With Six Words, Michelle Obama Rewires America’s Conversation on Race

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Michelle Obama coined one of the defining phrases of the political era: “When they go low, we go high.”

Going high did not work. Donald Trump won that election. While many of his supporters expressed discomfort with his go-low approach to politics, far more embraced it. Trump, despite his pedigree as a New York billionaire, would embarrass and attack and disparage the perceived elites, and many Americans loved him for it.

Lesson learned. In her speech Tuesday night at the 2024 Democratic convention, Obama didn’t explicitly revoke the “we go high” mantra, but she made clear that a different moment called for a different approach. It wasn’t that the former first lady went low, exactly, but she was unsparing in her disdain for and criticisms of her husband’s successor.

In one of the more memorable stretches of her speech, she equated the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, with the majority of Americans who never enjoyed Trump’s wealth and privilege — and the safety net that accompanies them.

Harris “understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” Obama said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No.

“We don’t get to change the rules so we always win,” she continued. “If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work.”

Trump’s name wasn’t used but it didn’t need to be. That line about the escalator, a call back to Trump’s 2015 campaign launch, made the point obvious, if it wasn’t already.

But there are six words in that stretch that extend well beyond Trump. Obama used a phrase that succinctly and elegantly reframes the ongoing debate over inequality in the United States and how it might be addressed: “the affirmative action of generational wealth.”

It’s concise, centered on two familiar concepts. The first is “affirmative action,” the term used to describe programs generally focused on ensuring that non-White Americans have access to resources and institutions they might not otherwise have. And the second is “generational wealth,” the transition of economic (and social) power through families and, at times, communities.

These are descriptors of elements in American society that are in tension. If you are a recipient of generational wealth, you don’t need affirmative action to ensure you have access. If you are someone who would benefit from affirmative action, you generally are not someone with access to generational wealth. Of course, you might be, which is one of the outliers used to criticize affirmative action programs: They often center more on demographic traits than on economic class.

The linchpin of Obama’s phrase, though, is its shortest word: “of.” She isn’t contrasting affirmative action and generational wealth as conduits to power and success, she’s overlapping them. She’s noting that generational wealth is a form of affirmative action, here in the person of Trump but certainly beyond that.

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