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The election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States is a milestone in this country’s history in and of itself. But even more, his election brings with it another first—the first black First Lady of the United States. Toward that end, Mrs. Obama has captured the imagination of people the world over. One must wonder what impact Mrs. Obama will have as black woman who can boast so many virtues—e.g., intelligence, outspokenness, professional success, beauty, and being a fashion icon. Her image stands in stark contrast to the stereotypes associated with women and blacks. Moreover, it adds nuance and new dimensions to the intersection of race and gender, and as much how we think about black women. For centuries, black women have been shoehorned into a handful of stereotypes—i.e., the mammy, the sexual siren, the welfare queen, the matriarch, and the angry Black woman. Arguably, Michelle Obama represents a pushback against each of these, even at the implicit level.

This chapter attempts to engage the racist assumptions held by many Americans about a black woman's ability to be First Lady and about the appropriateness of an African American First Family. Michelle Obama has been an essential complement to Barack Obama, a candidate viewed as a postracial phenomenon. She has helped her husband win the credibility and trust of many African Americans because of her firm and confident racial identity, her rootedness in Chicago's African American community, and her upholding of the values central to her own family. However, functioning as the perfect partner to Barack has come at an enormous price for Michelle. It seems an all too familiar paradox that given the persistent power of racial and gender dynamics in this country, Michelle Obama must button down her exceptional education and career background, and the “too much blackness” so essential to her identity, in order to secure Barack's presidential bid.

This essay examines the journey of the black woman from chattel to First Lady. The cumbersome, slow, thorny road black women have travelled from being personal property (chattel) to First Lady has required an active tradition of black women’s self-help agency and mutual assistance and far-reaching social and political changes across the nation. Indeed, surveys of blacks who lived through or were directly affected by Jim (and Jane) Crow segregation confirm that few imagined Americans would elect a black president in their lifetimes. First Lady Michelle Obama is no shadow of her husband. She was an accomplished lawyer before she met Barack Obama. She continues active personal agency in her work to advance projects she considers important and socially transformative, especially the nation’s crisis of obesity and the connection between food, diet, and health.

There is no issue in the black community that is more contentious than that of the romantic relationships between black men and black women. Black male-female relationships are fraught with challenges—e.g., low marriage rates, high divorce rates, absent fathers, educational and income gaps between men and women, and the down-low phenomenon. These issues, and others, have spawned countless movies, books, articles, and town halls on the state of black male-female relationships. What is auspicious about the Barack and Michelle’s relationship is that it provides a healthy example of marriage, family life, and even more “black love.” The issue it raises, however, is that it may also establish—either implicitly or explicitly—essential elements of such love. In essence, black women may look to the Obama marriage and come to even more strongly believe than many already do that healthy relationships for blacks must be intra-racial, heterosexual, and defined by pairings of Christian and equally successful (educationally and economically) blacks. This idealization, without appropriate consideration of the actual challenges the Obamas faced as a couple and realities that militate against such essentialism, may leave many black women more frustrated with their mate options than they already are.

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.

This chapter argues that Chicago’s long tradition of black liberalism helps explain the rise of Barack and Michelle Obama to the White House. The chapter also suggests that President Obama’s urban policy agenda exemplifies the limits of black liberalism. Michelle Obama grew up in a family engaged in the kind of neighborhood-based black liberal politics examined in this book. And she and her family provided one of the key institutional bases for her husband’s rise. The president also benefited directly from the long tradition of black liberalism in his experiences working as a community organizer, in the ideology of Christian liberal nationalism articulated by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and even in the neighborhoods around Reverend Wright’s church built by black bricklayers discussed earlier (Ch. 3 and 4). The Obamas represent both the subversive potential and practical limits of the black liberal political tradition and connect that tradition directly to the broader history of American liberalism.

In this chapter, Donna Franklin presents Barack and Michelle Obama as a stereotype-defying model for the modern couple. The term “stalled revolution” (Hochschild) describes how women have moved into the full-time workforce, but men have not made a comparable shift into sharing responsibility for household chores and children. Franklin provides a brief history of the Obama marriage and how the Obamas struggled to find a balance between the conflicting demands of two careers, their relationship, and family. She also places them in the larger historical and social context. She argues that the Obamas are not the exception, but represent a wider community of middle to upper middle class, professional, African American couples. She presents evidence that African American couples pioneered the idea of the dual-career, egalitarian marriage, but such families have been hidden from view until the prominence of the Obamas.

This chapter uses the controversy surrounding Common’s 2011 poetry reading at the Obama White House to examine the politicization of poetry, hip hop, and presidential politics. The cultural event organized by First Lady Michelle Obama, it argues, provided an opportunity for Republican pundits and strategists to use hip hop to associate the president with stereotypes of black pathology and violence. The chapter contends that this style of political race baiting ultimately caused Obama to distance himself from hip hop for the remainder of his first term. The chapter goes on to argue that the Common incident highlights the paradox of a black president and a post-black political agenda. It contends that the president’s legislative record has failed to address the concerns of the poor, working class, and communities of color—and that the hip hop and millennial generations must demand more than symbolic gestures from politicians and become the agents for change themselves.

This concluding chapter lays the groundwork for further work in the field of black fashion studies. It argues that future scholarship will have to grapple with the geopolitics of the United States’ relationship with the burgeoning African fashion industry and how such politics ultimately grow America’s empire. The United States has dominated other African markets—oil, copper, and diamonds—for centuries. Fashion is the new frontier. Some activists are already concerned about labor exploitation now that economists are predicting that “the next Asia is Africa” as multinational companies scurry to find cheap labor. These economic factors are unfolding as celebrities such as R&B singer Beyoncé and first Lady Michelle Obama are popularizing African fashion in the realm of social media.

This chapter examines the impact of social media on girls and women in Michelle Obama’s America. While online spaces like YouTube have the potential to empower young girls and enable digital activism, the chapter documents how pornographic and sexist hip hop videos continue to socialize women into problematic gender roles. Explicit, uncensored “bad bitch” performances, it argues, dominate these online spaces owing to the economic profitability of acquiring multiple “views” and “likes.” Drawing on autoethnography, the chapter describes the similarities and differences between a hip hop generation girlhood of the 1970s and early 1980s and the gendered media space experienced by today’s hip hop millennials. Critical media literacy and mentorship, the chapter argues, is key for ensuring that young girls can take control of their real lives and digital identities.

This chapter opines on the prospect for another African American to helm the White House kitchen at some point in the future. No African Americans have presided over the White House kitchen since Zephyr Wright did in the late 1960s. Given the current way that chefs often get hired to work in the contemporary White House, future chefs will likely come from the existing kitchen staff, as the personal chef of a future president or as someone of stature in the culinary world. The chapter gives the back story of the 1994 State Dinner held in honor of Republic of South African President Nelson Mandela. The chapter ends by looking at how the contemporary White House kitchen inspires young people today with a special emphasis on former First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" Initiative and the Kids' State Dinners she hosted during her tenure. This chapter profiles Chef Patrick Clark, Chef Marcus Samuelsson, White House kitchen steward Adam Collick and Kiana Farkash. The chapter includes recipes for sesame and wasabi-crusted halibut, layered late-summer vegetables with lemongrass and red curry dressing, grilled salmon with farro, Swiss chard salad, and a tropical smoothie.