A recent
article in Politico
magazine called First Lady Michelle Obama a “feminist nightmare” and lambasted her
for her failure to be “edgier” and more vocal about more controversial issues.
One commenter quoted in the article asserted that Michelle Obama has become “an almost music-hall-level imitation of a warm-and-fuzzy, unthreatening,
bucolic female from some imaginary era from the past.” The author ends on a
note of somber resignation: “Someday somebody will shatter the conventional
First Lady mold. It just won’t be Michelle Obama.” Nothing, however, could be
farther from the truth. Michelle Obama is the most unconventional First Lady in
the history of First Ladies. No amount of reading to children and gardening
will undo this.
Discourses
of the good wife and mother, along with discourses about empowered womanhood,
have historically been forged within the frameworks of racial and class based
ideologies. This is especially true today. There remains, for instance, an
intimate link between motherhood, race, class and civic membership. Black
motherhood is a particularly difficult role to occupy in contemporary United
States society, and that difficulty is heightened for educated black women who
sometimes find themselves conflicted by the possibility of desireable work
outside of the home and meaningful work within it. While an iconic goal of the
mainstream (white) feminist movement has often been to get out of the house,
for too many black women the goal has long been to get into the house—that is, into
their own houses and out of the houses of others where for centuries they
worked for no wages or low wages.
Black
First Ladyhood is a whole other dimension of black motherhood and womanhood. It
is a role whose demands are at once so complex, novel, and difficult to
maneuver that its performance certainly defies and disrupts most labels that we
might try to append to it. This is in large part because being a black First Lady involves a
much-too-short historic journey from the kitchen of the plantation Big House to
the Executive Residence of the White House. And we live even now in a world
where Ivy League-credentialed, business suit wearing, briefcase carrying black
women may easily be confused with the cleaning staff, courtesy of a pervasive, deep-seated
social and cognitive dissonance that admits of few other possibilities. It is
perhaps little wonder that Michelle Obama might like to pause to relish her
role as Mom-in-Chief. Indeed what a wonder it is for Michelle Obama to be cast
as Everybody’s Mother rather than as somebody’s mammy.
Media
portrayals of Michelle Obama’s allegedly deficient feminism are often assumed
to be neutral and ideologically pure, fueled by the wisdom of decades of well-honed
feminist activism and deep thought.
However, too often neither writers nor readers of such portrayals are
conscious of the strong ideological biases that are inevitably encoded, and
they sometimes adopt such stances without much critical inquiry. It is certainly
true that every act by every woman is not feminist. Even so, feminism is a
broad, multifaceted, and highly contextual concept. Media pieces like the one
in Politico do feminism a grave
injustice by framing Michelle Obama as one of the enemies of feminism, taking
scattershot aim with a claim that is at once overwrought and undertheorized.
