decorated with sunflowers and purple fabric.
For my final round of commencements as First Lady, I spoke at Jackson
State University in Mississippi, another historically black school, using the
opportunity to talk about striving for excellence. I spoke at the City College of
New York, emphasizing the value of diversity and immigration. And on May 26,
which happened to be the day Donald Trump clinched the Republican
nomination for president, I was in New Mexico, speaking to a class of Native
American students who were graduating from a small residential high school,
nearly all of them headed next to college. The deeper I got into the experience of
being First Lady, the more emboldened I felt to speak honestly and directly about
what it meant to be marginalized by race and gender. My intention was to give
younger people a context for the hate surfacing in the news and in political
discourse and to give them a reason to hope.
I tried to communicate the one message about myself and my station in the
world that I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew
invisibility. I’d lived invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility. I liked to
mention that I was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson,
who was probably buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on a South Carolina
plantation. And in standing at a lectern in front of students who were thinking
about the future, I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in
some ways, to overcome invisibility.
The last commencement I attended that spring was personal—Malia’s
graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June. Our close friend
Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who’d written a poem for Barack’s first
inauguration, spoke to the class, which meant that Barack and I got to sit back
and just feel. I was proud of Malia, who was soon to head off to Europe to travel
for a few weeks with friends. After taking a gap year, she’d enroll at Harvard. I
was proud of Sasha, who turned fifteen that same day and was counting down the
hours to the Beyoncé concert she was going to in lieu of a birthday party. She
would go on to spend much of the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, living with
family friends until Barack and I arrived for vacation. She’d make new friends and
land her first job, working at a snack bar. I was proud, too, of my mother, who
sat nearby in the sunshine, wearing a black dress and heels, having managed to
live in the White House and travel the world with us while staying utterly and
completely herself.
I was proud of all of us, for almost being done.