CBS News’ Michelle Miller, left at birth by mother, recounts search to belong
spring of 2020 was a haze of pandemic chaos and racial reckoning.
That June, shortly after George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, Michelle Miller, a CBS News correspondent and morning show co-host, was asked by a producer to offer her perspective about the protests erupting across the nation.
In her piece, Miller delved into her experience in covering Black communities scarred by racism, hate and police brutality and the hope she found in the voices of the people she covered. Then Miller got personal, revealing that she had been abandoned at birth by her fair-skinned Hispanic mother, whose family would not approve of the relationship with her Black father, a prominent surgeon and civil rights activist. Her father was also unhappily married at the time.
Miller was the product of an interracial relationship “that my father celebrated and my mother, to this day, does not acknowledge,” she said in the segment.
“No one on that side of my family knows who I am, knows I exist. That really, I guess, is at the core of who I am as a journalist,” Miller told CBS Morning News co-host Gayle King. “Acknowledgment is power. Racism impacts me to this day in that way,”
Miller’s explosive revelation led to her recent best-selling memoir, “Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love,” (HarperCollins) with co-writer Rosemarie Robotham.
It’s a powerful and remarkable story about her struggle with racial identity, growing up motherless and continually searching for maternal figures. Much of her childhood was filled with doubt, insecurities
and a sense of not belonging anywhere, Miller said.
“I wouldn’t be who I am without all of this,” she said, “but I was made to feel abnormal. Yet this is something that plays into a lot of families. Unfortunately, people make assessments. They layer judgments and make people feel as if they’re less than who they are and that their possibilities
aren’t as amazing as anyone else’s.”
Miller lived with her grandmother in South Central Los Angeles, while her father, Dr. Ross Miller Jr., made frequent visits. (He was the first doctor to assist Robert F. Kennedy on the night of his assassination in 1968.)
Miller was bused to predominantly white schools and exThe
celled academically, but she never fit in.
When she was 24, her father, dying of prostate cancer, urged her to find her biological mother, whom she refers to in the book as Laura Hernandez, a pseudonym. They met, and Hernandez made it clear that her family could never know she had a Black child. Miller promised her mother never to expose her.
“My story was validated with this book because I never thought it was worthy of this,” Miller said.
Miller’s story is far from tragic, though growing up motherless can create deep wounds and a distorted lens by which daughters judge themselves. Being rejected because of skin color adds even more weight to the issue.
It helped that Miller was raised with love, means and exposure, with her physician father and a grandmother who was an astute businesswoman and retired teacher. She attended the prestigious Howard
University in Washington, DC, landed her first journalism job at the Los Angeles Times and later married the love of her life, Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans. They have two children.
Her belonging, she said, comes from a lifetime of reflection and acceptance. It’s also something that comes from within, as cliche as that sounds.
Miller is currently working on a book for teens and young adults “who are doubting who they are and who can’t see behind the moment,” she said. It’s due out next year.
“I want people to know that they don’t have to be defined by other people’s limitations, defined by their origin story or defined by that little voice in their head that doubts who they can be,” she said.
“I’m my ancestor’s wildest dreams, and I still live in that.”