Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at Tuskegee University that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining.
Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off key and characteristically self-pitying.
Few women in modern America have been the focus of as much adulation as Michelle Obama, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was making almost $270,000 by the time her husband was elected senator. She is routinely lionized for her beauty and her public spiritedness.
Yet, the first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America (her notorious comment in 2008 was that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.”). Her gloss on the famous Wallis Simpson line is apparently that you can never be too rich, too thin or too easily offended.
At Tuskegee, she related a series of inconsequential gibes or perceived insults mostly from 2008 that, for her, loom large enough to share with graduating seniors years later.
The first lady cited a controversial New Yorker cover during that campaign of her sporting an Angela Davis-style Afro and a gun. The image was meant to satirize “misconceptions and prejudices” about the Obamas, in the words of the publication’s editor, David Remnick.
The first lady said “it knocked me back a bit.” Give her this: Few of us know the pain of being featured on a cover of one of the nation’s most respected magazines in a spoof meant to illustrate how our critics are mean-spirited loons.
(Remnick went on to further demonstrate his hostility to the Obamas by writing an admiring 672-page biography of the president.)
The first lady also mentioned to the Tuskegee graduates a brief mini-controversy over her congratulatory fist bump with Barack after a primary win getting called a “terrorist fist jab.” Here is the devastating reference, from E.D. Hill, then a Fox News anchor, teasing a segment on the bump: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.”
(The notion that it was a “terrorist fist jab” originated with a commenter on the Human Events website. A writer for Slate picked it up and wrote about the comment, and then the phrase became a meme, even though no one of any consequence had called the bump that.)
The rest of Michelle’s specific plaints involved a barb from Rush Limbaugh, another from Michelle Malkin, and a chyron on Fox News. Grim stuff, right? Needless to say, this comes with the territory. No doubt, if her husband is elected president, by the time he is inaugurated, people will have said mean things about Heidi Cruz, too.
After all the outrageous slings and arrows she suffered in the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama limped into office with a 68-18 favorable rating, according to Gallup. It couldn’t have been easy being showered with such widespread (but, admittedly, not quite universal) acclaim.
Somehow, she managed to recover when it came to magazine covers, posing for the March 2009 Vogue, looking resplendent on a cover with the lines, “Michelle Obama: The First Lady the World’s Been Waiting For.”
After six years of partisan warfare waged by and over her husband, Michelle Obama still has a 2-1 favorable rating and according to a recent YouGov survey is the fifth-most admired woman on the planet, finishing just below Queen Elizabeth II and above Celine Dion.
But even the mighty apparatus of the imperial presidency can’t protect the first lady from irksome interactions with the insufficiently sensitive or deferential. In a People magazine profile in which the Obamas told of their struggles with racism, Michelle Obama recounted how hurtful it was that when she once visited Target, a women asked her to help get something off a shelf. Perhaps because she was tall enough to reach it.
In her Tuskegee address, at least Michelle Obama urged the graduates not to be daunted by slights (and more meaningful obstacles, like rotten schools). She commended to them the example of herself, “the fully-formed first lady who stands before you today.”
Even though Michelle Obama didn’t mention the word, what she was discussing was “microaggressions.” It is the trendy term on college campuses for often inadvertent offensiveness, such as Barack Obama, once upon a time, being mistaken for a waiter when he wore a tuxedo at an event.
The idiocy of the concept of the microaggression is its underlying premise that only people who belong to certain select groups ever suffer indignities or humiliations, when they are, of course, endemic to the human condition. George Orwell once said that every life seen from the inside is a series of defeats.
The microaggression, properly understood, is a sign of progress. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow to innocent misunderstandings and occasional rudeness is a vast leap forward.
Michelle Obama’s Lifetime of Microaggressions
The first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America.
Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at Tuskegee University that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining.
Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off key and characteristically self-pitying.
Few women in modern America have been the focus of as much adulation as Michelle Obama, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was making almost $270,000 by the time her husband was elected senator. She is routinely lionized for her beauty and her public spiritedness.
Yet, the first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America (her notorious comment in 2008 was that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.”). Her gloss on the famous Wallis Simpson line is apparently that you can never be too rich, too thin or too easily offended.
At Tuskegee, she related a series of inconsequential gibes or perceived insults mostly from 2008 that, for her, loom large enough to share with graduating seniors years later.
The first lady cited a controversial New Yorker cover during that campaign of her sporting an Angela Davis-style Afro and a gun. The image was meant to satirize “misconceptions and prejudices” about the Obamas, in the words of the publication’s editor, David Remnick.
The first lady said “it knocked me back a bit.” Give her this: Few of us know the pain of being featured on a cover of one of the nation’s most respected magazines in a spoof meant to illustrate how our critics are mean-spirited loons.
(Remnick went on to further demonstrate his hostility to the Obamas by writing an admiring 672-page biography of the president.)
The first lady also mentioned to the Tuskegee graduates a brief mini-controversy over her congratulatory fist bump with Barack after a primary win getting called a “terrorist fist jab.” Here is the devastating reference, from E.D. Hill, then a Fox News anchor, teasing a segment on the bump: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.”
(The notion that it was a “terrorist fist jab” originated with a commenter on the Human Events website. A writer for Slate picked it up and wrote about the comment, and then the phrase became a meme, even though no one of any consequence had called the bump that.)
The rest of Michelle’s specific plaints involved a barb from Rush Limbaugh, another from Michelle Malkin, and a chyron on Fox News. Grim stuff, right? Needless to say, this comes with the territory. No doubt, if her husband is elected president, by the time he is inaugurated, people will have said mean things about Heidi Cruz, too.
After all the outrageous slings and arrows she suffered in the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama limped into office with a 68-18 favorable rating, according to Gallup. It couldn’t have been easy being showered with such widespread (but, admittedly, not quite universal) acclaim.
Somehow, she managed to recover when it came to magazine covers, posing for the March 2009 Vogue, looking resplendent on a cover with the lines, “Michelle Obama: The First Lady the World’s Been Waiting For.”
After six years of partisan warfare waged by and over her husband, Michelle Obama still has a 2-1 favorable rating and according to a recent YouGov survey is the fifth-most admired woman on the planet, finishing just below Queen Elizabeth II and above Celine Dion.
But even the mighty apparatus of the imperial presidency can’t protect the first lady from irksome interactions with the insufficiently sensitive or deferential. In a People magazine profile in which the Obamas told of their struggles with racism, Michelle Obama recounted how hurtful it was that when she once visited Target, a women asked her to help get something off a shelf. Perhaps because she was tall enough to reach it.
In her Tuskegee address, at least Michelle Obama urged the graduates not to be daunted by slights (and more meaningful obstacles, like rotten schools). She commended to them the example of herself, “the fully-formed first lady who stands before you today.”
Even though Michelle Obama didn’t mention the word, what she was discussing was “microaggressions.” It is the trendy term on college campuses for often inadvertent offensiveness, such as Barack Obama, once upon a time, being mistaken for a waiter when he wore a tuxedo at an event.
The idiocy of the concept of the microaggression is its underlying premise that only people who belong to certain select groups ever suffer indignities or humiliations, when they are, of course, endemic to the human condition. George Orwell once said that every life seen from the inside is a series of defeats.
The microaggression, properly understood, is a sign of progress. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow to innocent misunderstandings and occasional rudeness is a vast leap forward.
Michelle Obama doesn’t seem to fully realize that the narrative arc of being the wife of a political candidate celebrated by nearly every organ of elite culture on his way to a landslide victory in a presidential election, to becoming a “fully-formed first lady,” isn’t exactly that of the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
But the logic of the microaggression increasingly defines the Democratic Party, because identity politics needs the oxygen of perpetual offense. Democrats can’t even have a debate among themselves about trade policy without President Obama himself getting accused of sexism (for referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren by her first name).
As channeled by Michelle Obama, the party’s animating sentiment is we shall overcome — every insult real or imagined.
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