The Meaning of Michelle Page 3

  I wonder what Michelle thought of the Black kids from the tony private schools and Jack and Jill. Maybe like me she didn’t think about them because she didn’t know that they existed. Doubtful, considering that one of her best friends from high school was Santita Jackson, daughter of Jesse, one of Martin Luther King’s comrades. While the Jacksons are not officially, technically Black elite, they are Black civil rights royalty. And it’s been reported that Michelle spent so much time at the Jackson household, “Jesse could’ve charged her rent.” (Santita, who came to Howard just as I was graduating, is godmother to Malia.)10

  In August 1966, when Michelle was a preschooler, her parents—like all of Chicago and the nation—were witness to the violent reaction of whites to a Martin Luther King–led march through a white Chicago neighborhood to bring attention to the substandard living conditions of urban Black Chicagoans. Many local whites threw bricks (one hit King in the head), knives were thrown at protesters, cars were vandalized and set afire, cops were punched. King said: “I have seen many demonstrations in the south but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”11

  Michelle came of age at the tail end of Black Power, which might explain her supreme self-confidence in being exactly who she is. But let’s face it: The Black elite with its obsession with class and color had to touch her life at some point. She is a dark-skinned woman without “classically” beautiful features and no social provenance. A very smart friend of mine once said that Barack wouldn’t win because America wasn’t ready for a dark-skinned woman in the White House. I vehemently disagreed with her and when he won, she happily admitted that she’d been wrong.

  In 2007, Michelle told Vogue magazine: “I say this not to be modest, but there are so many young people who could be me. There’s nothing magical about my background. I am not a super genius. I had good parents and some good teachers and some decent breaks, and I work hard. Every other kid I knew could have been me, but they got a bad break and didn’t recover. It’s like I tell the young people I talk to: The difference between success and failure in our society is a very slim margin. You almost have to have that perfect storm of good parents, self-esteem, and good teachers. It’s a lot, which is why Barack and I believe so passionately about investing in education and strengthening institutions.”12

  Thing is, Michelle is like so many of us and she knows it. She was raised by striving, working-class Black parents. During the time we grew up, pretty much all Black parents were strivers and I don’t mean that in a grubbing, social climbing way—no, it was an achievement climb. It was about uplift, but not emulating white folks. The dream was that we would hold on to the values we learned in those Black neighborhoods and then we’d go out and conquer, but we wouldn’t “forget our raising.” That didn’t quite happen or it didn’t happen for enough of us; we did not all hold on to our essential selves. Michelle did. She brought her mama with her to the White House, which means she brought her home with her; she and Barack have the same friends and brought them along, too. It’s hard being oneself under a microscope and the miracle of Michelle is that she seems to have always held on to her authentic self—with lots of her middle name, LaVaughn—holding center, unlike me who traveled a path to get back to my authentic Neal.

  There’s something enviable (now) about women who don’t spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. Michelle went away to school and law school but moved back to her hometown and settled into her professional life, married, and became a mother all while within a five-mile radius. There’s a lot to be said for that. Her husband has adopted her hometown as his. Never any fight about which parents to spend the holidays with. Her brother Craig sums her up: “Michelle doesn’t like to play games and it’s not because she hates to lose, it’s because she wants everybody to win.”13

  Michelle resonates for us on a deeply personal level. She’s given us permission to be ourselves, on a national stage, to be proud of our Blackness, our realness, our humble beginnings, our regular-ness, our greatness. To not be perfect and to not even have that as a goal, because she’s smart enough to understand that perfection is its own prison.

  When we look back on the Obamas’ stay at 1600, as fantastical and far-fetched as his presidency seemed to be eight years ago, it was as real as Michelle is. A dark-skinned, working-class Black girl marries a biracial, Black-identified intellectual equal who ends up becoming the leader of the free world. They raised their young daughters into young womanhood under a spotlight with not one whiff of bad public behavior. It’s a story even the best of us wouldn’t have dared to dream, much less write.

  Crushing on Michelle: Or the Unapologetic Power of Blackness

  DAMON YOUNG

  The first time I heard Barack Obama’s name was in 2004. I was a teacher at Wilkinsburg High School (located in a Pittsburgh-adjacent suburb) and one of my colleagues burst into my classroom gushing about him, having seen his keynote the night before at the Democratic National Convention. He even claimed this guy would be president one day.

  Unfortunately, America had already given me a healthy and practical skepticism of the type of Black people White people gush about, so I smiled, thought “Whatever, man” and kept putting numbers in Grade Quick.

  Barack Obama? I thought, Did he even pronounce it right? That sounds like a stage name. Or the alias of a Black superhero. A poor man’s King T’challa.

  Still, I kept his name stored away, and felt my interest pique a bit later when Common namedropped him on a remix of Jadakiss’s “Why.”

  Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama

  Why don’t we impeach him and elect Obama

  This was enough for me to start a sincere investigation. Who is this mysteriously named man? Where is he from? Is he biracial or just a light-skinned brotha with two light-skinned Black parents? What is he about? Is he for real? Can he hoop?

  Each of these questions had easy-to-determine answers that could be found with a 10-second jaunt to Google. But the best and most honest way for me to find each of the answers I desired involved a follow-up question:

  “Who is he married to?”

  And then I learned about Michelle.

  I read up on her background and her resume. Her Chicago roots. Her sociology degree from Princeton, where she graduated cum laude, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School when she was 24. (24!)

  I learned about her mother, Marian Robinson, and her father, Fraser Robinson III, a man whose battle with multiple sclerosis inspired Michelle to excel academically. I learned that I—a basketball maven who makes a point of being aware of the relatively minute number of Black Division-1 coaches—actually knew about her brother. I was very well acquainted with then-Brown University head coach Craig Robinson.

  I found out about Barack and Michelle’s history. How he pursued her in the type of persistent, Darius Lovehall from Love Jones-esque manner that became a cute anecdote since it worked and would have been a scary story about a Chicago creeper if it didn’t. I learned about their first date; a trip to see Do The Right Thing, which is either the best or the worst choice for a first date movie ever. And then I met Sasha and Malia, the two beautiful daughters who somehow manage to be doppelgangers of both their parents.

  And, I also saw her. And I couldn’t (and, to be honest, still can’t) wrap my mind around the fact that this woman had an actual chance of being the First Lady.

  No offense to any of the wives of the presidents before President Obama—all lovely, gracious, and exemplary women—but damn! I was used to First Ladies being, well, professional First Ladies. Nice, grandmotherly white ladies who belonged to Silver Sneakers and shared houses in Florida with women named “Rose” and “Blanche.” Not statuesque and preternaturally attractive brown-skinned women with grace and style and sex appeal and swag. She was the real life version of the characters Angela Bassett and Gina Torres have spent the last decade of their careers playing. The type of woman who’d walk into a board meeting or a yoga cl
ass or a Trader Joe’s or a Friday happy hour on U Street in D.C. and make you instinctively straighten your posture, tighten your gut, and settle your gait. Because you knew that in order to have any type of meaningful interaction with her, you’d need to have your shit together. And you desperately wanted to have that shit together—or, at least, do a convincing job convincing her you had that shit together—because you desperately wanted to approach her, to talk to her, to know her, and for her to know and be impressed by and remember you. She was a level-lifter. An aspiration. An ambition. The woman you’d want to meet if you planned on taking over the world, together.

  And then my tepid and halting support for Barack Obama became a fervent following. How could I not throw all of my chips in with a Black man who had the wherewithal, the foresight, the wisdom, and the game (Yes. The game.) to marry her? If he found a way to convince this amazing woman to accept his hand and have his children, he’s exactly the type of man I want to be my president.

  Now before I continue, let me make a couple things clear. I’m in no way suggesting that a politician must be married (or straight) to be an impactful one worthy of support. Nor would I dream of implying that if a Black politician happens to be married, they must be married to a Black person. There are myriad examples of brilliant and committed Black people who’ve chosen partners who are not Black, and perhaps even more examples of substandard Black lawmakers who married within their race.

  But I can’t deny my truth, which is a truth shared by many other Black people who shared my skepticism. Yes, we eventually fell in love with Barack Obama. We bought the pins and the pens and stuck the bumper stickers on our windshields (and, if we didn’t happen to have a car, our bookbags). We made the phone calls and canvassed the neighborhoods, attempting to register people everywhere from family BBQs and Omega Psi Phi boat rides to beauty salons and barbershops. We attended the rallies. Shit, we had pre-rally happy hours and post-rally potlucks. We had watch parties and tweet-ups for his debates, treating them the same way we treat Scandal season premieres and the BET Awards. We bought and rocked the T-shirts with his face on them. Which, in hindsight, was probably rather creepy. But we did it anyway. We even adopted Joe Biden!

  But Michelle was the conduit. Michelle was the one who signaled that it was right and safe for us to do all of these things. Essentially, the anti-coal mine canary. She was our litmus test. The final and most important exam Barack had to pass. We weren’t just voting for Barack. We desired to see Barack and Michelle (and Sasha and Malia) in the White House. To be paraded and honored around the world. Because while Barack was the rock star, the headliner, it was Michelle and not her husband who we fell in love with first.

  Of course, much of this love was mined from the symbolic nature of the Obama family’s ascendance and prominence. And we made no bones about it; we wanted this unambiguously Black family to be America’s first family. (If you asked a typical Black Obama supporter in 2007 or 2008 if they only supported him because he was Black, the most likely answer would be “Of course!”) It was a cathartic desire; one mined out of the historic context of the Black American in America, a latent sense of and want for validation, an acknowledgement of the psychic impact this would have on America (Black America, specifically), and a very real want for America’s HNIC to be an actual nigga. Also, many of us (myself included) took a particular glee from the thought of historically prominent and morally minor racists like Bull Conner and George Wallace and all the people who believed our parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents and us weren’t worthy of full citizenship doing 1,000 revolutions per minute in their graves.

  But, when speaking specifically of Michelle (and speaking from a heterosexual Black man’s perspective), this love—this cavernous reservoir of positive feeling—was largely aspirational. And for the first time in recent memory, these aspirations were centered in reality. Before her, the benchmark romantic mates for Black men were fictional characters (i.e., Claire Huxtable), attractive actresses who played desirable fictional characters so well that we projected a perfect woman status on them (i.e., Nia Long, Regina King, and Halle Berry), blaxploitation stars (i.e., Pam Grier), hosts of MTV and BET shows that aired in the 90s (i.e., Ananda Lewis or Rachel Stuart) or former members of Destiny’s Child. None of these women, however, were realistically attainable. Because while some of them are very real people, the image they projected congealed with our own invented projections of them, creating perfect woman proxies that existed in a space between our imaginations and our realities.

  Michelle Obama, however, was real. While Black Americans collectively saw her and saw our sisters and cousins and aunts and moms, we (Black men) saw her and saw our classmates and our neighbors; our coworkers and our colleagues. We saw the woman we wanted to approach, to court, to date, to commit to, to marry, and to start a family and grow old with, even if we didn’t actually realize we wanted to do any of those things before we saw her. We saw a regular Black chick; but with “regular Black” being a compliment—the best compliment—instead of a pejorative.

  And this, the appeal of the First Lady’s “regular Blackness,” cannot be overstated. She wasn’t from Turks and Caicos; she was from Chicago. The same South Side immortalized in songs from Common and Kanye and name dropped whenever racists want to dog whistle a point about Black-on-Black crime. She didn’t possess what’s commonly and disturbingly referred to as “good hair.” Her hair was full and stylish and healthy, of course. But it was Black hair, the type of hair that communicated to us all that she knew what her “kitchen” was, was very well acquainted with the nap, and had a back-and-forth relationship with hot combs. And, the lean and athletic Michelle was also blessed with a curvy behind that I’d totally call a “bubble,” a “big booty” or even a “fat ass” if I wasn’t attempting to be respectful of the First Lady. She wasn’t the type of beautiful we’d usually see on the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. But she possessed the beauty shared by the women in our families and the girls in high school and the women at Urban League Young Professionals general body meetings we crushed on. It was a beauty specific to Blackness that wasn’t a specifically Black beauty. Because it was impervious to qualification. She wasn’t stunning for a Black woman. She was a woman whose undeniably Black features made her stunning.

  It’s still far too early to accurately assess the “Obama Effect” on Black America. It’ll take decades to be able to fully rate and measure the cultural impact of the Obama family’s eight-year-long stint in the White House. It’s even too soon to tease out and efficiently deconstruct easy-to-determine stats like Black marriage rates and HBCU enrollment. There’s just not enough of a sample size to distinguish an actual trend—and the Obama’s connection to that trend—from statistical noise.

  That said, I possess a few theories on the Obamas’ level of permeation and influence on our cultural zeitgeist; thoughts with no actual factual basis but instead determined from a mélange of feeling, anecdote, experience, observation, and conversation at happy hours after three Honey Jack and ginger ales.

  I think the Obamas have helped shepherd in both a collective embrace of unapologetic Blackness and a new generation of Black writers, academics, thinkers, activists, and pundits unconcerned with the White gaze. I think the photos of President Obama playing basketball provided validation for all the middle-aged Black men who have (1) said the first thing they’d do if elected president is organize the best pick-up games ever (like what President Obama did) and who (2) catch shit from their wives and children for regularly hooping in sweatpants and tucked-in white shirts. Because if President Obama does it too, it’s officially cool. I think we’re going to see a boom of Black babies named Barack, Sasha, and Malia. I think the light-skinned Black man, who jokingly was considered to be “out of style,” will continue to experience a renaissance. I think rappers will continue to find and invent unique words to rhyme with Obama. I think the already stale and abjectly false stereotype of Black people not appreciating intellect and ac
ademic achievement will die a slow and painful death. I think Washington, D.C., has officially replaced Atlanta as the Mecca for Black America. And since brunch is the preferred meal of choice for Black Washingtonians, I think it’ll officially replace the cookout as the peak Blackest meal.

  But mostly I think the onslaught of criticism Michelle has received pretty much nonstop from Whites who just haven’t been able to accept that a woman like her is considered beautiful—snide comments and just outright nasty remarks about everything from her body and her facial features to her height and her gait—caused us to circle the wagons around her. Because she’s our fucking First Lady so show some damn respect. And also because the insults about Michelle’s commonly and perfectly Black features were not-so-subtle shots at ours, too. If they believed the things they said about this woman, they felt the same way about us. And I believe that defense of Michelle helped many of us acknowledge, accept, confront, and attempt to alter some of the more unsavory and unflattering latent beliefs and subconscious feelings we possessed about our skin and our noses and our eyes and our hair.

  It’s a legacy I’m amazed by when I think of kids like my 9-year-old niece and 11-year-old nephew. While those older vividly remember a time when the thought of a Black president and Black First Lady was, if not quite absurd, unrealistic (and still surreal, struggling at times to wrap our minds around the whole idea), for children this age, this is literally all they know. They have no conception, no recollection, no idea of existing in an America without a Black president. They will have racial and cultural baggage, like we all do. But they will have less of it. All my niece knows is Sasha and Malia and Michelle—Black girls who look like her and a Black woman who looks like her mom—when she turns on CNN or picks up a newspaper or is in line at Giant Eagle and glances at the magazines in the aisle or is asked to research the First Family for a project at school. Perhaps she’s not old enough yet to fully process what she’s seen and heard, but she has seen and heard her mother and grandmother and aunts and uncles defend Michelle Obama’s Blackness. And now she knows Blackness—and all the beautifully Black things specific to her—is worthy of defense.