THE FRIGHT HOUSE
Michelle Obama reveals racist abuse and insults
MICHELLE OBAMA offered a rare insight into the insults and abuse she encountered on becoming America’s first AfricanAmerican first lady, including being caricatured as an angry black woman and accusations that she was ‘‘uppity’’.
Addressing the graduating class of 2015 at Tuskegee University in Alabama, historically a black college, Obama said that some derogatory marks had upset her and kept her up at night until she learned to screen them out.
‘‘Folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me. One said I exhibited ‘a little bit of uppity-ism’. Another noted that I was one of my husband’s ‘cronies of colour’. One cable news channel once charmingly referred to me as ‘Obama’s baby-mama’.’’
She added that she had been subject to different questions from those faced by other candidates’ wives. ‘‘Was I too loud, or too angry or too emasculating?’’ she said. ‘‘Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?’’
Since President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he has rarely referred to race and discrimination, a restraint generally attributed to his desire not to be defined by being America’s first black president or to be seen as the cliched angry black man.
However, after protests in Baltimore against the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers spilt over into riots last month, Barack Obama spoke powerfully about the racism and lack of opportunity faced by African-Americans. ‘‘This has been a slow-rolling crisis,’’ he said – an acknowledgment that many felt was too little and too late.
Michelle Obama has generally avoided the subject too. Her speech to the Tuskegee graduates was all the more remarkable for its force and passion and was a sign, possibly, that she believes that it is finally time to speak up.
She paid tribute to the Tuskegee airmen, a group of AfricanAmerican military fighter pilots and bomber pilots who fought in World War II but who still faced discrimination, with white soldiers refusing to return their salutes and the local sheriff addressing them as ‘‘boy’’.
She and her husband knew how frustrating that sort of treatment could be, she said. ‘‘We’ve both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives – the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’.’’
That frustration, she added, was expressed in communities such as Baltimore and Ferguson, where unrest over the treatment of black men by white officers has also provoked unrest.
While she acknowledged that the feelings were a heavy burden, the first lady said that they were not an excuse to give up: ‘‘To succumb to feelings of despair and anger only means that, in the end, we lose.’’