staid
visits. I aimed to do it with every foreign trip, beginning in England.
I wasn’t fully prepared, though, to feel what I did when I set foot inside the
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School and was ushered to an auditorium where
about two hundred students had gathered to watch some of their peers perform
and then hear me speak. The school was named after a pioneering doctor who
also became the first female mayor elected in England. The building itself was
nothing special—a boxy brick building on a nondescript street. But as I settled
into a folding chair onstage and started watching the performance—which
included a Shakespeare scene, a modern dance, and a chorus singing a beautiful
rendition of a Whitney Houston song—something inside me began to quake. I
almost felt myself falling backward into my own past.
You had only to look around at the faces in the room to know that despite
their strengths these girls would need to work hard to be seen. There were girls
in hijab, girls for whom English was a second language, girls whose skin made up
every shade of brown. I knew they’d have to push back against the stereotypes
that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a
chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with
being poor, female, and of color. They’d have to work to find their voices and
not be diminished, to keep themselves from getting beaten down. They would
have to work just to learn.
But their faces were hopeful, and now so was I. For me it was a strange,
quiet revelation: They were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could
be. The energy I felt thrumming in that school had nothing to do with obstacles.
It was the power of nine hundred girls striving.
When the performance was done and I went to the lectern to speak, I could
barely contain my emotion. I glanced down at my prepared notes but suddenly
had little interest in them. Looking up at the girls, I just began to talk, explaining
that though I had come from far away, carrying this strange title of First Lady of