Sara Baartman Discussion

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Michellle_Obama_Under_Cuviers_Microscope.pdf

Chapter Ten

Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama

in the Twenty- First Century

Natasha Gordon- Chipembere

Who might be a part of a terrorist cell? . . . Whose fist- knocks may summon the devil from hell? . . .

Michelle

Rah! Rah! Smear! Rah! Rah! “A Smear- Cheer for Michelle Obama” (Trillin 2008, 6)

***

Ludicrous as the opinion may seem, I do not think an oran- outang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female; for what are those Hottentot. They are, say the most credible writers, a people very stupid and very brutal. In many respects they are more like beast than men; their complexion dark, they are short and thick- set, their noses flat, like those of a Dutch dog; their lips very thick and big their teeth exceedingly white, but long, and ill set, some of them sticking out of their mouth like boars tusks; their hair black, and curled like wool . . . taking all things together, one of the meanest nations on the face of the earth. (Long 1774, 353)

This is the language one engages when climbing the precipitous slope connecting the legacy of the colonial [British and Dutch] “encounter” with the KhoiSan peoples of Southern Africa in the fifteenth century with contemporary popular culture discourse on the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. My chapter posits two arguments, namely that nineteenth- century

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European scientific racism etched a language that became the cornerstone for representations of Sarah Baartman, which in effect was transferred onto millions of African and African disa- poric women’s bodies, culminating in the current display, discus- sion, and dissection (ala Cuvier) of Michelle Obama. Secondly, I suggest that Michelle Obama has succeeded in disrupting this lens and language through the ownership of her body. The last two years (2008–2010) of international media flurry has solidi- fied the schizophrenic relationship the North has had with black femininity. Placed on the dissection table of the Western gaze, Michelle Obama’s body has been serrated with questions of her human- ness by the simple nature of her black womanhood (Barack Obama’s dissection is not nearly the same as Michelle’s and gender plays a central role in the difference. See Karlien van der Schyff’s (chapter 9) for a focused discussion of gender and exhibition spaces).

As First Lady, Michelle Obama has been left to defend herself in the face of, what I consider some of the most insidious, racist castings of the twenty- first century. She has been charged with epithets ranging from being “ape- like” to a “terrorist” to a “bit- ter, angry Black woman” to President Obama’s “baby mama.” These blatantly disrespectful, linguistic cartwheels have reached profound and frightening proportions. The most startling is the fact that such discourse, in both print media and the blogosphere, exist without someone pulling in the reigns. Michelle Obama’s final months on the presidential campaign trail with her husband and his first year in office produced a plethora of voices who indulged in the absolute freedom of airing their most intimate, racially disparate thoughts without censure. Historically in the North, very few had the ability to protect the black woman’s body, especially in the hands of white ownership. Michelle Obama has taken on the fight and thus far she remains a disquieting figure among mainstream narratives of perceived black womanhood. With her class status and education, Michelle Obama becomes an elusive and thus a troubling figure to mediate and control. Thereby, the mere possibility of her presence as First Lady war- ranted such a reactionary response, one that continues to equate her with her enslaved forebears of two centuries ago, despite her modernity.

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Under Cuvier’s Microscope 167

I suggest here that the negative, visceral reaction to the possi- bility of her as First Lady and the later celebratory role as “fash- ionista” and domestic “Mom- in- Chief” are all part of a silencing, insidious trajectory of objectifying her in ways that most white first ladies (besides Hillary Clinton who was rendered masculine) have escaped. Michelle Obama’s blackness distinguishes her and makes her body (one that has been historically viewed as available and expendable), the landscape upon which the American pub- lic inscribes their most virulent frustrations about the emerging power of blackness and the possibilities about the “end” of white- ness. Though many assert that with the election of Barack Obama the United States has moved into a “post- Black”/nonracial sensi- bility, clearly the particular attacks made on the body of Michelle Obama indicate that race and racism in the United States remain at its core.

I find much of this troubling public response surrounding Michelle Obama’s Green Garden agenda and “Let’s Move” pro- gram for fighting Childhood Obesity. People do not know what to do with her! Michelle Obama has unconditionally claimed her body as whole, as beautiful, as black and without shame (see Gabeba Baderoon’s chapter 4 on black women and shame for a fuller dis- cussion) while planting lettuce in the White House garden or mak- ing football moves in partnership with FIFA and South Africa’s World Cup’s reps in Washington, DC during March 2010. The statement is clear—Michelle Obama owns her body. She is also in a consistent struggle with those who have historically assumed the ownership over black womanhood (from the colonial male gaze to Cuvier’s dissection of Sarah Baartman to the Trans- Atlantic slav- ery to the modern day genital testing of South African track star, Caster Semenya). I suggest this is a brazenly defiant statement in the face of a Western gaze whose underbelly pines with the desire to metaphorically lynch her. In owning her personhood and serv- ing as an active agent of her blackness, Michelle Obama uses the tactic of responding to these attacks through action, reminding others of her humanity, which is in constant question because of her blackness. I ultimately suggest that Michelle Obama disrupts this trajectory of dehumanization, through a direct movement from an assumed silence to implicit, directed, and historically and culturally grounded “alter” acts of celebration and liberation.

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Oh, Sarah Baartman

Jennifer Morgan notes that the British representation of African (Khoisan) women’s bodies, in particular their genitalia, became part of a larger racialized ideology of difference:

Confronted with an African they needed to exploit, European writers turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ulti- mately became encoded as racial difference. Monstrous bodies became enmeshed with savage behavior as the icon of women’s breasts [and genitals] became evidence of tangible barbarism. (1997, 192)

The Khoisan peoples (comprising many nations including Khoi, San, Griqua, and Quena) are indigenous to the Southern African region. The general European perception of these people was that they were stammerers, and thought to have no language, voice, or literary traditions. Essentially, they were beasts, thus informing the conditions under which Baartman was subjected. The presumption of inferiority about the Khoisan people by the Dutch and British led to eventual genocide. Pieterse further states, “Speculation amongst naturalists about the missing link dated from the beginning of the eighteenth century . . . and it was the Hottentot . . . [whom many scientists] considered to be the missing link between apes and humans” (1992, 41). S.G. Morton, in 1839, labeled the Hottentots as the “nearest approximation to the lower animals . . . the women are presented by [European travelers] as even more repulsive in appearance than men” (quoted in Wiss 1994, 13). German writer, Gotthold Lessing wrote in 1766:

Everyone knows how filthy the Hottentots are and how many things they consider beautiful and elegant and sacred which with us awaken disgust and aversion. A flattened cartilage of a nose, flabby breasts hanging down to the navel, the whole body smeared with a cosmetic of goats fat and soot gone rotten in the sun, the hair dripping with grease, arms and legs bound about with fresh entrails. (Quoted in Aduonum 2004, 290)

Here begins a documented entry point for the black body that must be controlled and contained; Michelle Obama struggles against its legacy, as she attempts to define new terms of black personhood. The uncontrollable, wild black body lingers in contemporary

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Under Cuvier’s Microscope 169

perceptions of black women’s sexuality throughout the African Diaspora, which by default brought their humanity into question. As European naturalist discourses, which codified racial differ- ence, gained strength in the nineteenth century, new categories were constructed in which one’s morality and humanity were linked with one’s biological makeup. Wiss concludes “by such a process the sexual difference of Hottentot women came to signify a form of racialised difference so extreme as to create a new, and devalued racial type” (2005, 11). The “classical” European body was morally sound by virtue of its civility. The grotesque body, in this case Baartman’s, was designated to the margins, a night- marish construction external to the “normal” European form. According to Wiss

The classical body—as closed, homogeneous, and symmetrical—came to be perceived as marking out the identity of progressive rational- ism itself. These binarily opposed body types constructed the ideal bourgeois self as individual, progressively rational and self- contained against the body of the outsider as plural, regressive and incomplete. (1994, 12)

Thus the non- European, captured, labeled, and exhibited, was viewed within these categories of difference and pathology that lent permission to the “salvaging” work of European colonialists and others who sought to save the souls of “wretched” Africans. Baartman’s otherness fixed firm the European positionality of being the norm. Baartman, not seen as an individual woman with a voice or history, became the entryway to a “systemized radi- cal otherness—the exotic and foreign other as an example of [her] race” (Wiss 1994, 13). Rendered monstrous, the “Hottentot Venus” was a fabrication based on what was beyond the intellectual limits of Europeans at the time. Baartman/Venus is a myth necessary for the European imaginings of righteous self- representation and morality.

Qureshi explains how Cuvier’s writing and observations of Baartman contain their own pornoerotic perspective:

During the [three day] examination at the Jardin de Plantes, Cuvier pleaded with Baartman to allow an examination of her tablier; but she refused and took great care to preserve her modesty. Cuvier only suc- ceeded when her cadaver lay before him. His meticulous description of

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the tablier, including its length, thickness, and appearance folded and unfolded, takes up a long passage that is graphic and violating . . . and makes clear that Cuvier’s attempt in scientific resolution of the tablier was a personal triumph. (2004, 243)

Hobson adds that the European fascination with Baartman’s but- tocks and genitals were not for scientific purposes as much as they were for hidden erotic desire (see Ilaria Oddenino’s discussion on pornography and the erotic in chapter 7) where white audiences, both male and female, projected their own sexual desires to exploit the black female body as a means to create racial superiority. Sheila Meintjes adds:

The history of this woman’s life is one saga of the humiliation and brutality of the colonial experience. It captures the bizarre fascination of colonial scientists with the anatomical differences between racial types . . . scientific racism. (2002, 1)

The black female body became a location for the forbidden. These notions continue to be etched into the language used in Western popular discourse on the body of Michelle Obama; two hundred years later, one encounters a black female body as a site for the unspoken, forbidden, monstrous, and hypersexual, the body that needs to be “redeemed” (or killed) by the civilized observers in the media, acting as mouthpieces for the American (and world) public. Indeed the media, using the “world” as shorthand, dis- guises the extent to which intellectuals and journalists assume to know/ represent public opinion, when in fact they shape the way people are thinking on an issue. Media analysts drew attention to Michelle Obama’s physique and made it a necessary problem for the average person to absorb and dissect.

The Metaphorical Lynching of Michelle Obama

Because of her sudden (and may I suggest highly unexpected) emergence onto the international public stage, Michelle Obama, as potential First Lady, had no place within the imagination of the dominant culture. Caught unawares, the immediate visceral response to Michelle Obama, as black woman, as educated, as

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Under Cuvier’s Microscope 171

intelligent wife and mother, was rage. How dare she?! In the freedom of cyberspace, a viral lynching (see image at http://kathmanduk2 .wordpress.com/2008/05/23/michelle- obama- lynching- from- the - dailykos/) began of Michelle Obama as she was “exhibited” in cartoons, dissected across front covers, and made “terrorist” in newspaper headlines.1 The alacrity with which, in particular, the American media sunk its frothing teeth onto the body of Michelle Obama, I suggest, is equally as severe as what Baartman’s body experienced under Cuvier’s microscope and dissecting knife. It is this particular language, etched into Western racist/sexist scien- tific memory, which supplied the unrestrained approval that the universal exhibition of the African/diasporic black woman’s body was par for the course, dead or alive as it was with Cuvier and other Naturalists in 1815. From “liberal” scholars to political pundits to journalists to bloggers, there were no barriers between those who had the right to engage the body of Michelle Obama. Her body and therefore her person, as black woman, becomes the territory of all those who could see it, access it, and dissect it. Who protected Michelle Obama’s personhood/body during the Obama Campaign and subsequent first year as First Lady? Why did some Americans feel they were within their First Amendment rights to display a cartoon lynching Michelle Obama? The image has a Ku Klux Klan–based warning intimated that the black body, in this case Michelle Obama’s, was always the property of whiteness and one false step beyond its boundaries would lead directly to the noose and tree.2

Concurrently and reminiscent of the now infamous caricatures and aquatints of Baartman in London circa 1810, Michelle and Barack Obama made the front cover of The New Yorker maga- zine in July 2008. Michelle, dressed in army fatigues, sporting an Angela Davis–inspired afro and holding an AK47 issues the famous “terrorist fist bump” to her husband, indicating their associa- tions with all that is “foreign,” “evil,” “anti- American,” “Islamic/ non- Christian,” and ultimately subhuman. The media was at war with these black people who presumptuously felt they too could have a space in the American landscape of power and wealth. The visual representation and the assumptions undergirding this image was that Michelle Obama was the initiator of the fall from grace, like Eve bearing the apple. After much damage control around intention and humor, The New Yorker quickly removed the image,

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though it was forever a visual imprint of what the media wanted to shape around the Obama ascension into the most powerful couple “in the free world.”

Sarah Baartman’s Legacy in the Twenty- First Century

A legacy of demeaning Western representations of black women’s bodies continues well into the twenty- first century. Sadly, many African diasporic women have internalized this oppressive stance, which, similar to Cuvier’s methods with Baartman’s postmortem body, neatly dissects their body parts in order to attract—and pos- sibly gain stardom from—a capitalistic male gaze. Most appar- ently involved in this process are contemporary African American models and music video “dancers.”3 Though many black women identify with the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, questions about the beauty potential of the black female body remain. Today, black female bodies are widely excluded from the Western domi- nant discourse’s celebration of beauty, yet visible in marginalized, sexualized forums, namely hip- hop music videos and black male magazines that are semipornographic in nature.

Contemporary black male hip- hop artists and white producers corroborate with historical myths of the hypersexualized black woman’s body, refusing to challenge ideas of “grotesque” or “devi- ant” black female sexuality. These men, in an attempt to capital- ize on black women’s bodies, which are already encoded with a legacy of lascivity, reduce black women to one essential body part: their buttocks. From 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” to SirMixaLot’s 1992 rap, “Baby got Back,” hip- hop has sanctioned the pornographic exhibition of fragmented black women’s bodies through the mainstream music industry. Inherent in this exhibition is the implicit act of silencing black women and their realities; they are simply body parts of sexual fantasies. History repeats itself. What I argue here are two major points, namely that a eurocentric gaze continues to objectify and exhibit African and diasporic women’s bodies, marked from the legacy of Sarah Baartman’s exhibited body (alive and dead). This rac- ist, patriarchal “othering” has sought to undermine and silence any resistance by black women. Secondly, I suggest that there is

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no other contemporary Western discourse most encroached in this language of dissection and silencing as that found around Michelle Obama. It is this language of deviance and hypersexuality that has permeated media and the blog space without discretion. The American public, which initially hated Michelle Obama during the campaign because of her perceived “anti- Americanism,” has now shifted to a collective “ohhhhh and ahhhh,” celebrating now the most “famous” and “beautiful” woman in the “free world.” What is most interesting is that in more superficial and current public popular culture discourse on Michelle Obama, she has now been set apart from other black women in order to be diffused and “digestible’ to the dominant culture (essentially silenced).

A closer look problematizes how Michelle Obama reached such iconic status in less than one year—her rise to pop culture fame rivals the meteoric fame of Michael Jackson and Elmo combined! From the website www.mrs- o.org, which tracks the fashion prowess of Michelle Obama, to the countless books, magazines,4 the repre- sented body of Michelle Obama (her rear, her bare arms and legs, and the politics of her straight hair) is everywhere. If not properly interrogated, this coating is incredibly dangerous because it paci- fies the general public into thinking that the initial sentiments of racial hatred and objectification have passed and now it is “accept- able” for the dominant culture to “idolize” Michelle Obama. The insidious nature of racism slips past the average American media consumer but a stronger analysis of current discourse on Michelle Obama assures that the attack is long from over. The exhibition of Michelle Obama across the American imagination relates directly to the entrenched assumptions around how black women’s bod- ies are allowed to enter into this “imagination” and made visible. Michelle Obama is readily accepted and understood only as a fig- ure that must remain silent and happily domestic for her to main- tain her place as First Lady. Making her a “fashionista” is simply a diversionary tactic.

In Salon magazine, Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s 2008 piece, “First Lady Got Back” became the centerpiece of a discussion that has its legacy in the nineteenth century. Here were African American women writing with ecstasy that:

“Michelle- good God . . . has a butt!”; “Obama’s baby (mama) got back”;

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“OMG, her butt is humongous!’; It is not humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class- A boo- tay”. (“Michelle’s booty” 2008)

Patricia Hills Collins identifies “controlling images” (i.e., Michelle Obama’s oft- displayed rear) as a means in which to distort the ways black women see themselves and each other (1990, 72). These images and discourse also create a process of “un- mirroring,” to quote Janell Hobson, in which struggles for black female subjectiv- ity constantly grate against the distorted images of the dominant culture (2003, 88). So, in a breathe, gone are Michelle Obama’s Princeton and Harvard degrees, her lucrative careers in law and hospital administration, her political savvy, and territorial protec- tion of her daughters and family; in its place is a discussion that renders Michelle Obama into body parts with questions around her humanity. Sadly, in an attempt at affirmation with the best inten- tions assumed, Kaplan falls prey to the “un- mirroring” as she is only able to capture Michelle Obama’s potential in terms of the master Western narrative that continues to dissect and objectify the black female body. Kaplan simply exposes herself as a black “pundit” reduced to mimicry in the struggle to assume media spotlight in the White- dominated discourse on the Obamas. Once again, nothing is learned about the personhood of Michelle Obama through this entire unleashing of the media hurricane. Akin to Sarah Baartman, Michelle Obama is an observed object who the media takes on and fills in the gaps of “knowing” based on speculation that is inher- ently racist and sexist. As much of this is done in cyberspace, the precedents for censure or moderation are lost to the wind at the same time that the American and Western public at large has to discern what to make of black womanhood in power.

Examples of the vilification of Michelle Obama abound. Zoe Williams, in her article “Michelle and the Media,” stated that “Conservative [British] press deals with its unease by making [Michelle Obama] sound like a transvestite, offering the questions such as ‘is she a woman or a whole person? So hard to say” (2009, 35). Blogger Heather Cross on www.topix.com states:

Michelle Obama looks like an ape! or James Brown’s sister. She is ugly. Why do some people say she is pretty? Vomit looks better than her. She has no class and her husband is so gorgeous and the kids are beautiful. What a nightmare for Obama having to sleep with that woman who looks like a man in drag! (2009)

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Associations with masculinity and animalistic tendencies are redundant nineteenth- century assertions about the inhumanity of African women and thus their bodies become a site to be maligned at will. Blogger Impatient on www.huffington.post comments that “Michelle Obama has large ungainly legs” while an anonymous blogger on www.essence.com states that “Michelle definitely has man- hands. She should be serving ham sandwiches with those meat hooks” (“Michelle Obama” 2009). In the 2009 issue of Vogue where Michelle Obama graced the front cover, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the article praises Michelle Obama in the same breath that it renders her unusual. In discussing the cover photo, the writer admires “Obama’s lithe frame” though “an uncommon figure for an American First Lady” (Williams 2009). For those viewers who find the photos compelling, the writing instructs a self- doubt that not all is well with acceptance of Michelle Obama as a beautiful woman; she is made strange and singular by the nature of her black body (suggestions of masculinity are subtle but must be read) and certainly not the “material” for what a First Lady should look like.

In early 2009, the discourse took a sudden shift away from Michelle Obama’s rear, and the controversy raged around Michelle Obama’s bare arms. Does she have a right to show her arms, which begs the question does Michelle Obama have the right to make choices about her own body—at the expense of a historical trajec- tory that maintains her as object, never subject of her own agency? A study conducted at the University of Zululand among young black South African women in 2004 indicated an unprecedented high in overall body dissatisfaction and eating disorders where these black women indicated that they wanted to be “thin” and have bodies like those portrayed in Western media, without curves or a rear end, because that is what their men desire (Trainer 2004). The implications of this shift attest to the profound vilification of the African/diasporic female body by media’s negative attachment to all things curvy or non- Western (thereby implicitly ugly and undesirable, though a site of the hidden erotic). The discourse on Michelle Obama’s body fits right in the middle of such a trajec- tory where she must be “dressed” in order to hide the undesir- able or hypersexual. I concur with Janell Hobson, in her analysis of Cuvier’s porno- erotic agenda at the dissection of Baartman’s body, that the impetus driving the dominant dissection of Michelle

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Obama is that of pornographic- erotic desire. Her body becomes the object upon which unleashed, perverse Western sexual desire is bonded, implanted with racial hierarchies and sexual fantasy as this is how slavery was bred.

So when suddenly Western feminists begin to interject demands for a more “intellectual, militant” Michelle Obama, one who relies on the excellence of her credentials and not just wallow in her new role as “the black body to dress,” one wonders where the histori- cal context or precursor for such a call is. This feminist “call to arms” (no pun intended) in an interesting juncture to highlight specific trends in the way the black female body gets “robed” and by whom. I want to draw attention to the South African artist, Senzeni Marasela, who uses Sarah Baartman as a profound muse. Axis Gallery, a white South African run artistic space in New Jersey, represents Marasela and her art in the United States. In September 2010, in collaboration with Submerged Gallery, Axis put up Marasela’s most recent work on the Baartman narrative called “Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and Other Tales.” All the narratives were constructed on white cotton with red thread, meticulously embroidered. Marasela provocatively leans on the British and French nineteenth-century caricatures of Baartman, with an exaggerated bum, normally in profile, and she engages directly with her body as Marasela’s character, Theodora (repre- senting Marasela’s mother) robes with dignity the naked Baartman throughout the series. What I suggest Marasela is doing in this act of “dressing” Sarah is in fact an act of profound agency in that she directly engages Sarah’s body in respectful, caring ways—akin to how Gabeba Baderoon, in chapter 4, reiterates Zanele Muholi’s claim to desire Sarah as a lover; she is beloved. Also, with this simple act of clothing (which has the sensibilities of personhood; as the assumption is that only living, human creatures are cold or hot and need care); Sarah’s humanity is fully endorsed through this act. Marasela takes on the brutality of the pervasive violence on black womanhood by simply saying that Baartman, as a black woman, deserves to be covered, and thus protected. She also calls forward the caricatures of nineteenth-century newspapers and aquatints and by covering Sarah that history of misrepresentation is silenced and the external gaze muted.

Throughout her work, Marasela insists that we see Sarah Baartman differently and provides the visual map in how to do

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so with dignity. Since much of the work on Sarah also includes an imagine of Marasela herself and Theodora on various enact- ments of journey, the viewer also intimates the profound lessons Marasela takes for herself in the articulations of a new black wom- anhood who sits firmly at the crossroads of history using Sarah Baartman as ancestor who will guide these artistic acts of recov- ery. Marasela’s “Sarah Baartman Redress Series” is an intentional project of healing and opening spaces of possibility in how Sarah can be claimed.

In the exact opposite way, has the body of Michelle Obama, once vilified in the American public psyche, been “dressed.” There is no silencing of a colonial history of violence when designers flock to clothe her and photographers queue to have her photo- graphs adorn the glossy pages of women’s magazines throughout the world. These magazines (i.e., Vogue, Glamour, etc), with shad- ows of Black femininity suggested in its pages, have taken the leap and admitted Michelle Obama to the agreed field of beauty. Her body is draped and strewn with jewels, signature pieces created to indicate a sense of “designer” instinct and knowingness about her. Within her first year as First Lady, Michelle Obama’s body becomes the site of increasingly more exclusive, expensive clothing and she is further removed from the “JCrew” and “Target” woman that made her recognizable and very appealing to black women from the beginning of the presidential campaign. Once isolated from black women who felt she was a “familiar” (i.e., a profes- sional, well- educated mother and wife), Michelle Obama becomes the snapshot—the museum relic, as with the now memorialized dress she wore on the night of Obama’s inauguration. These static photographs attempt to mute her dynamic personhood; though she continues to insist on wearing dresses that accentuate her well- toned arms in daily outings, yet on the pages of these magazines what the viewer sees is the blanketing of her arms, of her legs; she is immobilized.

American history etched the place of the black woman into either the “mammy” or “jezebel”5—linking a continuous gender-fixed idea about the role of the black woman. Since Michelle Obama comes as part of the presidential package, it seems that the best way to absorb her into the American psyche is to make her “beau- tiful,” exhibited, silent, and domestic (and only Black when it counts). However, the powerful “attempt” (because I think they

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fail) at silencing her to cloak the more stringent racist discourses, is entrenched in the language of fashion and entertainment. By mid- 2009, Michelle Obama must have been one of the most photo- graphed women in the Western media. She graced cover after cover and many felt a sense of redemption—that finally the American public was owning up to the fact that Michelle could be “beauti- ful” once displayed—resplendent in colors to match her perfect coif—fixed as a museum artifact to once again be exhibited and observed. In both instances, the overt racial hatred dissecting all aspects of her humanity and the concurrent “capturing” of Michelle Obama as icon, as beauty, as different—the act of silenc- ing, invisibility, and erasure—endures.

Fighting Back

Alice Walker, in her essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden” remembers how, as the daughter of sharecroppers in the American South, her mother made it clear that the garden was the central place in which planting and preparing for the future harvest took root, in multiple forms. The rumblings of Michelle Obama’s gar- dening revolution only struck as charges of her failure to be more aggressive and less domestic became louder. One of the first man- dates by the First Lady was to plant a White House Garden and the chief architects were local fifth grade Washington, DC stu- dents and White House staff (the president also had his appointed time to come pull weeds with daughters, Sasha and Malia). This African American woman broke ground and signaled that a dif- ferent time was coming. Facing a history where African Americans have done everything in their power to move away from the field into industrial society because of the ruinous memory of slavery and sharecropping (and rightfully so), Michelle Obama braved the idea of disrupting static ideas about black womanhood and embraced the earth, planting, according to White House reports, over fifty types of vegetables. With each seed, each drop of water, Michelle Obama has told children of color that it is okay to want to be alive, to be healthy, that they can move beyond self- hatred and finally nourish their bodies. She advances a radical black agenda of moth- erhood. Joined with this idea, she then asked children to move their bodies, to exercise in order to live longer. Acknowledging

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a time when enslaved African mothers killed their children so as to prevent them from the ravages of slavery, Michelle Obama has fought for her body and the bodies of brown and black children (who, statistics show, are the largest group plagued with childhood obesity). Multiple frameworks for Black women’s empowerment need to be employed in order to examine the symbolic power of Michelle’s Garden and Let’s Move agenda. In the end, only those who learn how to read the layers and deconstruct the messages offered by Michelle Obama can understand the profound revolu- tion she has set to pace—that of the enduring and positive image of the black family in the United States. For those who willing to receive the message, she is infusing hope into the idea that Black families can preserve and thrive though historically, this country “never expected us to survive.” Most certainly, in the spirit of black womanhood, her defiance in the face of those who want to undermine and silence her reality, lays claim to the lives of black women who have gone before her, including Sarah Baartman.

Notes

1. I am aware of the growing commentary and analysis of the fact that almost by definition the Internet is allowing and permitting people to be rude and insulting. One explanation is that by enabling “anonymity” people feel free to say thing they would not say in person. There are many examples where authors, politicians, and musicians have been metaphori- cally “lynched” by the cyber mob. Though it may seem that the Obamas do not serve as an exception here but rather part of a larger representa- tion of a decline in public civility, I refute this by saying that the attack in Michelle Obama is more than just a civic refusal at etiquette. It is her sig- nificance as a black woman in the most prized, powerful position as First Lady; her precedent of visibility and ease that makes the cyber attacks most insidious.

2. See Maria DeLongoria’s unpublished doctorial thesis, “The Stranger Fruit” The Lynching of Black women: The Cases of Rosa Jefferson and Marie Scott.” University of Missouri, fall 2006. It provides an informed discussion around the particularities that defined the lynching of black women in the United States.

3. In many cases there is a fine line between “dancing” and prostitution in the music video industry. Many hip- hop music producers actively seek professional strippers and lap dancers at adult entertainment clubs to par- ticipate in their videos (Hobson 2005, 103–105).

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4. Michelle Obama has been on the covers of Time, People, Vogue, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Glamour, Prevention, Conde Nast Traveler, Parade, Radar, O Magazine, Ebony, and Essence. Since its inception in 1974, Vogue (the “Bible” of Fashion) has allowed eighteen black women on its monthly cover. In its tradition of photographing the First Lady within the first few months in office, Michelle Obama was defiant in her direct look at the viewer, baring her well- toned, much discussed arms, rather than the demure First Lady covers that have been the signature of Vogue for years.

5. See Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985) for a fuller discussion on this dichotomy in American female slaves.

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