Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his profile, American Girl, by saying “The first time I saw Michelle Obama in the flesh, I almost took her for white.” He later explains this is to be not because of her mannerisms, but because of her belief and support of a black community “fully vested” in their country. The piece focuses on the issue of race and the place of a working woman in American society through the retelling of Obama’s childhood. Coates admits he was surprised that Obama told her story of growing up in Chicago with extreme happiness as if it were picture perfect. Throughout history, African Americans were subject to extreme hardship and discrimination with bios playing on a “dream deferred.” He waited for “slave narratives and oppression… looking for justice and the plight of the poor” but instead Obama promotes the power of the modern woman with her “americanness” rooted in her hometown. Her neighborhood allowed her and other African Americans to be “Black and proud.” She, thus, bridges the gap between black America and all of America. Coates contextualizes Obama in the context of his own background in Baltimore by explaining that although he grew up in a segregated neighborhood, he never understood blackness as a minority until he was the only black man in a room of people who did not look or act like him. He knew he was black but never felt it because his own community had always surrounded him. Obama too, never looked at the world differently when she was a child. As a kid, she wasn’t directly aware of racism but as an adult she felt the segregation.