Michelle Obama said that she and former President Barack Obama could not have “gotten away” with “some of the stuff” going on in the Trump administration because the black community wouldn’t have let her.
“When we were in the White House, we could’ve never gotten away with some of the stuff that’s going on now, not because of the public, but our community wouldn’t have accepted that. You worked. You did your best every day. You showed up,” the former first lady said on her Spotify podcast this week.
Michelle Obama, who appeared on the podcast with her mother and brother, discussed growing up in Chicago, where “being black” was “a crime in and of itself.”
“When you leave the safety of your home and go out into the street, where being black is a crime in and of itself, we have all had to learn how to operate outside of our homes with a level of caution and fear, because you never know,” she said.
The former first lady spoke with her brother, Craig Robinson, about an incident when he was roughly 10 years old. Robinson was riding his bike down the street, and a police officer allegedly stopped him and accused him of stealing the bike.
Robinson described the encounter as “terrifying” and said it left him “heartbroken” because he had been raised to believe the police were his “friends.”
Race was a theme throughout the discussion, and at one point, Obama claimed “almost everybody” she knows was involved in an “incident where they were just minding their own business but living black and got accused of something.”
She added that black children from a young age are taught they have to exceed the expectations of white people.
“You’re taught, you know, people are going to assume the worst of you. So, you’ve got to be better than, you’ve got to be 10 times better than,” Obama said.
