Harvard University
Beyond race and prejudice
What a heart warming autobiography Becoming is – reinforcing the opinion I formed watching the Obamas during their time in the public eye: decent, honourable, hard-working, intelligent, well grounded, warm, caring.
The book is divided into three parts:
Becoming me – takes us from Michelle‘s childhood through to her falling in love with Barack.
Becoming us – covers their marriage, parenthood and entering the world of politics through to Barack becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States.
Becoming more – sees them surviving two full terms in office.
Her father taught her to work hard, laugh often and keep her word; her mother showed her how to think for herself and use her voice. Michelle Robinson herself emerged from humble origins into adulthood adopting all these attitudes, well balanced thanks to her close family unit, consistent love, high expectations, strong values, encouraging her to work hard at improving her sense of self-worth, excelling at school well enough to study law at Harvard – and all that in spite of the prejudices about women and race prevailing in the USA. As she puts it:
I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.
By the time she met Barack Obama, Michelle was already making a name for herself as a clever, articulate, determined, no-nonsense, principled woman, trying to make a difference in the lives of disadvantaged people. She recounts with disarming candour how Barack’s political ambition and slovenly habits strained her tolerance at times, and her struggle to retain her own sense of identity as an independent woman and mother in the face of his drive to further his career, and do his bit to improve the lot of ordinary American citizens.
Family was always her top priority. Though Barack was increasingly caught up in campaigning and meetings and responsibilities to the country, Michelle remained doggedly insistent that she should get back home to her two daughters at night, and attend school functions. Once she became First Lady even the most mundane of ordinary activities would become major strategic exercises such was the level of security necessary to protect them all, but throughout her maternal devotion never wavered.
In spite of their high principles, their obvious love for one another, and the lack of scandal in their lives, once the Obamas rose to political prominence they became fair game for every reporter around the world. Barack, naturally calm and steeped in political history, absorbed by the big problems in the country, remained relatively undisturbed by the rumours and misperceptions, but he was the central figure, and as such had the full weight of a large team of advisers and supporters around him. Michelle cared what people thought, craved approval, and took criticism to heart, but as simply the spouse of the main man, she was given no training and only limited back-up … until that is she began attracting negative publicity.
Over time their decency and high hopes for improving the lives of their fellow countrymen gained traction and their popularity soared, but even as support swelled, it was shadowed by cruel counter-narratives suggesting they were charlatans, ineligible and inappropriate to be America’s leading couple. Hearing this through Michelle’s eyes gives it added poignancy and pain. For someone who had struggled with her sense of self-worth for much of her formative years, having her own intellectual and personal and political credentials maligned falsely and publicly cut deep.
I am telling you, this stuff hurt.
And resentment built. After all she hadn’t chosen this life, she’d never like politics, she’d left her job and given up her identity and power for Barack’s campaign and ambition. To weather these tensions, somehow, she knew, she had to reclaim her personal self-worth and be her true self wherever she went. Happily, once she was given more support, she was able to embrace her role and begin to enjoy the unique opportunities she was given to woo the American people through the force of her personality, the eloquence of her distinctive voice, and the power of her message for change.
She allowed her naturally warm empathetic style free rein, engaging with people close up in their lives. She did a lot of hugging! And she learned an important lesson: It’s harder to hate up close. The more she showed the people how genuine and caring she was, the more they came to see the caricatures of her were untrue.
And so their campaign flourished. The election would be the real test: had the country indeed moved beyond race and prejudice as the polls suggested? Would it prove that Michelle’s conviction was right:
Barack was the right person for this moment in history … ?
And indeed, as we all know, on 4 November 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was declared the forty-fourth President of the United States. He could declare that
On this day we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
And so Michelle rose from obscurity to become First Lady of the United States of America aka FLOTUS – the first black woman ever to hold this position. She lived in the White House for 8 years, eager to make it less formal, more accessible, more welcoming, more representative of a cross section of American society. She herself wanted not be a well-dressed ornament cutting ribbons and cakes, smiling adoringly at her husband, but to make a difference in a meaningful way: improving the nation’s health, supporting service personnel, combatting racism, helping ordinary people – and especially children – to feel valued and supported …
(to) push back against the old and damning narrative about being a black urban kid in America, the one that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival …
… to point out students’ strengths and give them some glimpse of a way forward …
And in the drive to do that, she was prepared to accept for a while the loss of privacy, the erosion of family time, the presence of a constant security detail, less time for her own work.
Which of us could fail to see the difference between the two couples who took centre stage at the end of those eight years as the Obamas handed over the reins to Donald and Melania Trump? – stark and palpable for all to see in the coverage on our screens. The former, gracious and dignified, smiling and courteous, even with the man who had mocked and vilified them so publicly for so long:
a bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance.
… bragging about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established standards of decency.
In reviewing their time in the highest office, Michelle was able to say with complete conviction,
we’d managed two terms in office without major scandal. We had held ourselves and the people who worked with us to the highest standards of ethics and decency …
It was now time for her to begin the task of finding herself again, of squaring who she was with where she came from, and where she wanted to go. Of finding her voice yet again.
Throughout her story what comes across is the sheer humanity, grace, integrity and humility of this lady. A person we would surely all love to have sitting beside us at a banquet.
The transformational power of education
How many of us really appreciate the education we received? We mostly take it for granted, don’t we? – only stopping in our tracks when we hear children in less advantaged countries expressing their amazement or gratitude for opportunities (often limited) that come their way.
Educated is a searing account of one woman’s extraordinary childhood and the transformative power of education in her life. It’s a compelling and sobering read, beautifully written, and unflinching in its honesty.
Gene Westover doesn’t believe in the state, so his daughter Tara has no birth certificate, no schooling, no medical records. The government doesn’t follow up her absence from school because, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, she does not exist. Instead she spends her early formative years preparing for the ‘Days of Abomination’, or roaming the mountain, or bottling fruit ready for the End of Days, or delivering herbs and babies with her untrained unlicensed midwife mother.
The extremities of her dysfunctional family emerge only gradually in Tara’s memoir, which somehow makes the revelations the more harrowing.
Tara Westover is the youngest of seven children. Her father is a religious zealot, a paranoid and fundamentalist Mormon, an eccentric, who believes drinking milk is forbidden in the Scriptures; that public school is a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God; college education the work of the devil.
There’s two kinds of them college professors. Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth. Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati, who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.
To Tara’s father the theatre is a den of adulterers and fornicators; doctors are sons of perdition, and the Medical Establishment to be avoided at all costs; a teenage girl showing an inch of bare shoulder is a gentile exhibiting rank provocation; accepting a Government grant is to indebt oneself to the Illuminati; safety at work is a matter of faith in God. As Tara says:
We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith above safety. Because he believed himself right – after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.
It’s only years later that she suspects he suffered from bipolar disorder – unacknowledged, undiagnosed. At the time she believed his rantings: … the whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.
The Westover family live in a state of permanent chaos and squalor, and expectation of the imminent end of life as we know it. They keep themselves distant from anyone who believes differently, and even scorn members of their own church. Their family are the only true Mormons they know.
The house was pure confusion: piles of unwashed laundry, oily and black from the junkyard, littered the bedroom floors; in the kitchen, murky jars of tincture lined every table and cabinet, and these were only cleared away to make space for even messier projects, perhaps to skin a deer carcass or strip Cosmoline off a rifle. But in the heart of this chaos,Tyler [my third brother] had half a decade’s pencil shavings, [stored in matchboxes in his closet] catalogued by year.
It’s a wonder Tara survived childhood given the accidents and horrors and violence that befell her. Her father might believe angels were protecting them; her brothers might say they were protecting her; but to a dispassionate reader Tara relied largely on her own quick wits and instincts to survive. And in self defence she sometimes re-wrote history. It was the only way she could handle the manipulative controlling behaviour that characterised family life.
She finds redemption in study. Initially she uses dense church texts to learn.
In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse a narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
Then she applies herself to mastering the abstraction of algebra and trigonometry, of prepositions and gerunds, and of science, for the entrance exam to college, and that, in spite of her father’s constant refrain that her desire is flying in the face of God’s laws.
The Lord has called me to testify. He is so displeased. You have cast aside His blessings to whore after man’s knowledge. His wrath is stirred against you. It will not be long in coming.
University life is a shock to the system for Tara, even though it’s Brigham Young. Not only is the whole programme of work completely alien to her, but her fellow students repeatedly shock her. They think nothing of breaking the strict Mormon code of behaviour she has lived by: they shop and watch movies on Sundays, they wear skimpy clothes, they use soap regularly, they drink Coke. She’s surrounded by gentiles disguised as saints. She desperately clings to every truth, every doctrine, her father has taught her, finding a new devotion to an old creed. It’s only when she learns about slavery and apartheid at university that she starts to see her upbringing for what it was.
I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, and myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either wilfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others ...
Course-wise Tara is at a grave disadvantage. I wanted to weep at her accounts of ritual humiliation because of her deprived upbringing; her complete unpreparedness for life; her determination to remain true to her father’s philosophy. It’s clear from her writing that this girl is highly intelligent and discerning; and yet her loyalty overrides her instinct. But gradually, incrementally, enlightenment comes, and she receives sympathetic help. So much so that she wins entry to a study abroad programme at Cambridge in England!
I believed myself invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette.
But the refinement, the encouragement, the praise, at Cambridge, compared with her former life of violence and manipulative control on the mountain, is initially overwhelming. She could never belong here …
… being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life …
I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it … The ugliness of me had to be given expression.
However, her brilliance as a scholar shines through her social gaucheness. She is nurtured by her academic mentors, winning a Gates scholarship to Cambridge on merit and with their powerful endorsement. Her father still takes the credit, because they home schooled her … but he is also bereft – she is putting herself beyond the reach of his protection.
If you’re in America we can come for you. Wherever you are. I’ve got a thousand gallons of fuel buried in the field. I can fetch you when The End comes, bring you home, make you safe. But if you cross the ocean …
But it’s there, as a full time postgrad, and subsequently a PhD student, in this famous seat of learning, that she finds the courage to live in the real world. It is to cost her dear. One by one her family betray and disown her, creating a fantasy history exonerating themselves, blaming her for the evil influences that have led her astray. In the face of this agony, even a visiting fellowship to Harvard is robbed of any allure. This was what education had cost her. For a time she believes herself to be insane, delusional, crippled by psychological injuries, and begins to unravel. It takes years, and independent corroboration, for her to regain belief in herself. Some rifts are never healed, but eventually she finds a measure of peace – both within herself and with some of her family – without renouncing her own hard won belief.
A superb memoir by an inspirational writer and courageous woman.