Wow, I am only 4 years older than Michelle Obama. I was 22 years old in 1982 when my dad died at the age of 54 of a sudden heart attack. At the time of his death he made about $18,000 a year, we lived in one of the outer boroughs of NYC. My dad could not afford to send my sister and I to college, let alone Princeton University which is commuting distance from my hometown of Staten Island, N.Y. I get really annoyed when I hear Michelle speak in public about how she had to “struggle” to come up in the world. I had a sister who was 2 years younger than I was who was “gifted and talented” yet no one offered her any education beyond public H.S. and unfortunately my parents did not see her potential for success. My Dad was an underachiever, my mother never graduated high school, they did not put a premium on education. My sister (now deceased due to a fatal bout with a rare form of cancer) went to work in NYC right out of H.S. and did eventually become a successful bond trader on Wall Street, but without a college degree it took her much longer to achieve that success. She could have gone to a school like Princeton, she definitely had the intelligence to do well in an Ivy League School. Also, the financial companies on Wall Street she worked for tried to tamp down her success. There really was a glass ceiling back in the 1980′s and 1990′s for woman, especially a woman without a “sheepskin”.
The point is that we were white people living in a middle class (lower middle class) family and any potential was ignored. No one ever offered us an Ivy League education, it wasn’t even discussed in our home. We were even discouraged from attending CUNY or SUNY.
