Remember how some people used to talk about President Barack Obama’s rise as “post-racial?” With bracing candor, Michelle Obama has begun to open up about how post-racial her White House life wasn’t.
Remember how some people used to talk about President Barack Obama’s rise as “post-racial?” With bracing candor, Michelle Obama has begun to open up about how post-racial her White House life wasn’t.
In a Tuesday night appearance at the Women’s Foundation of Colorado in Denver, the former first lady who memorably advised Democrats, “When they go low, we go high,” offered a painful glimpse of how low the insults could go — and how it felt to be on the receiving end.
As the Denver Post reported, WFCO President and CEO Lauren Casteel asked her which of the “falling glass shards” from the glass ceiling that she broke as the first black first lady cut the deepest. “The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” she said, according to the Post. “Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country, there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin color.”
Sad but true. Along with the privileges of the presidency comes a breathtaking burden on presidential families. But, so far, only one first family has had the added burden of being African-American and facing the prejudices and cheap shots that come with it.
The fact that she also is a woman makes Michelle Obama an even more inviting target for the most boneheaded bullying.
As recently as last November, for example, she was called an “ape in heels” in a Facebook post by Pamela Ramsey Taylor, director of Clay County Development Corp., Clay, W.Va., who later swore she was not racist. Clay’s Mayor Beverly Whaling replied approvingly (“Just made my day Pam”), according to NBC affiliate WSAZ.
Whaling later resigned and Taylor also lost her position, according to the Washington Post.
A similar fate befell Patrick Rushing, mayor of Airway Heights, Wash., who reportedly admitted that he called President Barack Obama “monkey man” and first lady Michelle Obama “gorilla face” last July. He stepped down a month later after the city council called for his resignation, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
Obama’s anti-obesity campaign led to attacks against her physique and alleged uppityness. Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, of all people, said she had “no business being involved” in what people eat.
Even meaner was the cartoon in conservative Breitbart’s Big Government site of a chubby Michelle gobbling a burger and fries and telling her skinny husband to “shut up and pass the bacon!”
And when the real world is not nearly enough for some people, there’s a fog of urban legends and conspiracy theories, relayed over chain emails. The prize for the most bizarre may well go to radio and Internet conspiracy loony Alex Jones of InfoWars, who claimed last year that the Michelle Obama was secretly a transgender man and Joan Rivers was murdered in the cover-up.
Gimme a break, right? It not so hard to go high when others go that low — and keep digging.
Yet despite the many outrages against her and her family, the former first lady remained resolutely upbeat about this nation as a land of opportunity.
“Women, we endure those cuts in so many ways that we don’t even notice we’re cut,” she said. “We are living with small tiny cuts, and we are bleeding every single day. And we’re still getting up.”
“The people in this country are universally good and kind and honest and decent,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of the country you live in. The folks here are good.”
Indeed, most of us are, even if some of us still need to learn a few things — like better manners.
Email Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.