Michelle Obama Watch

The media is a fickle animal. It’s temperamental, unpredictable and at times volatile. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy. And to Michelle Obama it’s been sort of a “frenemy”. It has both uplifted her and has at times torn her down. One such torrid instance is the infamous statement of her being proud of America for the first time, which afterwards, the right deemed her as about unpatriotic as a third-world extremist. They took that one statement and ran with it. Well, there is one person who has analyzed that statement and debunked the cynics. Revealing that Michelle is just an all american girl, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic wrote a riveting article illustrating Michelle Obama as American as apple pie.  The article is named simply,  American Girl. 

Says Coates,

“When Michelle Obama told a Milwaukee campaign rally last February, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country,” critics derided her as another Angry Black Woman. But the only truly radical proposition put forth by Obama, born and raised in Chicago’s storied South Side, is the idea of a black community fully vested in the country at large, and proud of the American dream.”

Coates makes a sound case of why Michelle is just an all-American girl. She is a wholesome dichotomy of upper-class/working-class, black/white, urban/suburban, working mom/stay at home mom. She is the medley that America represents and per Coates perhaps more so than her husband, who has often been touted as the bridge that American needs to close the racial, socio-economic gap.

Says Coates,

“There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America’s racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you’re looking for common ground, then it’s true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we’re talking about the right one.”

Wow, there’s nothing more to say. Ta-Nehisi nails it in this article.

Posted by Bridgette of http://www.trailblazer-firstlady.blogspot.com. *Photo source is unknown.