Words.
"For decades, the divide between the White House and the impoverished black and immigrant neighborhoods in the nation’s capital has often seemed insurmountable. But in recent months, Michelle Obama has become something of a human bridge between the two worlds.
Mrs. Obama, the first lady, has repeatedly traveled to Anacostia and other neighborhoods rarely visited by the power elite here in an effort to reach out to young people who are struggling to succeed.
She has offered advice to Tiara Chance, the daughter of a part-time cleaning lady, who has long believed that college is solely for the well to do; to Ashleigh Cannon, who lives in a group home and longs for the rhythms of stable family life; and to Akrem Muzemil, an Ethiopian immigrant who has struggled to learn English and to close his ears to the seductive call of street gangs hunting for recruits.
To the students she counsels, Mrs. Obama’s gilded life in the White House is almost unimaginable. But in their stories, friends and relatives say, the first lady hears the echoes of her own struggles as a working-class girl on the South Side of Chicago.
...Mrs. Obama, the first African-American first lady, is also among the first to emerge from the urban working class, historians say. Her parents never attended college and rented an apartment when she was growing up. At Princeton, she wrote in her senior thesis, she sometimes felt “like a visitor on campus, as if I don’t really belong.”
Mrs. Obama feels so strongly about dispelling such doubts among young people that she came close to tears last month as she addressed a girls’ school in London. Aides said she saw something of herself in the faces of the immigrant girls in the audience.
“She wants to help those who were like she was,” said Craig Robinson, her brother. “She is focused on telling them they can make it.”
...“There were kids around my neighborhood who would say, ‘Ooo, you talk like a white girl,’ ” Mrs. Obama said. “I heard that growing up my whole life. I was like, ‘I don’t even know what that means.’ But you know what? I’m still getting my A’s.”
The students welcome her with astonishment."
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