Chapter Nine: The Armor We Wear

Michelle discusses adaptability, beginning with an anecdote about her first time speaking live on television. Shortly before the presidential election in 2008, she appeared at the Democratic National Convention in support of Barack’s presidential bid. Arriving at the podium, she realizes there were several unexpected contingencies: one of the two teleprompters is dead, and the “confidence monitor” that shows her speech is completely obscured by the signs the audience is holding. Though her anxiety was inevitably heightened, she still spoke well; certain that preparedness is always critical, she had memorized the speech word-for-word in advance.

In her view, preparedness and adaptability are paradoxically linked to each other. While adaptability inherently means rising to a situation you have not fully prepared for, the act of preparation provides you with a confident foundation from which to deviate when things go awry. While Michelle cannot always count on things proceeding as planned, she is always able to count on her preparedness.

Her urge to prepare and work hard has been a reliable constant throughout her life; however, she is careful to note that achievement in childhood is a very complicated thing. Reflecting on her own early academic experience, she recalls how students were put into “learning tracks” according to their perceived ability levels. Michelle notes the disservice this stratification does to children. Neutrality in this situation is impossible: resources and expectations are focused on those in the high-achieving tracks and those in the other tracks are left far behind. Not only does this stifle them academically, but it also disadvantages them socially; every student is conscious of the hierarchy that emerges from this unequal treatment. 

As a more recent example of inequitable expectations, Michelle retells an anecdote she first recounted in Becoming. During her first visit to England as First Lady, she had affectionately put her hand on the Queen’s shoulder. The Queen reciprocated the gesture by warmly putting her arm around Michelle’s back, but the press was already talking about how “disrespectful” Michelle Obama dared to touch the Queen.

The pressure to know the unspoken rules of propriety in specific, niche environments often falls disproportionately on Black or other marginalized people, who must constantly toe invisible lines and intuit mysterious rules to remain safe in unfamiliar environments that cater to others, not them. “Code-switching,” or shifting in and out of different sets of social rules as the environment dictates, is a tactic by which many accomplish this. Code-switching, she explains, is draining and laborious—it requires consciously knowing many sets of rules in the first place, reading all the hidden cues of an environment the moment you arrive, and adjusting and re-adjusting constantly.

There are, she notes, downsides to this practice. It may seem safer in the long run, but the extra work of constantly code-switching means every interaction is infinitely more laborious than for someone unencumbered by this task. Further, it often involves minimizing one’s authentic identity to better “fit in,” which can reinforce harmful ideas about who does and does not belong in a given space.

Recalling her own early career experience working in corporate law, Michelle remembers the women who ranked above her at the firm. Though they were always welcoming and supportive, she also could not help but notice that they possessed a kind of ruggedness that she likens to the “bearing of pioneers.” The expectation was extreme: when they were in the office, they were lawyers, not full people with family lives. This gave the impression that their acceptance into the “club” was conditional. They had managed to get in but needed to continue to justify their place there forever. Silencing their lives as wives and mothers and focusing primarily on themselves as lawyers were their “armor” and shielded them from unfair and gendered scrutiny.