Michelle Obama: Representational Justice

SARAH LEWIS

During the Civil War, the abolitionist and great nineteenth-century thinker Frederick Douglass made a surprising speech about the importance of pictures for justice. It was the dawn of the photographic age. In the speech, which he rewrote multiple times, Douglass argued that combat might end complete sectional disunion, but America’s progress and racial reconciliation would require pictures because of the images they conjure in one’s imagination. Douglass was making a case for the epiphanic power of an image to shift our vision of the world. He was making a case for the power of an image to arrest us, to penetrate us, to stop us in our tracks.

Resolute as Douglass was, he ended his speech with an admission—he thought it might take generations to understand the power of images to shift our vision for this country. Centuries later, we would have an example of the impact of pictures that he had in mind.

“I wake up every day in a house built by slaves,” Michelle Obama told the crowd at the City College of New York in 2016. She continued to emphasize the point: “I watch my daughters—two beautiful, Black young women—head off to school, waving goodbye to their father, the president of the United States, the son of a man from Kenya who came here to America.” The power of the sentence was completed by her image—an African American woman, descendant of those brought here in bondage, serving as the First Lady of the United States. She didn’t have to state that about her own history. By then, we all already knew.

Over time the image of Michelle Obama had become a colossus, a towering figure into which fell the opportunity, challenge, and contradiction of Blackness, power, and beauty. The intense visual study went beyond the scrutiny historically received by First Ladies. Our collective gaze became an assessment that exposed the very core of our nation’s stereotypes and racial views.

She was aware of the transformation from the beginning. “When my husband first started campaigning for President, folks had all sorts of questions of me,” she said. “Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman? Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover—it was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I’m really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder, just how are people seeing me.”1

I first saw Michelle Obama as if she was watching herself be true to a self-made pact of utter authenticity—convicted, self-possessed, forthright. “My view on this stuff is I’m trying to be myself, trying to be as authentic as I can be. I can’t pretend to be somebody else,” she said in 2007.2 She stated it again a year later with the words “trying to be” as if a near refrain. “I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be,” she mentioned in 2008.3

To some, the phrase might have been confusing. Michelle Obama seemed to be someone for whom there is no try, there is only do and do not. Accomplishment is her image. Indeed, there she was—casually curled on the couch, making lists, about to move into the White House—in front of Annie Leibovitz’s lens for Vogue. Yet the phrase let slip her knowledge about the examinations she was enduring—from the public, from the press—that were not so much about her, but about why we had never seen someone like her before as a potential First Lady of the United States of America.

Authenticity is not an achievement. Yet authenticity does take effort if you are upending centuries of history with your mere presence. It takes work to let people stare, wonder, probe and prod to determine the veracity of your life. It does involve some “try.” It takes effort to convince the world that you are authentic when simply being you shatters the mold. Images that create the dominant cultural narratives about African American life rarely show a life like Michelle Obama’s. It created an oxymoron: authenticity became a declarative act.

International curiosity turned the image of Michelle Obama into a public figurative emblem, an iconic image in the frieze of American landmark images of race and representation. “My life isn’t new, but it’s new to a lot of people who haven’t seen this up close and personal,” she would reflect years later, as if explaining the figurative tour America took of her body, her life, and her lineage.4

As a professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard, I spend my time thinking about the nexus of vision, race, and representation. Yet the repeated image of Michelle Obama in the public eye turned looking into our collective work.

I understood this when I received a call from a journalist writing a major piece on Black professionals on a mid-winter afternoon in 2008. He wanted to know about my life. He started asking about my other friends and colleagues who were Black and driven. I paused and asked, “What is the focus of this story?” The democratic race involving then candidate Barack Obama had put a spotlight on pioneering Black professionals. As the interview went on, I realized that the story seemed to be less about Black professionals and more about why people are suddenly aware of and interested in our achievements. He was asking me for a figurative tour. The journalist never ran the piece. He admitted during our call, with humility and self-reflection that I deeply admired, that he was interviewing subjects, but he really could have been interviewing himself.

If Black professionals of pedigree had become news, Michelle Obama as the potential First Lady of the United States was exploding the mold. “I will walk anyone through my life,” she would say.5 And she did, donating her body to the nation’s gaze for constant assessment for us all.

As Robin Givhan put it, “The rise of First Lady Michelle Obama as an icon—of fashion, black womanhood, working motherhood and middle-class success—has propelled her onto a pedestal that would surely give the average person vertigo. She is Jackie Kennedy, Sojourner Truth, Hillary Clinton and a Horatio Alger character all rolled into one.”6 Deborah Willis amplified the comment when she observed that Michelle Obama “has engaged the imagination of a new generation of writers and artists as they chronicle the commanding role the First lady now plays in American visual culture.”7

It took my mind back centuries.

I read that Michelle Obama’s friend said, “she’s a private person in a public role, a black woman in a costume drama previously only played by whites” and I imagined how she had reversed the racially symbolic production—the Masque of Blackness commissioned by King James at the birth of the so-called New World.8 In this masque in 1604, Queen Anne and her ladies had completely covered themselves in black paint to perform as princesses from the River Niger come to Britain to be cleansed of their Blackness. It scandalized the court. Centuries later, the image of Michelle Obama had indeed reversed the costume drama. She had fully upended the masque of Blackness on American soil.

I wondered how many knew that Black beauty once contained the incendiary power of a detonation. In the nineteenth century, just after emancipation, Winslow Homer, then America’s best-known painter, was nearly forced out of his hotel at gunpoint and called a racial epithet for deigning to show Blackness as beautiful with paint. At the time, Homer was in Virginia painting works of African Americans including The Cotton Pickers (1876), a portrait of two African American enslaved women rendered with a rare grace and dignity. Homer agreed to hold an informal exhibit of his recently completed portraits in the lobby of his hotel, where one high-society lady asked, “Why don’t you paint our lovely girls instead of those dreadful creatures?” Homer insisted on the beauty of his Black subjects. He replied, “Because those are the purtiest.” The following day, one man came to the hotel with a shotgun looking for the “damn ________ painter.” In a letter to his brother Homer said that he “looked him in the eyes, as mother used to tell us to look at a wild cow.” Homer’s defiance worked. “Halfway to the porch [he] hesitated, then turned and rode away.”9

Homer continued to paint African Americans for the duration of his time in Virginia, adding to a record of rare images filled with such humanity and dignity in a sea of racist caricature that Alain Locke, as late as 1940, remarked that “Homer is chiefly responsible for the modern revival of interest in the Negro subject.”10

At the unveiling of Artis Lane’s bust of Sojourner Truth, I watched as Michelle Obama spoke and wondered how many knew that she was scraping off layers of encrusted bias and history by daring to be herself in public, that she had to contend with the weight of the history of race and representation that mandated that effort.

The struggle to affirm the dignity and humanity of all cannot be waged without pictures. Race turns looking into work.

It was what Douglass knew. It is why, I have to imagine, he spent such time focusing on the nexus of race, imagery, and citizenship and spoke about the force of pictures at length in 1854, the year of the release of the widely known antebellum racial treatise Types of Mankind, by Josiah Clark Nott and George Gliddon. The book presented a hierarchy of human races and polygenesis. A few years earlier, in 1850, leading naturalist Louis Agassiz had commissioned photographer J. T. Zealy to take daguerreotypes of bare-chested and bare-breasted African- and American-born slaves in South Carolina in an attempt to prove his polygenesis views. As Sean Ross Meehan writes, Douglass was arguing that pictures, the same medium that was being used to excise African Americans from the human family, could be subversively used “to read him back in.”11

“In the making of our Presidents, the political gallery begins the operation and the picture gallery ends it,” Douglass said. Centuries later, we see it with the image of First Lady Michelle Obama, a figure of representational justice, a corrective model, a demonstration of the force of repeated images to continue the journey toward full citizenship for all on American soil.

Douglass was ahead of his time.