Who cares about stairs?
A transcription of my favorite parts of the Michelle Obama Podcast episode featuring Barack Obama on 7/29/20
Barack: When I first moved to Chicago and started community organizing, I was basically working in the neighborhoods that you grew up in. I remember when I went to start my job, the guy who was training me said “the first month, all I want you to do is just talk to people”. So I would go around the neighborhoods and talk to people about how they ended up in Chicago: folks coming up from the south and the great migration, their parents, great grandparents. They would reminisce and say when we first moved here, everybody raised everybody’s kids. That was a really common thing. If I was messing up, it wasn’t just Miss Smith-down-the-street. She’d see me messing up and she’d scold me. Then when I got home, I might get whooped because she’d have called my mom. So what you got was this portrait of a village.
Michelle: It felt easier in those times to have a family unit because it wasn’t just that you were supposed to branch out. That success wasn’t defined by your ability to leave your nuclear unit and make it on your own. That wasn’t how either one of us was raised. Every elder lived with someone. They shared expenses, shared households, they shared duties of raising kids. So there wasn’t this feeling that you were supposed to do this thing called loving and supporting your family on your own. It felt like the community, the neighborhood that I grew up with, operated on that notion and it wasn’t just up to that parent to provide that stability and that love.
Barack: Your values always start with those closest to you, right? So my mom deeply believed that everybody is worthy of love and praise and support. I think a part of what also happened because I moved around a lot as a kid and I didn’t have a big extended family like you did was my friendships became really important. All my buddies who you still know — Bobby, Greg, Mike — all the guys I grew up with and stayed in touch with all these years — that was my crew, that was my family. It’s interesting when I look back: all of us were from broken homes, all of us were working class to middle class at least from an income perspective but we were going to a school that had a lot of rich kids. We had to share and improvise. Greg lived on one side of town and the school where we went was a lot closer to my grandparents’ apartment so he would either sleep at my place or Mike’s place most of the week. My grandparents fed him and my grandma’s mom looked after him and made sure his clothes were clean. To some degree, we built our own community.
Michelle: At the core of everything you had done politically, what I know about you as a person, and one of the reasons why I fell in love with you, is because you’re guided by the principle that we are all each other’s brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. That’s how I was raised. My values in terms of what I think my obligation, my personal obligation as Michelle Obama, is that it is not enough that I succeed on my own. I have to care about what happens to the kid in the desk next to me at school because he’s just as smart but his mom works. My father always taught us to take in everybody’s full story, not to judge people — the drunk uncle or the cousin out of work — because you don’t know what happened to them. That we weren’t special, and so if something good happens to you or if you have an advantage, you don’t hoard it — you share it. You reach out. You give back. I can say that my family, my neighborhood, my notions of community growing up, shaped that view and shaped the choices that I made in life as I felt your experiences shaped yours.
Barack: I think I figured out once I got to school that if I’m just chasing after my own success, that somehow I’m gonna end up alone and unhappy. That’s why I ended up going into community organizing and the work I was doing because when I thought about I wanted to spend my life, I looked at what those civil rights workers had done and the freedom writers had done and I thought, that looks like hard work but it never looks like lonely work. That looks like hard and risky work, but it never looks like selfish, isolated, meaningless work.
Michelle: You could have done anything because of your academic achievement. You were the number one student at Harvard Law Review, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, top of your class. But you were running away from the money.
Barack: The thing that Harvard education gave me wasn’t the chance to chase as much money as I wanted. What I purchased was enough credentials and security that I could do the crazy things I wanted to do in terms of work in neighborhoods, going into politics, all of that knowing that I had enough of a floor beneath me that I was going to be okay.
Michelle: Our paths were almost flipped. I was punching the ticket. That’s what I thought: get out of school, buy a nice car.
Barack: Remember the wine club? Remember that? You were a wine club member.
Michelle: And we didn’t even drink wine back then! I never even opened a bottle. It seemed like a very professional thing to do.
Michelle: But I was punching the ticket. I was on that track. I was checking my boxes. I was doing what I thought I needed to do because I was a poor kid. I didn’t feel like I had the option to do other things but I also had a limited vision of what I could be because schools don’t show you the world, they just show you a bunch of careers. But I came to learn the same thing you learned. While working on the 47th floor of that fancy law firm and making all that money, it felt lonely. It felt isolating. I had this amazing view of the southeast side of the city from my office — I could see the lake and all of the neighborhood that I came from — and I never felt further from that neighborhood than when I was sitting in that office working on briefs and cases that had nothing to do with anything that helped a broader group of people outside of myself. It felt lonely. I say this to young people when they ask why I left corporate law to go into community service: the truth is, it was selfish. I was happier. When I left that firm and started working in the city and getting out into the broader community of chicago and seeing the interconnectedness of these neighborhoods, being alive in the dirt and grit of helping people, I never looked back.
Barack: You’re exactly right. I used to say that the years I spent organizing, I got more out of it than the people I was supposedly organizing. We were so young and inexperienced — it’s not like I set the world on fire, but I felt ok. I felt like I got roots here. I got a community. I got people and stories I know who know me, who connect me to a larger vision and a larger purpose. I know you felt the same way when you did Public Allies, right?
Michelle: When I left the firm, I went to the city and I got really interesting insight and exposure of what it’s like to work in the government but then I had an opportunity to run the Chicago office of this new nonprofit that was basically designed to help young adults find careers in public service. I had to literally go into all 77 community areas that make up the city of Chicago and meet with the heads of alternative school programs or programs working with single mothers or health care initiatives or fairly qualified health centers. I learned so much about the nonprofit world but more importantly I got out into this big broad amazing city that was Chicago…
Michelle: …I felt the “we” of Chicago, and that was by far one of the best parts of my career development: working with that nonprofit organization and meeting kids from all over the city and watching them discover different parts of the community and find their power and voice.
Barack: And start to find their common stories right?
Michelle: Yeah.
Barack: Something changed in the late 70s, early 80s. When we were coming up, the culture wasn’t beating us over the head every day with what you should have.
Barack: [describing the house he grew up in] I didn’t feel poor in that.
Michelle: We didn’t feel poor either. But if you go back to visit the house we grew up in, it’s tiny. We were broke.
Barack: [laughs] We were broke.
Michelle: But yeah, we talk about this a lot. The phrase that sticks with me from my parents is, “never enough”. Never enough. Because the minute we had a little bit of something — a pint of ice cream, a chocolate — we then asked for strawberry, and got in trouble. It was like, how dare you not be satisfied with what you have? And then we would feel bad because they were right. Because here I am with this little bowl of ice cream and I’m asking for more —
Barack: — before you’ve even finish your ice cream yet!
Michelle: “Never satisfied”! I find myself saying that to Malia and Sasha too and they know it. We’ll be doing something great and then you start to look over, it’s like — never satisfied. Stuff doesn’t make you happy.
Barack: Yes. I think that culturally we’ve become much more focused on stuff and much less focused on relationships, family. And part of being an adult, part of being a citizen, is you give something up.
Michelle: Instead of that, we have “you can have it all.” That’s the philosophy. Even when I talk to young mothers, it’s “how can I have it all”? Because the model has become not that you sacrifice, but you should be able to have it all and how do you get it. And if you don’t get it, then something’s wrong. I always joke, that was the opposite of how we were brought up. You were never supposed to have it all. In fact, if you had it all, you were being greedy. That meant somebody didn’t have anything. but that’s what we’re kinda teaching young people. You should have a career, you should earn a lot of money, you should be fulfilled, you should have your passion, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice that much, you should have it all.
Barack: You now have this sense of a cut-throat competition.
Michelle: That we’re all on our own. It’s dog-eat-dog. It’s not “us”. It’s “us-against-them”.
Barack: We’re constantly nervous about where we’re going to be on this pecking order, and then that reflects itself in our politics. At a certain point, we start thinking about politics in terms of “how do I protect ME”? Not “how do I look after US?”.
