Michelle Obama’s quote today about failure.
Quote of the day by Michelle Obama: Former First Lady Michelle Obama gave her most insightful thoughts about failure in her memoir becomeWhere she talked about her childhood in Chicago, her upbringing, and her mother, Marian Robinson.
The poignant quote came up when she talked about her school, Bryn Mawr, which had been an average to good school, but had suddenly become the victim of some intimidation that the school had become a “ghetto.”The quote attributed to Michelle Obama comes from the inspiration of her school principal, Dr. LaVezzo, who combated gossip about the school.
Here’s the story behind the memorable quote of the day
“As Chicago schools go, Bryn Mawr fell somewhere between a bad school and a good school.
Racial and economic segregation continued in the South Shore neighborhood through the 1970s, meaning the student population became blacker and poorer every year. “There has been, for some time, a citywide integration movement to bus children to new schools, but Bryn Mawr parents have successfully pushed it back, arguing that the money would be better spent improving the school itself,” Michelle Obama wrote.“When I was a kid, I had no concept of whether the facilities were dilapidated or whether it mattered that there were almost no white children.
I ran kindergarten through eighth grade, which meant that by the time I got to the upper grades, I knew every light switch, every chalkboard, and cracked patch of the hallway. I knew almost all the teachers and most of the kids. “For me, Bryn Mawr was an extension of home,” she wrote.When she was entering seventh grade, something big happened. “While I was entering seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper popular with African-American readers, published a scathing opinion piece in which it claimed that Bryn Mawr had gone, in the space 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. Lavezzo, immediately responded with a letter to the editor, defending his community of parents and students and deeming the newspaper article “an outrageous lie, apparently intended only to incite feelings of failure and escape.”“Dr. Lavizzo was a rotund, cheerful man, who had a bouffant Afro on either side of his bald spot, and who spent most of his time in an office near the front door of the building,” Michelle Obama wrote.“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 outcome. It’s a vulnerability that is born with self-doubt and then heightened, often deliberately, by fear. The ‘feelings of failure’ he mentioned were already everywhere in my neighborhood, in the form of parents unable to get ahead financially, children who began to doubt that their lives would be any different, and families who watched their wealthy neighbors leave for the suburbs. Or move their children to Catholic schools,” Michelle Obama wrote.“There were predatory real estate agents walking around the South Shore all the time, whispering to homeowners that they should sell before it was too late, that they would help them out while you still could. The inference was that failure was coming, that it was inevitable, that it was already half way through. You could get stuck in the ruin or you could escape it. They used the word everyone was afraid of — ‘ghetto’ — and dropped it like a lit match.”
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What does quote mean?
This means that defeat is often an internal psychological battle long before it manifests itself on the ground. This happens when a person begins to doubt himself, because at this stage he loses self-confidence and loses the internal battle. Failure occurs later as a mere reflection of a battle you lost mentally long ago.