Michelle Obama Watch

by Rhonda

(h/t pop+politics)

Over at Salon a couple of weeks ago, writer Erin Aubrey Kaplan, responding to all the “makeover” talk wrote an essay exploring the complexities and contradictions that have arisen in the mainstream conversation about Michelle Obama.

Among the points she makes, she notes that while she anticipated the attacks on Barack Obama, she should have known Michelle was quickly coming into focus as a target:

It was established early that while Barack was striving for the middle ground, trying to strike a balance between strength and inoffensiveness, Michelle was the loose cannon who didn’t bother to hide her identity or racial concerns. In the matter of blackness, she was the id to his superego. And unlike Barack, she was a typical black American with no transcendent story about immigrant parents and being raised in exotic locales; she had the black Everywoman name of Michelle Robinson.

She goes on to argue that Michelle brings with her a distinctly Black American perspective–a “(Black) every woman-ness”– that America isn’t yet comfortable imagining in the White House:

Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know…[F]or a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem. Michelle’s frankness about the ills of America and how they’re connected to race taps into an anxiety about such a story becoming prominent and representing us all. Like so much about the whole Obama phenomenon, this has never happened. The black story has always been marginal by definition; now, suddenly, it isn’t. And Michelle’s is a story that’s much more nuanced and challenging than the hardcore urban tales or middle-class fantasies we’re used to ascribing to all black folk. Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself. Not exactly flattering, right? Not quite what happened in high school history, right? No wonder people are at a loss. [emphasis added]

Optimistically, Kaplan concludes that even with the specter of the unfinished business of racial justice, as well as the fact that Michelle Obama bucks many people’s gender-based expectations of a pretty but preferably silent and demure First Lady,

…there’s a strong possibility that those criticisms and the context that goes along with them will make it to the White House and officially enlarge the great American story in a way it should have been enlarged long ago. Got to say, makes me proud.

And I’m right there with you, Erin.