Love Letter To Michelle

While charges of gender-treason abound all around me, I turn my attention to the kind of woman I actually do admire. I admit that I felt embarrassed when I realized, watching her on Larry King relatively recently, that beyond very superficial consideration of her kick ass fashion and the genuine affection she shares with her husband, I had not paid much attention to the woman who would be First Lady. This to me was yet another strike against the mythology that claims Ultimate Victim Status for Hillary, a woman who, as far so many women are concerned, has been incredibly privileged and powerful (at the very least for being an entrenched and influential part of the government of the biggest world superpower currently engaged in an occupation war). The fact that even I wasn't really paying Michelle Obama any mind strikes me as proof positive that something particularly bitter sits at the bottom of the gender-race cocktail that some of us drink from and some us never taste.

Michelle Obama was on Larry King and I watched and was in genuine awe. I think for all her husband's charisma, she by far exhibits more: more power, more strength, more fight and more poise. She is that rare creature that is only loved by those whom she would have love her, while he is the creature that everyone falls in love with. It's clear which quality is best for a national leader--his, but it's also clear which quality makes me proud to be a woman--hers. You see, Michelle Obama is loved by those who have long held a fundamental belief in their personhood and a commitment to the protection of that belief when pretty much the history of the world has been a string of vicious attacks on it. To me she, even more than he, communicates self-possession and an adamant refusal to cede the slightest inch to the notion that she somehow belongs in some exceptional, Other reality. More impressive is that she does it without appearing to be posturing. I don't mean that she is cocky, and I don't just mean that she is confident. I mean that she IS herself completely. We all know that women are made vessels, and targets, for all sorts of shenanigans in the big patriarchical circus. We all know the ways that projecting gets even trickier for women of color. Even more specific for black American women in America. When you see Michelle Obama and really look at her and listen to her and see her countenance, it seems to me a challenge to find room for projections, open ended sentences one could give predictable ends, meanings one could arbitrarily derive and crazy racist/sexist fantasias one could enact: she's the fully constituted person she is and you're just talking to her. When she was swiftboated anti-patriotic by the right wingers, she actually had said this was the first time she was proud of this country. These are her words and though they may have called up the swiftboating, stating them plainly and fearlessly as she did also called up something else: context. Many understood exactly what she did and did not mean. I regret the need for this cliché, but she is (powerfully) real. And not only that, she is fully aware of the necessity of her realness-in fact, she is deploying it against all.

On Larry King that night she was fantastically self-assured and when he asked the typical question of "are you ready to be the first black first lady", she barely allowed him to finish before cutting him off to answer, simply,

“I’m who I am I. I’m ready for it. That’s who I am.”

Larry King didn’t get it and many other people probably don't get that this is a very significant way to phrase that answer. She intends in that phrase, to say, of course I am ready to be first black woman anything. She is answering Larry King, and also answering this curious, skeptical, possibly ill-intended and certainly ill-instructed public. She is answering a whole historical narrative about who she is and filling up her own space. She is, without any drama, making a critical point that is rather profound. She is explaining that she was born ready for the fact that for most of what's worth fighting for and living for--be it the integrity of her body, her education, an adequate measure of respect or even the White House; be it daily survival or grandest aspiration--if she got there, she'd likely be first. And if not first, one of very few. That was true when she got good grades and a good education early on, and true when she graduated high school, and true when she got into Princeton, and true when she got into Harvard, and true when she got her first job, and true when she got her last job, and true when she quit it to help her husband run for highest office in the land. Her not being ready to be first then, same as for me and and so many like me that I love and admire, would have been tantamount to not being ready to be much of anything.

I won't even do a disclaimer here and say maybe I am overthinking this because frankly, I've been damn near drowned in some of the most exotically toxic essentialist gender critiques for my support for Obama in recent days. Those interlocutors-all women, all white, all Hillary's age--have not pulled any punches or spared any romance or even sobered any of their thinking on the matter, and so I won't either. I've fought the nefarious pull of suspect identity politics in this election as best as I could because I stand firm on the conviction that it is lazy and a remedy akin to the effect that old antiobiotics have on new strands of TB--while shit was potent once today the organism it fights has evolved and adapted and we need new medicine. I held out and but having recently been pulled back by the fabricated Obama backlash cum Hillary surge, I now feel entitled to say this: it makes me giddy, from my toes to my ears, and it makes my heart skip a beat, to think that this barely 200-year old country, once one of the most brutal slave societies known, could soon have its First Lady, its feminine icon, its '08 Jackie O. be one Michelle O.(if judging by last night's superb battle royale black number with the punctuating white pearls, I think she’s indeed ready).

We have long understood who he and what his arrival on the scene means but we’ve not spent enough time talking about the fact that along with him, she would come as well. The First Lady to be is a black American woman whose Africa is not the appealing, up-by-bootstraps Kenyan immigrant story but slavery, whose biography did not take her from Hawaii to Indonesia to Kansas but grounded her in that typical American city by way of the South experience, whose persona is called the familiar names (your New Yorker politesse may say "mordant" or "stone-faced" but others will say more colorful things soon enough). Michelle Obama is a woman whose blackness is that fait accompli, that known target, that common place this whole mess is about anyway, that black American blackness.

...One of the women with whom I recently disagreed about my choosing Obama said to me, by way of friendly critique, that this election had the country "working through some serious subconscious stuff". To that I say, you have no fucking idea.