Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Becoming, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Optimism, Growth, and Fulfillment
Community, Investment, and Hard Work
Race, Gender, and Politics
Marriage, Parenthood, and Work
Power, Privilege, and Responsibility
Summary
Analysis
As Michelle grows up, Craig starts to accumulate a variety of unfounded fears: going blind, going deaf, losing an arm. His most realistic, Michelle writes, is a house fire, and he starts to run evacuation drills with the rest of the family. He practices hauling Michelle’s father over to the stairwell, knowing that his father probably wouldn’t be able to run or jump from a window given his disability.
Craig’s dedication to making sure his family can be safe is another, if slightly less conventional, example of how one’s community can push one to work harder. Craig’s fear of something happening to his family gets him to work hard and be prepared for any potential disaster.
Themes
Simultaneously, Michelle becomes more social and spontaneous, more willing to explore the “messes of the wider world.” Michelle’s mother’s relatives gather mostly at Southside’s house, and Michelle enjoys visiting for the music, for the exuberant environment that includes many cousins, and for the dog that Southside bought for her (which Michelle’s mother insisted could not live at their house).
Michelle’s family not only helps instill in her the values of working hard and getting a good education, but also learning to explore life more fully and take risks—being open to its messiness. This is something that will help Michelle as she leaves her law firm job later in life and tries to adjust to the messiness of less stable jobs.
Themes
Michelle’s father’s family, on the other hand, lives throughout the wider Chicago area. On Sunday afternoons, Michelle’s family drives to Parkway Gardens to eat dinner with her father’s parents, whom they call Dandy and Grandma, as well as his three youngest siblings. Dandy is somewhat bitter and irritated by everything. He frequently yells at Michelle’s grandmother, and her passivity in the face of this treatment grates on Michelle. She tells Dandy to stop, asking why he’s so mad all the time.
Michelle understands some of the inherent sexism of the gender dynamic between her grandfather and grandmother, as she remains passive while he is sometimes emotionally abusive. But at the same time, Michelle quickly learns some of the racial underpinnings of Dandy’s resentment, as she goes on to explain.
Themes
Michelle (as her adult self) acknowledges that Dandy is angry for a multitude of reasons. He was born in 1912 in South Carolina and was the grandson of two slaves. He was bright and had set his sights on going to college. But he was black, poor, and grew up during the Great Depression. He worked at a lumber mill after high school, but when the mill closed, he joined many other African Americans in his generation and moved north to Chicago, joining the Great Migration.
As Michelle explores her grandfather’s background, she acknowledges how slavery continues to affect African Americans from generation to generation, because of institutionalized racism that continued (and continues) to permeate American society. Moving north to avoid the shadow of slavery, only to face the same kinds of discrimination, is an example of this.
Themes
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When Dandy arrived in Chicago in the early 30s, jobs were hard to come by, and factories often hired European immigrants over African Americans. He gave up on the idea of college, and many jobs were unavailable to him without a union card—which was incredibly difficult to get as a black man. This form of discrimination, Michelle writes, “altered the destinies of generations of African Americans,” including her own family. They were denied access to high-paying jobs, which kept them from being able to save for the future. This is why Dandy continues to live with bitterness and anger.
Michelle explains that, in the factories and in the labor unions, African Americans were not afforded the same opportunities as their white counterparts. This kind of discrimination was difficult to escape, and has ramifications on entire generations of families because they do not receive the same opportunities, nor can they achieve the same kind of social mobility.
Themes
Only over time does Michelle learn that her questions for Dandy are “hard and unanswerable.” She is forced to face some of these kinds of questions herself. When visiting some distant relative, one of the girls Michelle is playing with asks her why she talks “like a white girl.” Michelle protests, but she understands what the girl means. Her parents had emphasized the importance of using proper diction, but to other black people, this was often perceived as a “betrayal,” or a denial of one’s culture. Michelle sees this same confusion play out years later, as Barack steps onto the national stage and people across the country have a hard time squaring his ethnicity with his persona.
Michelle explores the complexity of race within this interaction with one of her distant cousins. Michelle acknowledges that because her family has given up some of the markers of black culture (such as a distinct way of speaking), it seems as though they are playing into a racist ideal—that they believe speaking more like a white person is better than speaking like a black person. In this way, Michelle, and later Barack, are criticized from both angles, unsure of what kind of community they fit into.
Themes
The rest of the day, Michelle feels uneasy about the exchange. She is frustrated by the girl’s hostility, but also wants to seem genuine. She thinks to herself that everyone else around her seems to fit in except for her. Looking back on this exchange, Michelle recognizes the “more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.”
Ultimately, Michelle understands that even though this critique is one of race, in actuality it is a question of growing into one’s own. Michelle ultimately “becomes” who she really is; she doesn’t try to “become” something that is untrue to herself or try to adhere to some previously held expectations—something that continues to confound people as the Obamas enter the White House.
Themes
