Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiorit… - Michelle Obama

Barack insisted that we pay for everything ourselves, using what we'd saved from his book royalties. As long as I've known him, he's been this way: extra-vigilant when it comes to matters of money and ethics, holding himself to a higher standard than even what's dictated by law. There's an age-old maxim in the black community: You've got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than it was.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

We cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical.