Michelle Obama revealed that she was close to not dating Barack when they first met.
Speaking with Doris Kearns Goodwin for History Talks, Michelle revealed why their romance almost didn’t happen, according to PEOPLE.
“I wasn’t gonna date him at first. Because I thought it would be tacky for the two Black folks from Harvard to fall in love,” Michelle said. “I even said that. I was like, ‘We can’t date. This is too cliché.’ But he was like, ‘Screw them.’ ”
The two first met in 1989 at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. Then-Michelle Robinson was a first-year associate and adviser to Barack, who was a summer associate.
“He was late the first day,” Michelle recalled. “He blamed it on the weather, but I, as a box-checker, thought, ‘You’re trifling.’ ”
“I was skeptical, because I read his résumé. I was like, ‘OK, he seems smart, but he’s a Black kid that grew up in Hawaii.’ Thought that was strange,” she said as the audience laughed. “So, I was expecting the typical sort of nerd that — forgive me — that white people would think was a nice Black guy.”
“But I was surprised, because he walked in with a little swagger,” Michelle admitted.
MICHELLE WAS IMPRESSED BY BARACK
Over time, Barack made an impression on Michelle.
“He was funny, and he was humble, and he was wicked smart,” Michelle recalled/ “And his background was very much like mine, working class. But not like mine in the sense that he came — his mother was a single mother, and he and his mother lived all over the world. He spent time in Indonesia; his grandparents were white folks from Kansas.”
“But our values, our morals, the things that we believed in, were the same,” she continued, “And he had taken a completely different path. You know, he went to law school, but he was a community organizer. He wasn’t at Harvard to become, you know, the next hoodie-do. He wanted to use those skills to help the community.”
On their first date, the soon-to-be couple saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and had their first kiss outside a Baskin-Robbins.
Eventually, Barack told Michelle, “Let’s get serious about life.”
“We started dating, and the story goes on from there. But our meeting, my interaction with Barack, the way he thought about the world, the way he sort of thought that there were many paths to doing things, made me question mine.”