The Friday 56 – Becoming by Michelle Obama

The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted over at Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple and go something like this.

1.  Grab a book, any book.
2.  Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader (If you have to improvise, that’s ok.)
3.  Find any sentence, (or a few, just don’t spoil it)
4.  Post it.
5.  Add the post url, not your blog url to the Linky.
6. Tweet it #Friday56 (not an official Freda’s Voice rule)

I am currently reading former First Lady Michelle Obama’s book Becoming and let me tell you, Wow! Just Wow! The following passage for this week’s Friday 56 resonated and resonates with me on so many levels.

More intriguing was my early discovery that there was such a thing as an African American elite. Most of my new high school friends were black, but that didn’t necessarily translate . . . A number f them had parents who were lawyers or doctors and seemed to know one another through an African American social club called Jack and Jill. They’d been on ski vacations and trips that required passports. They talked abou things that were foreign to me, like summer internships and historically black colleges. 

This was my new world. It’s not to say that everyone at the school was rich or overly sophisticated becuase that wasn’t the case. There were plenty of kids who came from neighborhoods just like mine, who struggled with far more than I ever would. But my first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible – the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended over-head, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.

Becoming by Michelle Obama