By Chandelis Duster, CNN
(CNN) — Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama reflected on the insights gained while attending elite colleges and how they leveraged that experience into a strong tool to empower their communities on the first episode of “The Michelle Obama Podcast.”
During the 49-minute episode released Wednesday, the former first lady and first Black president of the US discussed social justice advocacy in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the importance of the younger generation being politically engaged, and family. The Obamas, who both received their law degrees from Harvard University, also stressed that the perspective they gained from their experiences influenced their passion for political advocacy in their communities.
Barack Obama, who was the first African American to be president of the Harvard Law Review, said his education at Harvard gave him the “credentials and security” to work in community organizing.
“I think I figured out once I got to school that if I am chasing after my own success, that somehow, I am going to end up alone and unhappy,” he said. “And that’s why I ended up going into community organizing and the work that I was doing because when I thought about how I want to spend my life, what I looked at was what those civil rights workers had done…And the freedom riders had done. And I thought, you know, that looks like hard work but it never looks like lonely work. That looks like hard and risky work but it never looks like selfish, isolated, meaningless work.”
He later said, “So, but the thing that a Harvard education gave me, the real ticket that I punched wasn’t to chase as much money as I wanted. What I purchased was enough credentials and security that I could go do the crazy things I wanted to do in terms of working in neighborhoods, going in to politics, all that,” the former president said. “Knowing that I had enough of a floor beneath me that I was going to be okay.”
Michelle Obama, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, discussed working as a junior associate for Sidley Austin, a law firm in the city, and the loneliness she felt while looking at the neighborhood she came from.
“I was on the track. I was checking my boxes. Because I was doing what I thought and thought I needed to do because I was a poor kid. So, I didn’t feel like I had the option to just go off and do other things,” she said. “But I also had a limited vision of what I could be because schools don’t show you the world, they just show you a bunch of careers. But I came to learn the same thing you learned that while working on the 47th floor in that fancy law firm making all that money, that it felt lonely.”
She continued, “And it felt isolating. And you know, I had this amazing view of the southeast side of the city from my office,” she said. “I could see the lake and I could see all of the neighborhood that had I come from. And I never felt further from that neighborhood than when I was sitting in that office working on briefs and cases that had nothing to do with anything that helped a broader group of people outside of myself.”
The-CNN-Wire
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