Former first lady Michelle Obama gave her most insightful thought on failure in her memoir Becoming, where she spoke about her childhood in Chicago, her growing up, and her mother, Marian Robinson. The poignant quote appeared as she spoke about her school Bryn Mawr, which was a medium to good school, but it suddenly became a victim of some fearmongering that the school was becoming a ‘ghetto’.The quote attributed to Michelle Obama comes from the inspiration of her school principal Dr Lavizzo, who fought back the gossip about the school.
Here’s the story behind the memorable quote of the day
“As Chicago schools went, Bryn Mawr fell somewhere between a bad school and a good school. Racial and economic sorting in the South Shore neighborhood continued through the 1970s, meaning that the student population only grew blacker and poorer with each year. There was, for a time, a citywide integration movement to bus kids to new schools, but Bryn Mawr parents had successfully fought it off, arguing that the money was better spent improving the school itself,” Michelle Obama wrote.“As a kid, I had no perspective on whether the facilities were run-down or whether it mattered that there were hardly any white kids left. The school ran from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, which meant that by the time I’d reached the upper grades, I knew every light switch, every chalkboard and cracked patch of hallway. I knew nearly every teacher and most of the kids. For me, Bryn Mawr was practically an extension of home,” she wrote.It was when she was entering the seventh grade that something big happened. “As I was entering seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper that was popular with African American readers, ran a vitriolic opinion piece that claimed Bryn Mawr had gone, in the span of a few years, from being one of the city’s best public schools to a “run- down slum” governed by a “ghetto mentality.”“Our school principal, Dr. Lavizzo, immediately hit back with a letter to the editor, defending his community of parents and students and deeming the newspaper piece “an outrageous lie, which seems designed to incite only feelings of failure and flight.”“Dr Lavizzo was a round, cheery man,” Michelle Obama wrote, “who had an Afro that puffed out on either side of his bald spot and who spent most of his time in an office near the building’s front door.”“It’s clear from his letter that he understood precisely what he was up against. Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self- doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. Those “feelings of failure” he mentioned were everywhere already in my neighborhood, in the form of parents who couldn’t get ahead financially, of kids who were starting to suspect that their lives would be no different, of families who watched their better-off neighbors leave for the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools,” Michelle Obama wrote.“There were predatory real estate agents roaming South Shore all the while, whispering to homeowners that they should sell before it was too late, that they’d help them get out while you still can. The inference being that failure was coming, that it was inevitable, that it had already half arrived. You could get caught up in the ruin or you could escape it. They used the word everyone was most afraid of— “ghetto”—dropping it like a lit match.“
What does the quote mean?
It means that defeat is often an internal psychological battle long before it manifests in reality. It happens when a person starts doubting themselves because it is at that point that they lose self-confidence and lose the inner battle. Failure happens later as just a reflection of a battle mentally lost long before.
