Obamapolooza!!!!

Michelle Obama is covering the latest issue of Time Magazine. In the article she talks about how her experiences as a black girl and later a black woman have shaped her.
“I kind of think back to my childhood, and I tell this story a lot. I mean, I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and literally a 10-minute drive away was the University of Chicago in all of its grandeur. And I never knew anything about that institution that was a few minutes away from me, and that was so telling, even to the point that my mother worked there. She worked there for four years as a secretary to the legal office. But I never set foot on campus. We came through, we picked her up, we left. It was sort of like another world that didn’t belong to me. I didn’t think about college in that sense when I was younger. So it was a very foreign place, even though it was a stone’s throw. It had an impact on my life.”
“There are so many institutions like that around the world, and so many kids like that who are living inches away from power and prestige and fame and fortune, and they don’t even know that it exists. And the White House, all these wonderful buildings, these monuments and capitols — I’m sure there are children who feel that way. I’m sure there are people in this country who feel the same way about these places that I did about the University of Chicago. I have probably dedicated more of my life to trying to break down those barriers for people. I think that might be one of the small themes in my professional life, is to try to be the bridge so that more people feel like they have access; that their voice, that their faces, that their worlds count in places like this and that there is understanding across those divides.”
“And as I grew up and came to work in those places, right, and got to know them, I realized that the misunderstanding or the disconnect goes both ways — that folks outside of these communities have no idea what goes on within these institutions, and sometimes the people in the institutions have no real understanding of the people who live outside. You know, everybody is dealing in these misperceptions about one another because there is no bridge.”
“I just feel like through the small things that we can do here at the White House, we can start exemplifying the importance of building those bridges, in real meaningful ways, so that when you come — when young people come here, they don’t have to come here and be something they’re not. They can come here and be who they are, and the folks here will listen. And we can go out and be ourselves and listen in their communities as well.”
Source
She's quite an example.

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