8-year-old’s cosplay of Michelle Obama goes viral

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Everyone has heroes when they’re a kid. Someone that they see as a role model. For 8-year-old Ella-Lorraine Brown of Los Angeles, her role model is Michelle Obama.

For her school’s Cultural Heroes Day, Brown chose to dress up as Mrs. Obama from her freshman move-in day at Princeton University. From the looks of things, she nailed it.

“Ella-Lorraine has never known a time when Black women weren’t publicly honored and ‘Black girl magic’ wasn’t a highly celebrated thing,” Karlyn Brown, Ella-Loraine’s mother, told Yahoo. “That’s awesome.” says Brown.

—Family of Oscar Grant fights to get Fruitvale Station renamed in his honor-—

“We try to surround Ella-Lorraine with women who are go-getters like Michelle, women who are independent and smart, level-headed and loving,” her father, Eugene Brown, added. “We make sure she knows about those who have gone before and have passed on.”

This especially holds true for previous school projects. In the past, Ella-Lorraine has dressed up as pioneer Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an elementary school in the South, William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, in 1960.

—Montreal Exposed: Steakhouse ordered to pay a Black woman $14,000 in discrimination suit over hair—

She has also dressed up as pioneering pilot Bessie Coleman as well. Dressing as the Princeton freshman version of Michelle Obama strikes a particular tone with Brown. Ella-Loraine’s mother is a Princeton alum and in Obama’s new book Becoming, she shared a moment where a high school counselor in Chicago attempted to pour water on her collegiate hopes.

“She was really in awe of the idea that with hard work you could become anything,” says Ella-Lorraine’s mom, Karlyn Johnson Brown.

“Rightly or wrongly, I got stuck on one single sentence the woman uttered,” Obama wrote. “‘I’m not sure,’ she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, ‘that you’re Princeton material.’”

Obama applied and got in. The rest is history and it appears to have inspired young ladies like Ella-Lorraine.