Michelle Obama

Interview with the First Lady - TIME

Mrs. Obama: Welcome. Thanks for taking the time to come.

TIME: Well, thanks for making time.

This is a good day. It's pretty outside, a little sun.

So, I've been following your events, I've been talking extensively with your staff. One of the things I wanted to get at actually goes back to something you said on Tuesday night at the poetry jam. You said it's one thing for people to be speaking in their own spaces. It means something different ... I'm paraphrasing ... but it means something different for them to be speaking in this space. I wonder if you could elaborate on it. What is the meaning of being able to bring these new different voices?
I kind of think back to my childhood, and I tell this story a lot. I mean, I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and literally a 10-minute drive away was the University of Chicago in all of its grandeur. And I never knew anything about that institution that was a few minutes away from me, and that was so telling, even to the point that my mother worked there. She worked there for four years as a secretary to the legal office. But I never set foot on campus. We came through, we picked her up, we left. It was sort of like another world that didn't belong to me. I didn't think about college in that sense when I was younger. So it was a very foreign place even though it was a stone's throw. It had an impact on my life. (Watch TIME's video "Election Day in Chicago's South Side.")

And there are so many institutions like that around the world, and so many kids like that who are living inches away from power and prestige and fame and fortune, and they don't even know that it exists. And the White House, all these wonderful buildings, these monuments and capitols ... I'm sure there are children who feel that way. I'm sure there are people in this country who feel the same way about these places that I did about the University of Chicago.

And I have probably dedicated more of my life to trying to break down those barriers for people. I think that might be one of the small themes in my professional life, is to try to be the bridge so that more people feel like they have access; that their voice, that their faces, that their worlds count in places like this, and that there is understanding across those divides.

And as I grew up and came to work in those places, right, and got to know them, I realized that the misunderstanding or the disconnect goes both ways; that folks outside of these communities have no idea what goes on within these institutions, and sometimes the people in the institutions have no real understanding of the people who live outside. You know, everybody is dealing in these misperceptions about one another because there is no bridge.

And I just feel like through the small things that we can do here at the White House, we can start exemplifying the importance of building those bridges, in real meaningful ways, so that when you come ... when young people come here, they don't have to come here and be something they're not; they can come here and be who they are, and the folks here will listen. And we can go out and be ourselves and listen in their communities, as well.

Well, you know, that makes me wonder, because you've said so many times, especially to groups of kids, "I'm not supposed to be here." It makes me wonder whether in the last couple of months, maybe you've thought, "Maybe I am supposed to be here." (Laughter.)
You know, I don't know if I have thought that deeply about it, but I think that now that I'm here, there's a whole lot that hopefully I can bring to being here, because of, you know, the differences in the way that I've grown up, the different perspectives that I bring.

And I think that Barack and I and ... you know, I think all of our staff, they're just trying to think about what are the things that we can do differently here, the things that have never been done, the people who've never seen or experienced this White House. How do we make that possible for them?

Well, that day that you started in Anacostia and then ended up with all these amazing women and girls, can you talk a little bit about that day and what it meant to you and what you think it meant to them?
Yes, I think it's a part of this theme. You know, I had this vision when ... as we were going through the campaign and you started thinking about, okay, what if my husband wins and I'm the First Lady, what are the kind of things that I'd like to do? And you always get that question ... or, I got that question a lot over the course of the campaign. But one of the things that I thought was, well, how powerful would it be for young girls to come into this space and hear from other really powerful, impressive, dynamic women, and to have that conversation go on here in the White House?

And as we sort of started thinking through the event and thinking about how I wanted to relate to the D.C. community, as well, I always thought whenever we invited somebody in, I wanted to go out to their space, too. I wanted that to be a mutual exchange; that it's not just people coming here where I live, but it's me going out to where they live.

So we've tried to do that in almost every event that we've done from, you know, the White House Kitchen Garden to whenever we go to a school and read to kids. Either their teachers or the kids will be invited back here very soon. That's sort of a theme. (See pictures of the White House kitchen.)

So the event started coming together. And it came off so beautifully. I think it was ... it's one of those events that stand out in my mind as, this is why I'm here ... to help make this possible and to see the faces on those girls as they entered the East Room in all its glory, and to be sitting around these tables with women they saw on TV, or saw on the news, and to have them having real conversations. Alicia Keyes, who's the idol of every single girl under 30, probably, when she came in, she literally walked around to every single table, because everybody is still a little sort of ... I'm in the White House, let me behave, I can't get up.