First Lady Michelle Obama
(4 of 7)
Put her in a room with black teenage girls and her message couldn't be more radical or more all-American: Anyone can be anything if they are willing to work hard enough at it. This is inspiration with an edge. The honors student who wrote her Princeton thesis about being black in the Ivy League knows that the difference between success and failure can be cruelly random. She knew lots of bright kids growing up, she says, "and you slowly see people slipping through the cracks, you know that there but for the grace of God." She had friends who could have thrived in college, but their parents didn't believe in going into debt to pay for it. "I saw kids like me who were using their loan money to help their parents pay the electric bill, and therefore they'd run out of money for books and couldn't feed themselves over the course of the semester ... So I just keep thinking about those kids who are missing opportunities by a hair, by a breath, by a parent, by a teacher, by a dollar amount, and I'm kind of working to make up some of that difference to the extent that I think I can."
One of her fantasies during the campaign was that in her White House, famous people wouldn't just come in; they would go out into the community too. So on a cool day in March, she dispatched a regiment of role models to schools across Washington, including singers Alicia Keys and Sheryl Crow, Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general, and Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel into space. Michelle visited Anacostia High School, where violence is common and signs on the walls tell students which baby supplies will be available through the Baby Bonus Bucks Redemption Program. She sat with a group of 10 girls and three boys, who had been chosen, she told them, because "somebody in your school thought that you had a lot of potential." She recalled how she had lived close to the University of Chicago but never set foot inside growing up. "It was a fancy college, and it didn't have anything to do with me." Maybe you feel the same way about the White House, she suggested. "There are so many kids like that," she observes, "who are living inches away from power and prestige and fame and fortune, and they don't even know that it exists."
Which is why that night, the women leaders reassembled at the White House for a dinner with more than 100 students from schools across the city to celebrate Women's History Month. Tonight is your night, Michelle told the girls. So don't be shy. "Poke and prod and figure out how [these women] got to be where they are and what you can do in your lives to get yourselves ready for that next step. Tonight we just want to say, Go for it! Don't hesitate. Don't act with fear. Just go for it." Because all the women in the room, she told the girls, see a little bit of ourselves in you.
"It's one of those events," she says looking back, "that stand out in my mind as, This is why I'm here."
White House Life