In "Becoming", Michelle Obama opts primarily for empowerment in relation to politics



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When Michelle Robinson first heard her fellow lawyers faint in front of a new summer partner, Barack Hussein Obama, she was dubious. "From my experience, you put a suit on a half-intelligent black man and whites tend to go crazy," she writes. Aside from recording her "rich, even sexy baritone" on the phone, she was not impressed, especially when he arrived late for her first day of work. The "breath of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder" would come later. But she would still struggle to adjust to her delays, her constant belief that everything would be fine, and how her ambitions often dictated the course of their lives.

"Becoming" discloses some details that the Obama had not spoken publicly before: the fertility treatments they used to design Malia and Sasha; the miscarriage that left her with "a pinch of heart followed by a painful shortness of breath" when she saw women walking with their children on the street; the advice of couples who saved their marriage when she felt that her political career would "end up steaming all our needs". She talks about the wardrobe that was the object of so much attention, explaining the great pressure she felt as the only African-American. first lady up here in a culture addicted to the image and double standard. It also includes some achievements from his achievements since the White House, including his initiatives against childhood obesity and in support of veterans.

But this is the most moving moment when Obama tries to understand what he is currently seeing in the country – if only because he is so clearly struggling to reconcile the gaudy realism of his education, brought about by necessity, with glamorous life, previously unthinkable she has today. Throughout her stay at the White House, she said, "I had lived with the awareness that we were provocative ourselves." She unambiguously characterized the new president as "tyrant" and " misogynist ", watching him do everything he could to cancel her husband's inheritance and replace the" carefully crafted compassionate policies "by what appears to be a brazen cruelty." I sometimes wonder, writes – where could the bottom be?

"My grandfather lived with the bitter residue of her own broken dreams," she recalls; Like many African-American men of his generation, his sneaky aspirations left him with "a basic level of resentment and mistrust". His life has been different, filled with possibilities, riches and achievements. She insists on listing the gains made by the country in the eight years preceding 2016, although gradual, because it would be too easy, she said, to succumb to despair. "Progress is slow," she told young people today; they must rely on "their persistence, their autonomy and their ability to win."

Despite all the Conservatives' attempts a decade ago to describe it as radical, Obama seems to be a measured and methodical centrist. But his does not have the slightest faith to expand the pie and cross the driveway. His pragmatism is more severe than that, even though it will seem particularly frustrating for those who believe that centrism and civility are no longer enough. As she writes in "Becoming", she has long learned to recognize the "universal challenge of confronting who you are with, where you come from and where you want to go."

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