"Oh, No. Not that.": A Black First Lady Looms
Yesterday, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd imagined a conversation between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton where the Illinois Senator attempted to vet and prep the 42nd president for a support role in a prospective Obama/Hillary Clinton administration. In it, Obama laid out the tight rein his administration would attempt to keep on the former president.
All your trips abroad will have to be authorized by a higher authority."
"The State Department? Fine, I'll check with them."
"Higher."
"Oh, no. Not that."
"Yes, Michelle. She'll have you on a much shorter leash, Bill, and it's not so fun. There'll be no more Ron Air, no Burkling and Binging. Eight long years of Michelle watching your every move.
When confronted with a snarling Michelle Obama, Clinton changes his tune.
"You know, Barack, the more I'm seein' what you've got in mind for me, the more I'm worryin' that Hillary's just not cut out for this job.
So Toni Morrison's Black first (her recent clarification rang as especially revisionist) quits his race baiting all for fear of South Side slim? Does Dowd, inhabiting her aged white woman and Clinton's aged white man's psyches, find Black women so frightful? Well, yes. As does America, if you let the literature, film, art and other cultural production tell it. Women have long been perceived as creatures of correction: nagging, instructing and restraining men and children from their wild ways. This stereotype is distilled in Black women, ever "tell it like it is" sassy, neck-turning, wet-nursing, business-poking, and teeth-sucking. Still, it strikes as rather lazy to rear the caricature in an otherwise amusing satire and just as grating as when my favorite comedian Chris Rock did the same in his New Year's Eve 2007 Madison Square Garden stop of his No Apologies Tour. Rock, as I noted in January, and I paraphrase, said that a Black woman can't be first lady because she doesn't play her position but your (the man's) position. Where Rock's Black woman is too overbearing to flank, Dowd's is just overbearing enough to attack and neither one allows much space for Michelle Obama in all her humanity.
Link: "Can He Take a Frisk?", Maureen Dowd, New York Times
Tags: Black Women, Clinton, Obama, Politics
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Comments
1.
professorf says:
i concur mb83. too many people have gotten out of pocket in the way they address michelle obama, which just goes to show how much people will do and get away with when they are not in front of the cameras. Bill O'Reilly went much further than Don Imus and yet Fox's advertisers did not in the least feel compelled to reprimand him.
06/01/2008 at 10:15 AM
2.
mb83 says:
the way folks talk about black women is so problematic. has the country ever been so distracted by who candidates are (or who their spouses are) rather than examining what they stand for?
05/30/2008 at 6:55 PM