Becoming Read online

  “All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you.

  An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

  * * *

  Two months after Hadiya Pendleton’s funeral, I returned to Chicago. I’d directed Tina, my chief of staff and an attorney who herself had spent many years in the city, to throw her energy into rallying support for violence prevention there. Tina was a bighearted policy wonk with an infectious laugh and more hustle than just about anyone I knew. She understood which levers to pull inside and outside government to make an impact at the scale I envisioned. Moreover, her nature and experience wouldn’t allow her voice to go unheard, especially at tables dominated by men, where she often found herself. Throughout Barack’s second term, she would wrestle with the Pentagon and various state governors to clear away red tape so that veterans and military spouses could more efficiently build their careers, and she’d also help engineer a mammoth new administration-wide effort centered on girls’ education worldwide.

  In the wake of Hadiya’s death, Tina had leveraged her local contacts, encouraging Chicago business leaders and philanthropists to work with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to expand community programs for at-risk youth across the city. Her efforts had helped yield $33 million in pledges in just a matter of weeks. On a cool day in April, Tina and I flew out to attend a meeting of community leaders discussing youth empowerment, and also to meet a new group of kids.

  Earlier that winter, the public radio program This American Life had devoted two hours to telling the stories of students and staff from William R. Harper Senior High School in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side. In the previous year, twenty-nine of the school’s current and recent students had been shot, eight of them fatally. These numbers were astonishing to me and my staff, but the sad fact is that urban schools around the country were contending with epidemic levels of gun violence. Amid all the talk of youth empowerment, it seemed important to actually sit down and hear from the youth.

  When I was young, Englewood had been a rough neighborhood but not necessarily as deadly as it was now. In junior high, I’d traveled to Englewood for weekly biology labs at a community college there. Now, years later, as my motorcade made its way past strips of neglected bungalows and shuttered storefronts, past vacant lots and burned-out buildings, it looked to me as if the only thriving businesses left were the liquor stores.

  I thought back to my own childhood and my own neighborhood, and how the word “ghetto” got thrown around like a threat. The mere suggestion of it, I understood now, caused stable, middle-class families to bail preemptively for the suburbs, worried their property values would drop. “Ghetto” signaled that a place was both black and hopeless. It was a label that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival. It closed corner groceries and gas stations and undermined schools and educators trying to instill self-worth in neighborhood kids. It was a word everyone tried to run from, but it could rear up on a community quick.

  In the middle of West Englewood sat Harper High School, a large sand-brick building with multiple wings. I met the school’s principal, Leonetta Sanders, a quick-moving African American woman who’d been at the school for six years, and two school social workers who immersed themselves in the lives of the 510 kids enrolled at Harper, most of them from low-income families. One of the social workers, Crystal Smith, could often be found pacing Harper’s hallways between classes, peppering students with positivity, communicating her high regard for them by calling out, “I’m so proud of you!” and “I see you trying hard!” She’d shout, “I appreciate you in advance!” for every good choice she trusted those students would make.

  In the school library that day, I joined a circle of twenty-two Harper students—all African American, mostly juniors and seniors—who were seated in chairs and on couches, dressed in khakis and collared shirts. Most were eager to talk. They described a daily, even hourly, fear of gangs and violence. Some explained that they had absent or addicted parents; a couple had spent time in juvenile detention centers. A junior named Thomas had witnessed a good friend—a sixteen-year-old girl—get shot and killed the previous summer. He’d also been there when his older brother, who had been partially paralyzed due to a gunshot injury, was shot and wounded in the same incident while sitting outside in his wheelchair. Nearly every kid there that day had lost someone—a friend, relative, neighbor—to a bullet. Few, meanwhile, had ever been downtown to see the lakefront or visit Navy Pier.

  At one point, one of the social workers interjected, saying to the group, “Eighty degrees and sunny!” Everyone in the circle began nodding, ruefully. I wasn’t sure why. “Tell Mrs. Obama,” she said. “What goes through your mind when you wake up in the morning and hear the weather forecast is eighty and sunny?”

  She clearly knew the answer, but wanted me to hear it.

  A day like that, the Harper students all agreed, was no good. When the weather was nice, the gangs got more active and the shooting got worse.

  These kids had adapted to the upside-down logic dictated by their environment, staying indoors when the weather was good, varying the routes they took to and from school each day based on shifting gang territories and allegiances. Sometimes, they told me, taking the safest path home meant walking right down the middle of the street as cars sped past them on both sides. Doing so gave them a better view of any escalating fights or possible shooters. And it gave them more time to run.

  America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.

  And now I was at Harper, listening to children talking about how to stay alive. I admired their resilience, and I wished desperately that they didn’t need it so much.

  One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you actually going to do about any of this?”

  To them, I represented Washington, D.C., as much as I did the South Side. And when it came to Washington, I felt I owed them the truth.

  “Honestly,” I began, “I know you’re dealing with a lot here, but no one’s going to save you anytime soon. Most people in Washington aren’t even trying. A lot of them don’t even know you exist.” I explained to those students that progress is slow, that they couldn’t afford to simply sit and wait for change to come. Many Americans didn’t want their taxes raised, and Congress couldn’t even pass a budget let alone rise above petty partisan bickering, so there weren’t going to be billion-dollar investments in education or magical turnarounds for their community. Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure tha
t could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing terribly uplifting or encouraging to say.

  I went on, though, to make a different pitch, one that came directly from my South Side self. Use school, I said.

  These kids had just spent an hour telling me stories that were tragic and unsettling, but I reminded them that those same stories also showed their persistence, self-reliance, and ability to overcome. I assured them that they already had what it would take to succeed. Here they were, sitting in a school that was offering them a free education, I said, and there were a whole lot of committed and caring adults inside that school who thought they mattered. About six weeks later, thanks to donations from local businesspeople, a group of Harper students would come to the White House, to visit with me and Barack personally, and also spend time at Howard University, learning what college was about. I hoped that they could see themselves getting there.

  I will never pretend that words or hugs from a First Lady alone can turn somebody’s life around or that there’s any easy path for students trying to navigate everything that those kids at Harper were dealing with. No story is that simple. And of course, every one of us sitting in the library that day knew this. But I was there 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. If I could point out those students’ strengths and give them some glimpse of a way forward, then I would always do it. It was a small difference I could make.

  24

  In the spring of 2015, Malia announced that she’d been invited to the prom by a boy she kind of liked. She was sixteen then, finishing her junior year at Sidwell. To us, she was still our kid, long-legged and enthusiastic as she’d always been, though every day she seemed to become a little more adult. She was now nearly as tall as I was and starting to think about applying to college. She was a good student, curious and self-possessed, a collector of details much like her dad. She’d become fascinated by films and filmmaking and the previous summer had taken it upon herself to seek out Steven Spielberg one evening when he’d come to the White House for a dinner party, asking him so many questions that he followed up with an offer to let her intern on a TV series he was producing. Our girl was finding her way.

  Normally, for security reasons, Malia and Sasha weren’t allowed to ride in anyone else’s car. Malia had a provisional license by then and was able to drive herself around town, though always with agents following in their own vehicle. But still, since moving to Washington at the age of ten, she’d never once ridden a bus or the Metro or been driven by someone who didn’t work for the Secret Service. For prom night, though, we were making an exception.

  On the appointed evening, her date arrived in his car, clearing security at the southeast gate of the White House, following the path up and around the South Lawn by which heads of state and other visiting dignitaries normally arrived, and then gamely—bravely—walking into the Dip Room dressed in a black suit.

  “Just be cool please, okay?” Malia had said to me and Barack, her embarrassment already beginning to smolder as we rode the elevator downstairs. I was barefoot, and Barack was in flip-flops. Malia wore a long black skirt and an elegant bare-shouldered top. She looked beautiful and about twenty-three years old.

  By my reckoning, we did manage to play it cool, though Malia still laughs, remembering it all as a bit excruciating. Barack and I shook the young man’s hand, snapped a few pictures, and gave our daughter a hug before sending them on their way. We took what was perhaps unfair comfort in the knowledge that Malia’s security detail would basically ride the boy’s bumper all the way to the restaurant where they were going for dinner before the dance and would remain on quiet duty throughout the night.

  From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers—knowing that a set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with extricating them from any sort of emergency. From a teenager’s standpoint, though, this was understandably a complete and total drag. As with many aspects of life in the White House, we were left to sort out what it meant for our family—where and how to draw the lines, how to balance the requirements of the presidency against the needs of two kids learning how to mature on their own.

  Once they got to high school, we gave the girls curfews—first 11:00 and eventually midnight—and enforced them, according to Malia and Sasha, with more vigor than many of their friends’ parents did. If I was concerned about their safety or whereabouts, I could always check in with the agents, but I tried not to. It was important to me that the kids trusted their security team. Instead, I did what I think a lot of parents do and relied on a network of other parents for information, all of us pooling what we knew about where the flock of them was going and whether there’d be an adult in charge. Of course, our girls carried extra responsibility by virtue of who their father was, knowing that their screwups could make headlines. Barack and I both recognized how unfair this was. Both of us had pushed boundaries and done dumb things as teenagers, and we’d been fortunate to do it all without the eyes of a nation on us.

  Malia had been eight when Barack sat on the edge of her bed in Chicago and asked if she thought it was okay for him to run for president. I think now of how little she’d known at the time, how little any of us could have known. It meant one thing to be a child in the White House. It meant something different to try to emerge from it as an adult. How could Malia have guessed that she’d have men with guns following her to prom someday? Or that people would take photos of her sneaking a cigarette and sell them to gossipy websites?

  Our kids were coming of age during what felt like a unique time. Apple had begun selling the iPhone in June 2007, about four months after Barack announced his candidacy for president. A million of them sold in less than three months. A billion of them sold before his second term was over. His was the first presidency of a new era, one involving the disruption and dismantling of all norms around privacy—involving selfies, data hacks, Snapchats, and Kardashians. Our daughters lived more deeply inside it than we did, in part because social media governed teen life and in part because their routines put them in closer contact with the public than ours did. As Malia and Sasha moved around Washington with their friends after school or on weekends, they’d catch sight of strangers pointing their phones in their direction, or contend with grown men and women asking—even demanding—to take a selfie with them. “You do know that I’m a child, right?” Malia would sometimes say when turning someone down.

  Barack and I did what we could to protect our kids from too much exposure, declining all media requests for them and working to keep their everyday lives largely out of sight. Their Secret Service escorts supported us by trying to be less conspicuous when following the girls around in public, wearing board shorts and T-shirts instead of suits and swapping their earpieces and wrist microphones for earbud headsets, in order to better blend in at the teenage hangouts they now frequented. We strongly disapproved of the publication of any photos of our children that weren’t connected to an official event, and the White House press office made this clear to the media. Melissa and others on my team became my enforcers anytime an image of one of the girls surfaced on a gossip site, making haranguing phone calls to get it taken down.

  Guarding the girls’ privacy meant finding other ways to satiate the public’s curiosity about our family. Early in Barack’s second term, we’d added a new puppy to the household—Sunny—a free-spirited rambler who seemed to see no point in being house-trained, given how big her new house was. The dogs added a lightness to everything. They were living, loafing proof that the White House was a home. Knowing that Malia and Sasha were basically off-limits, the White House communications teams began requesting the dogs for official appearance
s. In the evenings, I’d find memos in my briefing book asking me to approve a “Bo and Sunny Drop-By,” allowing the dogs to mingle with members of the media or children coming for a tour. The dogs would get deployed when reporters came to learn about the importance of American trade and exports or, later, to hear Barack speak in favor of Merrick Garland, his pick for the Supreme Court. Bo starred in a promotional video for the Easter Egg Roll. He and Sunny posed with me for photos in an online campaign to urge people to sign up for health-care coverage. They made excellent ambassadors, impervious to criticism and unaware of their own fame.

  * * *

  Like all kids, Sasha and Malia outgrew things over time. Since the first year of Barack’s presidency, they had joined him in front of reporters each fall while he performed what had to be the most ridiculous ritual of the office—pardoning a live turkey just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. For the first five years, they’d smiled and giggled as their dad cracked corny jokes. But by the sixth year, at thirteen and sixteen, they were too old to even pretend it was funny. Within hours of the ceremony, photos of the two of them looking aggrieved appeared all over the internet—Sasha stone-faced, Malia with her arms crossed—as they stood next to the president, his lectern, and the oblivious turkey. A USA Today headline summed it up fairly enough: “Malia and Sasha Obama Are So Done with Their Dad’s Turkey Pardon.”

  Their attendance at the pardon, as well as at virtually every White House event, became entirely optional. These were happy, well-adjusted teens with lives that were accordingly rich with activities and social intrigue having nothing to do with their parents. As a parent, you’re only sort of in control, anyway. Our kids had their own agendas, which left them less impressed with even the more fun parts of ours.