remain strong and intact once he left office. It was an economy that had been hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month when Barack entered the White House having now racked up nearly five straight years of continuous job growth.
I took this all in as evidence that as a country we were capable of building a better reality. But still, we lived in the world as it is.
A year and a half after Newtown, Congress had passed not a single gun-control measure. Bin Laden was gone, but ISIS had arrived. The homicide rate in Chicago was going up rather than down. A black teen named Michael Brown was shot by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the middle of the road for hours. A black teen named Laquan McDonald was shot sixteen times by police in Chicago, including nine times in the back. A black boy named Tamir Rice was shot dead by police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun. A black man named Freddie Gray died after being neglected in police custody in Baltimore. A black man named Eric Garner was killed by police after being put in a choke hold during his arrest on Staten Island. All this was evidence of something pernicious and unchanging in America. When Barack was first elected, various commentators had naively declared that our country was entering a “postracial” era, in which skin color would no longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation apart.
Late in June 2015, Barack and I flew to Charleston, South Carolina, to sit with another grieving community—this time at the funeral of a pastor named Clementa Pinckney, who had been one of nine people killed in a racially motivated shooting earlier in the month at an African Methodist Episcopal church known simply as Mother Emanuel. The victims, all African Americans, had welcomed an unemployed twenty-one-year-old white man—a stranger to them all—into their Bible study group. He’d sat with them for a while; then, after the group bowed their heads in prayer, he stood up and began shooting. In the middle of it, he was reported to have said, “I have to do this, because you rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”
After delivering a moving eulogy for Reverend Pinckney and acknowledging the deep tragedy of the moment, Barack surprised everyone by leading the congregation in a slow and soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was a simple invocation of hope, a call to persist. Everyone in the room, it seemed, joined in. For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation. As minorities across the country were gradually beginning to take on more significant roles in politics, business, and entertainment, our family had become the most prominent example. Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and deep and as dangerous as ever.
We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on, as gracefully as we could.
* * *
The same day as the funeral service in Charleston—June 26, 2015—the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark decision, affirming that same-sex couples had the right to marry in all fifty states. This was the culmination of a legal battle that had been fought methodically over decades, state by state, court by court, and as with any civil rights struggle it had required the persistence and courage of many people. On and off over the course of the day, I’d caught reports of Americans overjoyed by the news. A jubilant crowd chanted, “Love has won!” on the steps of the Supreme Court. Couples were flocking to city halls and county courthouses to exercise what was now a constitutional right. Gay bars were opening early. Rainbow flags waved on street corners around the country.
All this had helped buoy us through a sad day in South Carolina. Returning home to the White House, we’d changed out of our funeral clothes, had a quick dinner with the girls, and then Barack had disappeared into the Treaty Room to flip on ESPN and catch up on work. I was heading to my dressing