REBECCA CARROLL
The minute Michelle Obama rolled up to the podium at the 2008 Democratic National Convention wearing that cool mint-green dress, hair laid to the gods, demonstrating what would become her trademark unflinching poise and ineffable ease, it was quite clear that she did not come to play. And some months later, as televised footage of the inauguration of President Barack Obama captures instances when Obama appears more taken with his wife than with the fact that he has just become the country’s first Black president, her magnific influence and his gratitude for it is all but palpable.
Michelle Obama is everything a Black man raised by a white single mother in Hawaii needed. She is everything a country with an utterly disgraceful history of emotional and physical violence against Black women should champion and elevate. And I would argue that she represents at least 60 percent of what America will miss most about the Obama presidency.
It would be easy here, and a thousand other times over the past eight years, to trot out the “behind every great man is a great woman” trope, or the “strong Black woman” and “Black superwoman” stereotypes. In truth, though, what Michelle Obama did as First Lady of the United States was take the strong Black woman stereotype and laugh, then kick its ass and tell it to move on out of her way. You see, as she and the President like to say, Michelle Obama has no use for stereotypes or tropes—because they stunt intellectual growth, leave no room for imagination, and are antithetical to the power of hard work, individual strength and self-determination. And if FLOTUS and the President are about anything, it’s about the platform of self-determination.
As indomitable as she is today, as a young girl, like most girls and perhaps in particular most young black girls, Michelle did not always lead with confidence. She has admitted to feeling “tangled up in fears and doubts that were entirely of my own creation” when she was a student in high school, and spending too much time worried about her hair and her looks, and what other kids might be saying about her. She has mentioned teachers who openly underestimated her intelligence and prospects to succeed. The beauty, though, of having created her own fears and doubts, is the way in which she has effectively, even casually, decimated them along her path to Princeton, then Harvard Law School, as a successful corporate lawyer, and as a prominent badass in the public sector.
Self-determination is not a mysterious thing—but Michelle makes it seem like it is. For a kid who grew up on the South Side of Chicago with a big brother to trail behind and working-class parents to make proud for their sacrifices, her will and character and complete lack of cynicism are woven throughout her life like threads of magical realism. We can all imagine little girl Michelle in school, working hard and being brave, as the notion evokes almost on cue images of Ruby Bridges and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, alone in the white world of newly integrated schools. But it gets harder to envision when you think about young woman Michelle at Princeton and Harvard in the 1980s—set in between the Black Is Beautiful 70s and the Living Single era of the 90s. Somewhere along the line, she walked into the light and got the hell over.
I marvel at the thought of how my own little brown self would have been influenced growing up with Michelle Obama in the White House. The little brown me, adopted into a white family, surrounded by anti-reflections, inundated by unremitting standards of white beauty, acceptance, worth. Exoticized for my caramel skin and praised for my talents as a dancer and a storyteller early on, when I hit fifth grade, it was as if my skin had somehow suddenly taken on a darker hue—scorched for flying too close to freedom. I wore an afro and sometimes handkerchiefs around my head leaving just a lion’s mane ring around my face. I smiled and smiled and laughed and wrote stories and played with friends and felt free. I was free. Until I was not. My fifth-grade teacher, who was mean anyway, made sure to let me know that I was less than all the others—lucky, but in a defying nature sort of way: “very pretty … for a black girl. Most black girls aren’t very pretty.” And with that, I turned inward and lost a faith in my blackness that I never even knew I had until it turned into pride years later.
In middle school I delighted and felt special, somehow redeemed, when one of the most popular boys bought me for the school’s annual “Slave Day”—a tradition since quietly phased out, but back then at my regional middle school in rural New England it was a highly anticipated barometer of popularity. Boys would bid on girls, and girls would bid on boys with fake money, even though all the most popular kids were wealthy. The slave you purchased belonged to you as property for an entire day, and you could make them wear and do whatever you wanted. The boy who bought me was, at 12 years old, a competitive ski racer. He dressed me in his tightest fitting racing suit, and I had to wear his heavy ski boots and tinted goggles too.
No one—not teachers, students, librarians, secretaries or the principal—in the entire school gave a second thought to the racial implications of this time-honored tradition. Not a single parent, including my own, mounted a complaint or expressed concern that dedicating a whole day to the buying and selling of people and calling them slaves might be problematic, demeaning or racist. Because in a historical context, I was the sole student who would suffer this impact. There were no other black students. And in fact, I did not exist to anyone in that school until I was purchased property. I reveled in my status as purchase-worthy, while also mindful of how lucky I was to not have the misfortune of looking like most black girls.
A few years later, the boy who bought me was the same boy who asked me to the sophomore prom “as a friend” and who was forbidden by his father to take me, a black girl, because: “You don’t want to look back at pictures and see that you took a black girl to the prom.”
I’m quite sure that my fifth-grade teacher would have been less kind to little Michelle, with her dark brown skin and full lips. But I also believe that Michelle would not have internalized the comment as I did for years—indeed, could not have internalized the comment and gone on to become who she is and withstand the public scrutiny she has been subjected to since day one.
Even in the late days of the first campaign trail when the media attacked her mercilessly with coded language regarding her toughness and harsh tone and general outspokenness, then and still eight years later, she has never once lost her composure. In fact, she has consistently boosted it up a notch.
Whether demanding to be “greeted properly” with a fist bump while guesting on The View after being ridiculed for the gesture, riffing on the double entendre of “turn up”/turnip, spitting Missy Elliot lyrics, dancing to “Uptown Funk” with the cast from You Think You Can Dance, practicing Tai Chi with high school students in China, throwing shade or mitigating straight inappropriate behavior by public figures, shimmying with Jimmy Fallon, rapping about college or flexing her freakishly beautiful, sculpted arms—Michelle Obama’s sense of self is distinctly rooted in humor, tenacity and resolute blackness. She is the embodiment of what black American writer Zora Neale Hurston meant when she wrote: “I love myself when I am laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”
That Hurston quote, which also became the title of the Zora Neale Hurston Reader edited by Alice Walker and published in 1979, comes from Hurston’s response to a series of photos taken of her by white photographer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten. Condemned for her independence as an assertive Black woman in the 1930s, Hurston was, if nothing else—and indeed, she was many things—herself. That is no small thing for a Black woman in the 1930s, and sadly, it is no small thing for a Black woman in the 2000s either. But that is, I think, what befuddles and pleases and intoxicates America about Michelle Obama. It doesn’t occur to her to be anything other than herself.
She is a civil disrupter with a radical kind of benevolence. She is focused and silly, compelling and humble. It would all be an act if it wasn’t. And while some might argue that this is precisely what politicians do and who they are—polished, well prepared, articulate, unflappable—Michelle Obama is not so much a politician as she is a manifestor; the hyper spectacular incarnation of a Black woman unbound. The Black woman who knew when and where she entered on her own terms, evocative of still yet another Hurston quote: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
Whereas these words might be interpreted as a reflection of the Hurston described by many of her critics as contrary and immodest, to me they register as Hurston’s manifesto and Obama’s preamble. Michelle Obama would never speak such words, but she doesn’t need to—they rest high in her taut brown shoulders, gather in meaning as her hands gesture in that trademark make-it-plain way, march quietly in the crescent of her broad, knowing smile, and are released in the sureness of her stride.
Among the most remarked upon attributes of Zora Neale Hurston is how centered she was in her Blackness, and how racially ambiguous she appeared. Light-skinned, and likely identified by the term at the top of her own personally created color scale—“high yaller”—she could have easily passed for white in various circles, and yet, she didn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t about that. She was ardently committed to her culture and kinfolk, and her place among them. There is no mistaking Michelle Obama for anything but Black—although one gets the clear impression that she would evince the same cultural devotion if she looked anything like Hurston.
And that—the full immersion, gratitude and integrity regarding her Blackness and that of those she loves—is perhaps the most appreciable reason that Barack chose her. I might be less inclined to be so bold in my presumption about why the President of the United States loves his wife, if not for the deep well of empathy I have for the younger Barack Obama—the Barack in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, who writes: “Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a Black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Michelle Obama knew what that meant.
As a Black adoptee growing up in a white family, it also fell upon me to raise myself to be Black whilst no one around me had any idea what that meant—but I was sure as hell going to find a partner who did—whenever or if ever it came time to get married, or to settle in with someone for the duration. About this intention, I wrote some years ago: “I was going to marry a Black man. That was the mandate. He would validate my own Blackness, and allow me to reemerge as the Black woman I always knew I was but wasn’t able to express. I would happily, freely shed any and all remnants of an identity shaped by being raised in a white family, attending all-white schools, and the imbued notion that I would be a better and more appealing person, friend, girlfriend, if I were white.”
It didn’t end up that way for me, because ultimately, you love who you love. And as it turns out, if you are Black, who you marry doesn’t make you any less or more so. But I understand well, and recognize duly that Barack Obama could not deny himself the company of a woman who loves herself and her Blackness when she is laughing, and then again when she’s looking mean and impressive.