In the end, she said, she realized all the negativity was just “noise.”
Obama encouraged the graduates of Tuskegee, a historically black university, to overcome adversity and discrimination by staying “true to the most real, most sincere, most authentic parts of yourselves.”
People “will make assumptions about who they think you are based on their limited notion of the world,” she said. “My husband and I know how frustrating that experience can be. We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives. … And all of that is going to be a heavy burden to carry.”
“But,” she said, “those feelings are not an excuse to just throw up our hands and give up. They are not an excuse to lose hope. To succumb to feelings of despair and anger only means that in the end, we lose.”