WASHINGTON — For years, the divide between the White House and the impoverished black and immigrant neighborhoods in the nation’s capital has often seemed insurmountable. But in recent months, Michelle Obama has become something of a human bridge between the two worlds.
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Mrs. Obama has repeatedly traveled to Anacostia and other neighborhoods rarely visited by the power elite here in an effort to reach out to young people who are struggling to succeed.
She has offered advice to Tiara Chance, the daughter of a part-time cleaning lady, who has long believed that college is solely for the well to do; to Ashleigh Cannon, who lives in a group home and longs for the rhythms of stable family life; and to Akrem Muzemil, an Ethiopian immigrant who has struggled to learn English and to close his ears to the seductive call of street gangs hunting for recruits.
To the students she counsels, Mrs. Obama’s gilded life in the White House is almost unimaginable. But in their stories, friends and relatives say, the first lady hears the echoes of her own struggles as a working-class girl on the South Side of Chicago.
While Mrs. Obama’s parents pushed her to achieve, she says teachers, counselors and classmates often questioned her abilities and potential. Today, when she speaks to black and Hispanic teenagers, she often shares her own memories of feeling like an outsider, disconnected and doubted in a community that was largely isolated from the centers of power.
On Saturday, the first lady is expected to again use her life story to illuminate the possibilities open to young people when she delivers a commencement speech at the University of California, Merced. Seventy percent of students there are members of minority groups, and half are the first in their families to attend college. Her aides say she will tell them what she tells students everywhere: that success, even against the odds, is possible with hard work and stubborn determination.
“I know that there are hundreds of kids like you across the country, who some people underestimate,” Mrs. Obama told students at Anacostia Senior High School in March in a theme she is likely to echo on Saturday.
“I ran into people in my life who told me, ‘You can’t do it; you’re not as smart as that person,’ ” she said, “teachers who would tell you, ‘Oh, you can’t go to Princeton,’ or, ‘You’re not smart enough to do this,’ or ‘You can’t make the honor society.’ ”
“That never stopped me,” said Mrs. Obama, who graduated from Princeton and Harvard law school and became a hospital executive. “That always made me push harder.”
Of course, reaching out to the underprivileged is nothing new for first ladies. And focusing on schools is a safe choice for Mrs. Obama, who has carefully steered clear of controversy.
But Mrs. Obama, the first African-American first lady, is also among the first to emerge from the urban working class, historians say. Her parents never attended college and rented an apartment when she was growing up. At Princeton, she wrote in her senior thesis, she sometimes felt “like a visitor on campus, as if I don’t really belong.”
Mrs. Obama feels so strongly about dispelling such doubts among young people that she came close to tears last month as she addressed a girls’ school in London. Aides said she saw something of herself in the faces of the girls, who were mostly immigrants and minorities.
“She wants to help those who were like she was,” said Craig Robinson, her brother. “She is focused on telling them they can make it.”
So she greets students with high fives and hugs, jokes and straight talk. She tells them to do their homework, to listen to their parents and to do their very best, even when no one is watching.
She cheerfully answers questions about her makeup, her daughters and her new dog. And she tells them she never cut class, and was proud of being smart, even when it was not cool.
“There were kids around my neighborhood who would say, ‘Ooo, you talk like a white girl,’ ” Mrs. Obama said. “I heard that growing up my whole life. I was like, ‘I don’t even know what that means.’ But you know what? I’m still getting my A’s.”
The students welcome her with astonishment.
At Anacostia High, where children walk through metal detectors every day and only 21 percent of students read proficiently last year, Tiara Chance, 18, was surprised that Mrs. Obama had decided to visit.
“We don’t deserve it,” she said. “People are fighting and cussing all the time around here. Who would want to be around that?”
At Mary’s Center, a health clinic that serves a predominantly immigrant community, Akrem Muzemil, 16, who dreams of becoming an engineer, asked the first lady flat out, “Like, why did you want to come out here to meet us?”
Mrs. Obama told him, “I think it’s real important for young kids, particularly kids from communities without resources, to see me.”
Her office sends signed photographs to the children she has met and has invited some, including Akrem, to visit the White House. And her aides responded affirmatively when Jasmine Williams, a high school senior from a crime-ridden neighborhood, invited the first lady to address her graduation from a charter school dedicated to math and science.
Jasmine burst into tears when she heard the news. For many of these children, Mrs. Obama has provided an incredible boost.
Tiara said Mrs. Obama persuaded her to go to college, though she had not applied yet. Akrem said he was working harder in school. Ashleigh Cannon, 17, said the first lady persuaded her to ignore negative voices.
“My father says, ‘You’re not going to make it,’ ” Ashleigh said. “I just got to set it aside.”
It is impossible to know whether the impact of these encounters will be fleeting or transformative. But Mrs. Obama hopes some will cast aside doubts, as she did, and push for their dreams.
At a school’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo this month, the first lady urged students to get to know the Capitol and the White House.
“That space is your space,” Mrs. Obama said. “It’s your democracy, as much as it is anyone else’s.”
