Michelle Obama spoke out against "white flight" in a recent interview, saying she experienced it as a kid and that it remains a problem.
"As families like ours — upstanding families like ours who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better — as we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented," the former first lady said Tuesday at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago.
"I want to remind white folks that y’all were running from us ... This family, with all the values that you read about, you were running from us. And you’re still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in," she continued. "The families that are coming from other places to try to do better. But, because we can so easily wash over who we really were — because of the color of our skin, because of the texture of our hair — that’s what divides countries, artificial things."
Obama, 55, said she felt a "sense of injustice" and understood from a young age that white people were fleeing her neighborhood.
She talked about the issue of white flight in her bestselling book Becoming. Obama noted that she grew up in the South Side of Chicago while her husband came to the South Side by choice.
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