E

She’d also understood that the only thing our girl could do, that day and every
day after it, was get back on the court and hit another ball.

very challenge, of course, is relative. I knew my kids were growing up with
more advantages and more abundance than most families could ever begin to
imagine having. Our girls had a beautiful home, food on the table, devoted adults
around them, and nothing but encouragement and resources when it came to
getting an education. I put everything I had into Malia and Sasha and their
development, but as First Lady I was mindful, too, of a larger obligation. I felt
that I owed more to children in general, and in particular to girls. Some of this
was spawned by the response people tended to have to my life story—the surprise
that an urban black girl had vaulted through Ivy League schools and executive
jobs and landed in the White House. I understood that my trajectory was
unusual, but there was no good reason why it had to be. There had been so many
times in my life when I’d found myself the only woman of color—or even the
only woman, period—sitting at a conference table or attending a board meeting
or mingling at one VIP gathering or another. If I was the first at some of these
things, I wanted to make sure that in the end I wasn’t the only—that others were
coming up behind me. As my mother, the plainspoken enemy of all hyperbole,
still says anytime someone starts gushing about me and Craig and our various
accomplishments, “They’re not special at all. The South Side is filled with kids
like that.” We just needed to help get them into those rooms.

The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value
of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small
ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my
confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved
me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and
indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those
environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor
female.

I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how
she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all
I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who
showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr.
Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my