Michelle Obama is an extraordinary woman by any measure.

She is an attorney with degrees from Princeton and Harvard. She is the former first lady of the United States, and the first African-American one. She just came off a gangbusters book tour for her memoir, “Becoming,” which was Amazon’s longest-standing No. 1 title since “Fifty Shades of Grey.” And, according to polls, she is the most admired woman in the world.

She has conducted her life with the utmost honor, dignity and grace. Every day I miss her and her husband’s presence in the White House. Their contrast with the Trumps is so stark that it’s painful. America downgraded erudition to indecency.

Obama owes no one anything. She has nothing to prove. It is already proven.

This is why I was saddened to hear her say at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago that she “can’t make people not afraid of black people.” She continued: “I can’t explain what’s happening in your head, but maybe if I show up every day as a human, a good human … maybe, just maybe, that work will pick away at the scabs of your discrimination.”

Why should this brilliant black woman spend even a second of her time considering the mind-set of a racist? She shouldn’t. No black person should. No person who suffers the sting of racism should.