Ronald Lett

“Barack wasn't a real black man, like them--someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many books could never be.
What bothered me most was that Barack exemplified everything parents on the South Side often said they wanted for their kids.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“...Barack had told me, he'd contended most often with a deep weariness in people--especially black people---a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time. I understood it. I'd seen it in my own neighborhood, in my own family. A bitterness, a lapse in faith. It lived in both of my grandfathers, spawned by every goal they'd abandoned and every compromise they'd had to make. It was inside the harried second-grade teacher who'd basically given up trying to teach us at Bryn Mawr. It was inside the neighbor who'd stopped mowing her lawn or keeping track of where her kids went after school. It lived in every piece of trash tossed carelessly in the grass at our local park and every ounce of malt liquor drained before dark. It lived in every last thing we deemed unfixable, including ourselves.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“They were unapologetic about prioritizing the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting the flow at work, and didn't try to compartmentalize work and home the way I'd noticed male partners at Sidley seemed to do.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“And then again, there was something painfully familiar in the menace and male jocularity of that tape. I can hurt you and get away with it. ... Every woman I know recognized it. Every person who's ever been made to feel 'other' recognized it. ... Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It's the ugliest kind of power.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming