How to Raise a Smart Black Woman
Michelle Obama’s parents followed this formula. Here’s why you should too.
Before Michelle Obama reached kindergarten, she could read. At age 7, she skipped second grade. She would also eventually graduate from Princeton and Harvard Law. Although she married a man who’d make her the First Lady of the United States, she was already exceptional — in intelligence, drive, and purpose.
When we see people like Michelle, Oprah Winfrey, Ava Duvernay, and Kamala Harris, Black women who have defied all odds and reached extraordinary power and success, we can’t help but cheer them on, but also wonder: What transformed their God-given talents into outstanding abilities? Was it nature? Was it luck? Or could it possibly be something else?
Could that something else be parenting? Two Princeton graduates were raised in Michelle’s working-class childhood home on the South Side of Chicago. Her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, were not rich; they were not college educated, they were not tiger or helicopter parents, nor overly strict. But they were the real secret link to Michelle and her brother Craig’s academic achievements.
Is it possible that her parents, and parents of other extraordinary people like Michelle, had unknowingly been following a universal blueprint for youthful…
