Last year, gal-dem invited me to speak at their event celebrating the release of Michelle Obama’s memoirs Becoming. I was charged with reading the book then writing my speech having imagined what Michelle Obama would do if women ruled the world. Find my speech in full below. I hope you enjoy.
I am honoured to be here. Thank you Gal Dem, Liv and Charlie. Thank you Penguin. And most of all thank you Michelle Obama for Becoming and bringing us all together tonight.
I was asked to discuss what Michelle Obama would do (if women ruled the world)? And I’m gonna be really honest with you. I was inspired reading Becoming. I did cry reading her words. They are beautifully sewn together in a blanket she wraps around you as she tells you about her triumphs and her challenges. Becoming is an encouraging love letter to women like you and me, ambitious, hungry women. It was almost like she was talking straight into my heart and revealing truths about myself that I’d buried. “Like a lot of girls, I become aware of the liabilities of my body early, long before I began to even look like a woman… I knew never to walk alone at night.” Obama writes early on as if she’d been right next to me in Peckham growing up.
Michelle Obama tells us, that even with all her accomplishments and devastating beauty she too questioned herself and had to beat back the nagging voice of self-doubt that told her she was not enough. My breath caught when she described kissing her husband for the first time. I am a romantic at heart. I was inspired. She told me that my success, my physical stature were not off putting but instead would attract the right person- the person I’ll spend my life with. I was reassured that only people I should be unconcerned with would expect me to be less than who I am in order to love me. “Barack had arrived in my life a wholly formed person” she says. I know whoever is right for me will arrive the same way. Then she took my hand and in Becoming Us told me “This was simply my reality. I couldn’t be shy or embarrassed about my needs.” Around a similar age to what I am now, Michelle Obama demanded the pay she deserved and got it. I was hugged and encouraged and inspired and loved while reading her memoirs.
However, I was also frustrated. Okay? I was FRUS TRATE TED! I have read countless articles about Michelle Obama’s grace under fire. And to read about the ways in which she contorted herself throughout her life to appeal to people’s better selves broke something inside me. When I said I cried, of course I cried for the beauty of this tome, but I also cried for the ways in which this woman, tall and perfect and black and dark skinned, like so many of us, contorted herself into respectability. Oh! And make no mistake, while Becoming is a raw, honest and fearless expression of her truth, it is also a feat of awe-inspiring contortion. At so many points in the book, she hopes to achieve acceptance outwardly. Without meaning to, for black women, Obama included, that well meaning hope derails the important work black women rarely get to do of accepting ourselves inwardly- first and foremost. Inside and amongst ourselves.
In Becoming Me she writes “If in high school I’d felt as if I were representing my neighbourhood, now at Princeton I was representing my race. Anytime I found my voice in class or nailed an exam, I quietly hoped it helped make a larger point.” And all I can think is THIS IS EXHAUSTING.
“I was still earning my grace.” Obama writes in Becoming More and I’m aghast. From whom would a whole Michelle Obama be earning grace? Are we all clear who this woman is? She is the graduate of both Princeton and Harvard Law School, the former lawyer and Director of an entire hospital. She went on to helm community projects in Chicago to enfranchise young people to have opportunities similar to the ones which lifted her family out of abject poverty. “I knew that I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate.” She writes in Becoming Us. This woman, smart and thoughtful, cared enough to understand that not all of us are afforded opportunities or inbuilt with the grit needed to push past the inequality that pounds down on us every day the way she was. Without judgement, she extended her expertise to those in her hometown and she helped make a way where, for many, there was no way. WEW! Now imagine this woman seeking approval or attempting to earn grace from anyone. I was FRUS. TRATE. TED!
And then my frustration morphed into something more personally wounding. The familiarity of conforming and assimilation stung me as the book opened up into her experience on the campaign trail for her husband’s bid for the democratic nomination.
When her husband’s team asked her to look at a video of herself giving a speech she understood the negativity others saw. “…it was too serious, too severe-at least given what people were conditioned to expect from a woman. I saw my expression as a stranger might perceived it, especially if it was framed with an unflattering message.” Going forward she adjusted herself, grateful for the correction. Me, with my expressive face and loud mouth, I didn’t feel good reading this.
I didn’t feel good that she understood for her husband’s political career to succeed she early on “sensed already that the sacrifices would be more mine than his.” Not only would she go on to put aside her achievements in order to be instrumental in getting her husband into the highest political office on earth, inside that she had to make herself smaller to make others feel comfortable with who and what she is. During her education she understood “the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask.” The irony is not lost on me that the onus of assimilation was heaped on her shoulders. That burden was almost too painful to bear witness to reading her memoir.
This is a round-about way to get to the truth of what I’m trying saying. If women ruled the world with all due respect, I would be thoroughly unconcerned with what the Michelle Obama in this book would do. Michelle Obama found a path through the hatred and pain and ridicule that worked for her. I commend and love Michelle Obama. She did what I could not have and would have been thoroughly ill equipped to achieve. She absorbed the ceaseless blows of racism and misogyNOIR- that special brand of misogyny that lives at the intersection of race and gender blended specifically to break black women- and she did not complain. Throughout the book she talks honestly about her pain and hurt and exhaustion and I would not have ever had the patience to wait for any man, Barack Obama or otherwise, to achieve anything before I speak to the way white people are traumatising me. And make no mistake what she experienced was TRAUMA. She might be too polite to say it, or too cognisant not to appear like a victim but it was trauma. This is trauma she experienced specifically because she is a black woman. And let me tell you something, friends, you are living in a fantasy world if you imagine a matriarchal global society would erase racism.
Do you hear what I’m saying? A matriarchal society would not end racism because white women are no more virtuous than white men. Slavery would still have been a thing. The Civil Rights movement would have still been a thing. Look here at home, them lot’s prime minister Theresa May oversaw the atrocity of Grenfell and the Windrush wickedness cos the word scandal makes it seem like a quaint BBC drama.
In the face of this, Becoming shows us that Michelle Obama would encourage us to outwardly ignore numerous injustices both personal and shared. The Michelle Obama in this book tells us that she was patient during her denigration because eventually your time will come. But for many disenfranchised, their time never came. This racist white patriarchy took them from us or left them so despondent they simply left before their time.
“How could I put my own needs and even those of our girls, in front of the possibility that Barack could be the kind of president who helped make life better for millions of people?” Obama asks in Becoming Us. And just like that we arrive at the crux of my argument. I believe the next generation of women in leadership will be able to stand on the foundation Michelle Obama built for us and not have to choose. I will not choose between my needs, my work and the work and needs of my partner. One will not go before the other. They will happen side by side. I know this because of her candour and the example she’s given me.
The women who came before us, Michelle Obama included, catered to everyone before themselves and I ask is it too much to ask to have it all? President Barack Obama had it all, a family, a wife, high office. If women ruled the world, my fantasy is Michelle Obama would have been the first African American president of the United States. Michelle Robinson and her husband Barack Robinson would have been the first black POTUS and FMOTUS (lol, fmotus). If women ruled the world, Michelle Robinson, would still have to fight against racism but in my dream she would be free to fight without one arm tied behind her back, clasped by respectability. With this freedom President Michelle Robinson could speak directly to her detractors unburdened by the suffocating need to make her oppressors comfortable. Or maybe not.
Michelle Obama’s visibility matters so deeply to me. It comforts me to know she’s there and has been there, diligently, resiliently doing the work to reclaim black womanhood from the jaws of racists who’d have everyone believe being black and woman is the worst thing in world. And with regards to my politics, her visibility is important if only to show me the path I don’t want to take. And there’s space for all of us. Yes. The calm, collected women. The loud, in your face women. Every one of us is important. But know this, women like me do not care about white feelings. We do not care if we come across as angry to the white majority. We do not care that our big, tightly coiled hair makes you nervous. We will not make ourselves smaller for you. We have watched as the greatest amongst us have pretzelled themselves to appeal to white people and all the while, black women like Michelle Obama are still derided and abused and maligned. Nah. It’s over. We’re gonna get the work of equality done and we will achieve these aims wearing the fullness of our character UNAPOLOGETICALLY.
Thank you.
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