Background information

Michelle Obama addresses three main issues in her “Dear Class of 2020” graduation speech. First, she talks about the COVID-19 pandemic, which was declared a global issue in March 2020. The pandemic hit the US especially hard compared to many other nations, and some critics argued that this was partly because of then-president Donald Trump’s failure to respond properly to the crisis. Throughout her speech, Obama talks about the social, personal, and economic consequences of the pandemic, and focuses on the difficulty of people being forced to choose between their work and their life, as many essential workers did not have proper protective equipment or worked in unsafe conditions. 

Another issue that Obama addresses is the struggle against sys...