Michelle Obama’s quote of the day: Former first lady Michelle Obama gives her deepest reflections on failure in memoir becomeshe talks about her childhood in Chicago, growing up, and her mother, Marian Robinson. The phrase came up when she was talking about her school, Bryn Mawr, an average to excellent school that had suddenly become the victim of some alarmist claims that it was becoming a “ghetto.”Michelle Obama’s quote was inspired by her school principal, Dr. Ravizzo, who fought back against school rumors.
Here’s the story behind the day’s memorable quotes
“As Chicago schools go, Bryn Mawr’s is somewhere between a bad school and a good school. Throughout the 1970s, the racial and economic classification of South Shore neighborhoods continued, meaning the number of students grew, the number of blacks grew, and the number of poor people grew. For a time, there was a citywide integration movement to send children to new schools, but Bryn Mawr parents successfully resisted the movement, arguing that the money would be better spent improving the schools themselves,” Michelle Obama wrote.“As a child, I didn’t know if it mattered if the facilities were shabby or if there were not many white kids left. The school ran from kindergarten through eighth grade, which meant that by the time I reached senior grade, I knew every light switch, every blackboard, and crack in the hallway. I knew nearly every teacher and most of the kids. To me, Bryn Mawr was literally an extension of home,” she wrote.When she entered seventh grade, something big happened. “When I entered seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper popular with African-American readers, published a vitriolic opinion piece claiming that Bryn Mawr had gone from one of the city’s best public schools to a “blighted ghetto” governed by a “ghetto mentality” in a few years.“Dr. Ravizzo, the principal of our school, immediately wrote back to the editor, defending his parent and student body and arguing that the newspaper article “was an egregious lie that seemed designed solely to incite feelings of failure and flight.” “Michelle Obama wrote: “Dr. Ravizzo, a rotund, cheerful man with an afro haircut and a bald patch on the sides, spent most of his time in an office near the building’s front door.”“It’s clear from his letter that he understood exactly what he was up against. Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It is a vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is often deliberately escalated out of fear. Those “losses” he mentioned Defeat “has become ubiquitous in my community, manifesting itself in parents who can’t get ahead financially, in children who begin to wonder how their lives will be different, in families who watch their affluent neighbors move to the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools,” Michelle Obama wrote.“There have always been predatory real estate agents roaming the South Shore, whispering to homeowners that they should sell before it’s too late and they’ll help them get out while you still can. Their reasoning is that failure is coming, it’s inevitable, it’s already halfway there. You can end up in ruins, or you can escape from it. They use the word everyone fears most – ‘ghetto’ – and throw it away like a match.“
What does this sentence mean?
This means that failure is often an internal psychological battle long before it manifests itself in reality. This happens when a person starts to doubt themselves because it is at that point that they lose confidence and lose their inner fight. The defeat came later and was simply a reflection of a battle that was lost mentally long ago.
