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Giving a candid and deeply personal commencement speech at Tuskegee University on Saturday, the First Lady of the United States reflected on the emotional toll of being the country’s first black first lady.
As reported by The Hill, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke to the students at the Historically Black Alabama college for about a half an hour on Saturday, running down the ways in which media especially held her to a different standard than other first ladies.
“…Over the years, folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me,” said Mrs. Obama. “One said I exhibited ‘a little bit of uppity-ism.’ Another noted that I was one of my husband’s ‘cronies of color.’ Cable news once charmingly referred to me as ‘Obama’s Baby Mama.’ ”
CNN Reports:
“Back in those days, I had a lot of sleepless nights worrying what people thought of me,” she recalled. Obama added that she let the criticism get to the point where she would wonder if she was hurting her husband’s chances of becoming President, while also fearing what her daughters would think.
The first lady said eventually the only thing she could do to prevent others from defining her was to “ignore all of the noise.”
“I had to be true to myself and the rest would work itself out,” she recounted, to cheers from the audience.
“But, as potentially the first African-American First Lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?”
The first lady also mentioned that simple gestures between she and the president became something else: “You might remember the on-stage celebratory fist bump between me and my husband after a primary win that was referred to as a ‘terrorist fist jab,’ ” she reflected.