Michelle Obama’s Racial Resentment

Last week, Michelle Obama criticized white people for refusing to live with non-whites. At the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, she lectured whites about their fear of diversity. “[U]nbeknownst to us, we grew up in the period . . . called ‘white flight,’ ” she said. “As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented.”

“I want to remind white folks that y’all were running from us — this family with all the values that you’ve read about,” she continued pompously. “You were running from us. And you’re still running, because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in.”

She and her husband own three homes, all in white communities. In August, the Obamas bought a $15 million dollar compound in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, which is 88 percent white and less than 4 percent black. The Obamas also own an $8.1 million home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington D.C. Kalorama is nearly 83 percent white and less than 4 percent black. They also own what must be for them a pokey little dump: a six-bedroom, six-bath house in Chicago that Zillow estimates to be worth only $1.2 million, but that is in what a gushing story calls “one of Chicago’s loveliest neighborhoods.”

Mrs. Obama’s latest comments are typical. She explained in July what Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration was like. It was agonizing “to look around at a crowd that was not reflective of the country, and I had to sit in that audience as one of the handfuls of people of color, all that I had to hold on to over those last 8 years, and it was a lot emotionally.”

In her 2018 book Becoming, Mrs. Obama claimed that questions about her husband’s birth certificate threatened her family’s safety: “The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”

Michelle Obama during the book tour for Becoming. (Credit Image: © Toon Dompeling/Pro Shots via ZUMA Press)

In 2017, she said Congress is too white: At the State of the Union, she claimed to see a “real dichotomy.” “It’s a feeling of color almost,” she explained. “On one side of the room is literally gray and white. Literally, that is the color palette on one side of the room. On the other side of the room, there are yellows and blues and whites and greens. Physically, there’s a difference in color, in the tone, because on one side all men, all white, on the other side some woman, some people of color.”

In Mrs. Obama’s farewell address in January 2017 she said: “Our glorious diversity, our diversity as the faiths and colors and creeds, that is not a threat to who we are — it makes us who we are.” She told Muslims, immigrants, and other minorities that “this country belongs to you.” In a December 2016 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Mrs. Obama said anyone who thought she was an “angry black woman” was driven by fear.

Her address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention emphasized black identity:

That is the story that has brought me to this stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done — so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.

Earlier that year, she demanded more diversity in the entertainment industry.

At a 2015 Tuskegee University commencement address, the then-first lady complained about the racism she and her husband allegedly suffer, saying they carry a “heavy burden” as blacks. Living in the White House was tough: “As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating?”

In the same address, Mrs. Obama also alluded to “structural racism” and implied it caused the race riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri. That same year, she said blacks don’t feel welcome in museums.

Mrs. Obama claimed in a 2014 People interview that she faced racism when she visited a Target in 2011:

I tell this story — I mean, even as the first lady — during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life.

Maybe being 5’ 11” had something to do with it.

Mrs. Obama claimed in 2012 that Trayvon Martin’s death was a “tremendous loss” and urged America to “rally around” it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, as her husband was climbing in the polls, she said, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Attending Princeton and Harvard Law School and working for a prestigious law firm weren’t enough.

Her senior thesis at Princeton was all about race. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” she wrote. “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

The future first lady believed she was forced into “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” It’s hard to be a fuller participant than First Lady. The thesis cited the black “separationism” of Stokley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton as influences.

Michelle Obama is regularly touted as a possible presidential candidate. Her resentment against whites won’t hold her back; it will be an asset.