My 18-year-old niece, Carlie, tried to bond with me recently by showing me her new outfits for my approval. Everything was see-through, thigh-high or skin-tight. Not only was I shocked, I was frightened. It was all I could do not to spank her, the way you might swat a child caught playing with a loaded gun, because she seemed dangerously unconscious about the power of her magnificent breasts and legs. Instead, I subjected her to a lecture on date rape and street harassment that she sat through patiently. When I took all my nieces and nephews out for movies and pizza that evening, I actually made her change from her booty-cooler shorts to something with more coverage. Carlie’s a sweet girl, so she didn’t get mad at me. She thinks I’m funny. “I’ll just wear them tomorrow,” she said with sly good humor.
The thing is, Carlie is a good girl. She wants to be a math teacher. We know all her friends, she’s responsible, she happily spends most of her time with family, and she’s in no hurry to date much. When she does, she prefers her dates to hang at the house with her, watching videos and being abused by her horde of smart-mouthed aunts. But can she really dress “like that,” immerse herself in hip-hop culture and still be a good girl, i.e. a girl who’s not going to screw up her life? It’s against this personal backdrop that I’ve watched the gathering storm over the status of hip-hop star Lauryn Hill in the black community.
Hill is young black womanhood writ large. She’s only 23, but her sultry alto, enormous talent and furious drive have made her the female artist of her generation. Her debut solo album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” won every award you can think of — ethnic, mainstream and international — and went triple platinum. “Miseducation,” which she single-handedly wrote and produced, is both a dead-on critique of negative behaviors in the black community and a love letter to it. An accomplished movie and TV actress, songwriter, producer and video director, Hill is firmly in control of her own career.
And there’s more. On leave from Columbia University, she’s also created the Refugee Project for inner-city kids in her spare time. She still lives with her revered parents in the New Jersey home she grew up in. A fervent Christian whose every utterance and song lyric proclaim her belief in God, she simultaneously exudes New Age grooviness (“Cause karma, karma, karma comes back to you hard” goes one line of “Miseducation”) and old-time religion (“You can’t hold God’s people back that long” thunders the next).
But Hill, the rhapsodic Christian proselytizer, is not everybody’s idea of a black female role model. For one thing, she often dresses hoochie-style. Worse, she has two out-of-wedlock children with her live-in boyfriend, Rohan Marley (one of Bob’s many children). Hill may embody the best of young black womanhood to some people, but to others she’s just a hypocrite, or worse, a danger to the community’s endangered morals with her hip-hop halo.
The calls for her head crescendoed recently with the June 2 television broadcast of the Essence Awards. In a tearful acceptance speech, Hill said: “I want to let young people know that it is not a burden to love Him, and to represent Him, and to be who you are, as fly and as hot and as whatever, and to still love God and to serve Him. It’s not a contradiction.”
Radio call-in shows, letter-to-the-editor pages and, especially, online venues were deluged by the debate over Hill. Lee Bailey, founder and publisher of the Electronic Urban Report (EUR), said, “I was totally surprised by the outpouring. We received 300-400 e-mails before we stopped counting and it’s still coming in.” Indeed, the EUR ran a special section of the Hill e-mails. As one disgusted e-mailer wrote, “Lauryn’s lifestyle doesn’t match her sermons. If she’s gonna shack up (and in her parents’ home, no less) with her man and her two babies, that’s her business, but Lauryn’s crossing the line when she gets on every available TV screen talking about how ‘holy’ she is. God is not in that mess.” Another e-mailer wrote, “If Lauryn Hill weren’t famous, but instead worked the register at [McDonald's], black folks would be the first people saying what a poor role model she is and how she needs to get her life together.” Still another fulminated: “If most of these people we ‘hero worship’ weren’t celebrities, we’d probably be dogging them for some of their lifestyle choices. It makes it difficult to explain the difference to my son.” Many e-mailers supported Hill, but it was the fulminators who grabbed the most attention.
Clearly, some of Hill’s detractors are mere player-haters. “True,” Bailey says, “but she really has touched a nerve. The undercurrent has been there for some time.”
Of course, the black community is on a collision course with itself, judging from a recent Newsweek poll. The poll found that 55 percent of black Americans admire the young, gifted and black Hill. But asked what they consider a “big problem,” 78 percent mentioned teenage girls having children, 63 percent talked about “people not following moral and religious values” and 51 percent said that “too many parents never [get] married.”
The depth and breadth of the criticism of Hill made me take it seriously. Plus, I had to admit that I shared some of Hill’s critics’ reservations. The hardcore black Protestantism many of us were raised on, with its many prohibitions regarding dress, deportment and lifestyle, makes Hill hard to accept. Distant as I am from my own Southern Baptist holy-dance-in-the-aisle roots, I was shocked when I accompanied a white friend to his Baptist church and saw women in sleeveless dresses. Godless yuppie that I’ve become, I still thought: HARLOTS! Gospel music is my only remaining tie to the religion of my youth, yet I can only listen to it, because watching today’s performances, with their choreography and hip-hoppiness, makes me afraid I’m going to have to duck lightning bolts. The junior choir I sang in at Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in north St. Louis wouldn’t allow us to even clap our hands or sway from side to side, because it was too much like dancing. Everything was simple then. Makeup? Whore. Pants? Lesbian. Unwed motherhood? Damned.
It was that very backwardness that helped drive me from my religion, of course. But I’m like the veteran doctors, lawyers and soldiers who won’t let anything change because they want everyone else to have to suffer the way they did. Lauryn Hill’s newfangled black spirituality is just too damned easy. At least I had the grace to lie, feel guilty and sneak around when I fornicated or dressed like a ho. Hill writes songs about it.
“People are uneasy, more confused these days,” says Bailey. “Before, things were more black-and-white. Even if you didn’t live up to them, you knew what the rules were. Now, kids look at Lauryn Hill and think, ‘If it works for her, why won’t it work for me?’ And that’s dangerous.”
Indeed, the controversy over Hill is particularly charged, given that the black community has long struggled with irresponsible and ill-advised teenage pregnancy. Lately, there have been heartening declines in the black teen birth rate, and to me, anything that endangers that progress is dangerous.
But is what Hill represents really that simple? Would I really despair if Carlie had two “illegitimate” children, regardless of the circumstances? No, I wouldn’t — not if she first became a level-headed, take-charge success, living in quiet monogamy with a man who worships her and their children, as well as her parents. And some of the black religious community is starting to develop a more nuanced response to the issues of female sexuality and unwed motherhood as represented by Hill. The Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, says, “It’s not just the babies. It’s having children when you’re not prepared. When you have no psychological or economic viability, no support systems, no interest from the father. Other than that, each person has to deal with their own conscience, their own morality.”
Veazey (who is a senior citizen, by the way) and his controversial organization are spearheading the Black Church Initiative, which helps African-American clergy and laity address teenage pregnancy, sex education and reproductive health, subjects long taboo in the black church. Those taboos go a long way in explaining the devastation wrought on the black community by prostate cancer, AIDS, teen pregnancy, STDs and the like. The organization will hold its third Sexuality Summit in Washington next month.
Lee Eric Smith, author of “Is There Sex In Heaven?” and a freelance minister in the Christian New Thought movement, also thinks there’s a change in black spirituality afoot, a needed one. “You learn the rules in church, then life happens,” he says. “People look at Hill, she’s prospering, she’s doing so many things that are not of the church, but she’s not eaten up with guilt, she’s not shy about her choices and sincerity resonates from her. It’s confusing. She’s an unwed mother, she’s not supposed to invoke God. She raps but she doesn’t glamorize violence. She glamorizes God. People are beginning to realize that what they’ve been taught may not be what works.”
Its not just New Agers who see, and embrace, this trend toward “have it your way” Christianity. Dr. Delores Williams is the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York and the author of the book “Sisters in the Wilderness.” She believes that Hill is performing a healing ministry for young black women and pointing them to a deeper spirituality. “There’s no ‘yes/no’ to Lauryn Hill’s fitness as a role model,” says Williams. “You have to look at her whole life, not just the babies, who, by the way, she is pointing to God and a moral, Christian life. She has support from a good man, a loving family, independent means. It’s un-Christian, the attitude of judgment so many are taking.”
It’s dizzying, all these mutually exclusive reliances on Christian dogma. Who’s right? Rev. Veazey chuckles. “For sure, the church is not the same one I grew up in,” he says. “Most ministers now are young guys, seminary trained. They have broader views. The church is still the moral force in our community, but ‘moral’ has been modified. Black ministers have to understand that while they absolutely have to talk about abstinence, they also have to talk about responsible sexuality. Contraceptives, AIDS, pregnancy, abortion. Some will hear the abstinence talk, some won’t, but we have to minister to the whole community, not just the ones who don’t question. Going into the new millennium, ‘Thou Shalt Not’ just won’t play.”
But beyond the controversy among ministers, I wondered how Hill’s life choices resound in the wider black community. I think we probably don’t give young folk enough credit. “I’d rather try to write songs like her,” one slouching teen at the mall told me. “I don’t need no babies right now. Now if I had her money …”
Joan Morgan, author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist,” recognizes that there’s a double standard between the way the country views the McDonald’s counter-girl’s illegitimate babies and Hill’s, but she doesn’t think that’s the point. “They’re celebrities, not role models. There is a difference.” Morgan argues that we have to stop looking to people in their 20s for guidance, that if we continue to interpret social phenomena through the prism of celebrity worship, we train the very people we’re trying to protect to gauge their own behavior that way. “You can’t put the weight of the black community on Lauryn. There was no Lauryn Hill when I was in high school, yet me and my two friends were the only ones who didn’t get pregnant. Lauryn’s a positive influence, if anything. Teenagers see her with her man by her side and solid ground under her feet. Why can’t that be the influence she has?”
Judging by Carlie, it is. She praised “Miseducation” when I brought up Hill’s name. “I like the way all her songs have a meaning,” she says. “She doesn’t come fake like those other rappers, she writes all her own stuff.” But she scoffed at the notion of admiring her personally. “I don’t even know her.” Whom does she admire? A teacher she’s been close to since elementary school (and who figures prominently in Carlie’s casual conversation). She also admires her aunt. Me, a daily influence I never thought about. Carlie respects specifics about my life I would never have given her credit for noticing.
“People play on that [Hill's lifestyle], just so they can blame somebody for their own problems. Way before Lauryn Hill, girls were having babies and some of them will keep on having them, too. It ain’t about Lauryn Hill,” my wise hoochie-mama niece observes, between videos and pager beeps.
I might have known that, if I had read the last line of that Newsweek poll: Only 41 percent of blacks think the lack of “successful blacks as role models” is a big problem. They’re much more concerned about crime, drugs and jobs to worry about the things that occupy the pundits.
Anger gets a bad rap. It’s the universal disguised denunciation (“Why are feminists so angry?”), the wink-and-nudge code word to signal contempt while fronting as pity for the deranged. That label gives those at whom the anger is directed a get-out-of-jail-free card to abandon the debate since anger is, in one fell swoop, deemed irrational. Neat trick that, changing the subject from the offense that provoked the response to a feigned disgust over the angry person’s “unseemly” behavior.
Here’s hoping that Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker holds onto his newfound rage over his city’s crime rates. A recent column in the Newark Star-Ledger lays out the stark reality that has turned this Zen-y, post-race, teetotaling philosopher, Rhodes scholar, Stanford football star and Yale Law grad into Martin Luther King Jr. If he doesn’t see progress soon, we may be heading for Malcom X territory. A year into his mayoralty, Booker’s million and one grad school-infused plans to save Newark have come to naught and will continue to do so as long as the war on drugs remains a war on the urban poor.
Booker staked his campaign on making Newark safe, yet the city’s as dangerous as it ever was. Its tally of 105 murders last year is the highest in 10 years. But that die was cast long before he nailed his shiny diplomas to his office wall, because New Jersey‘s urban and crime policies are designed to keep Newark an enclave of despair, violence and race-based underachievement. Drugs remain about the only game in town for an urban poor denied entree to the legit life. And, once in the drug life, talk about cutthroat competition; dealers are ruthlessly assassinating each other, up close and personal. The only good news is the decrease in random killings. The number of people hit by gunfire is down 31 percent — people who aren’t drug dealers, that is.
What do we expect as a society, when we fail to educate and embrace “the usual suspects” and send them out into this brutal economy with no way to make an honest living? What’s more, once they’ve fallen into that trap, we do everything possible to ensure they’ll have to repeat the pattern. Cherry on top? The millions that the Halliburtons of America make off the prison-industrial complex. I’m not one given to easy racial tropes, but prisons are indeed the new plantations. New Jersey spends a billion dollars a year on prisons, one-third of which are filled with nonviolent offenders, our nation’s highest rate.
Not surprising, considering that the entire city (save the airport) is within a school drug zone, which means that illegal drug activity in the area carries a mandatory minimum of three years’ incarceration. According to Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran, 96 percent of those so sentenced are black or Hispanic, though virtually none of the drugs in question were sold to children. Even so, the state Legislature voted down a proposal to shrink the school zones from 1,000 feet to 200 feet, offering instead proposals to make the mandatory penalties, already among the nation’s toughest, tougher still. It also refuses to fund more than token levels of drug treatment or sentencing alternatives for the nonviolent, with predictable results.
A staggering 1,500 state cons are released back to Newark each year. One thousand of them will end up back on lockdown, probably on drug charges, within three years. In between prison stays, the state’s post-release restrictions on employment (or basic adult necessities like, say, getting a driver’s license) are among the nation’s most draconian. Given the underperforming schools most in this group attended, it’s a wonder we don’t just round them up, à la the hapless Baghdad-cabby-and-tea-shop guys of our war on terror raids, and lock them all in conveniently located Gitmos.
In tracing the arc of Booker’s road to rage, columnist Moran noted, “At a time when even states like Texas are changing course, we are sticking with our failed strategy.” Booker told Moran that he was willing to go to jail himself to change things. “I’m going to battle on this,” the mayor said. “We’re going to start doing it the gentlemanly way. And then we’re going to do the civil disobedience way. Because this is absurd … I’m talking about marches. I’m talking about sit-ins at the state capital. I’m talking about whatever it takes.”
Booker’s right. It’s time to let America know that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Urban policy, in most of America and especially in Newark, is what we GIs called a self-licking ice cream cone: It exists only for its own satisfaction and benefits no one but itself. This is a reality that dreamy-eyed young leaders like Cory Booker are learning the hard way. Let no one say that he didn’t try to work within the system. Now, the same energy he put into genteelly lobbying Trenton politicians with pie charts and spreadsheets must now take to the streets. No justice, no peace.
Could it really be? Is the NAACP, the civil rights group that rocked the entire planet so hard that even the students in Tiananmen Square invoked it, really on the verge of collapsing with a willfully self- destructive whimper?
With Bruce Gordon’s recent departure as president after just 19 months and the recent announcement that the NAACP is shuttering its regional offices, the future does not look bright for the nation’s oldest advocacy organization.
Back in the late ’90s, I was fresh out of law school and raring to take on the system with the tools that NAACP and other civil rights leaders had won for me. Working in D.C. at the time, I remember seeing a photo of then NAACP president Kweisi Mfume in the paper. I was transfixed by the reverential image of him being arrested outside the Supreme Court during a protest against the dearth of black law clerks — an essential steppingstone for young lawyers wanting to enter the upper reaches of the legal profession. Eyes closed, on his knees, handcuffed, he looked with beatific stoicism to the heavens, à la Dr. King en route to the Birmingham jail. A shot for the ages.
But as inspired as I was by traditional civil rights activism, I was also having some nagging doubts about the efficacy of the old-school struggle the world has been watching us play out since the ’60s. After two generations of activism (preceded by NAACP’s earlier dogged war against Jim Crow, beginning with the group’s founding in 1909) racism has changed. Thanks to the sacrifices of the heroes and the martyrs, the battle against overt white supremacy has been won, however imperfectly. Now a critical bloc of black professionals are entering the halls of power and the black masses have a real, though obstacle-strewn, shot at achieving the dream.
As I studied Mfume’s photo, I couldn’t help thinking: Shouldn’t the NAACP have been using its moral authority to extend black influence throughout the nation’s institutions instead of submitting those institutions to unceasing frontal attacks designed merely to expose their racism? Instead of playing the faux martyr on the steps of the Supreme Court, shouldn’t he have been inside, respectfully but firmly lobbying Clarence Thomas and any other justice he could buttonhole? Holding my newly minted law school diploma, I was beginning to think so. It was time for the NAACP to evolve into a problem-solving organization for black America.
That’s why I was thrilled when the NAACP tapped veteran businessman Gordon to lead the black community into the future. Finally, after the organization had spent years clinging to a focus on confrontation without much action, Gordon promised to retool the NAACP to focus on social services and to leverage the civil rights movement’s gains into practical results. A star businessman whose career had been made possible by organizations like the NAACP, he was living proof that black success now requires more pragmatism than protest.
With a membership that peaked during WWII, long-running budget shortfalls, and a leadership and membership dominated by politicians, preachers and the elderly, the NAACP was in danger of becoming all but irrelevant. A history of poor management and disagreement with the group’s protest-focused agenda dried up the corporate and philanthropic monies that had earlier bankrolled black freedom. When former Verizon exec Gordon was named president in 2005, it seemed a tacit admission that America had changed, and that the NAACP would change, too.
Gordon was the ultimate insider motivated by a social accountability ethic born from the civil rights struggles that made his success possible. He had long used his clout, working from within, to significantly increase minority hiring and training programs in the telecom industry. “Civil rights leaders throughout this country did what they did and died,” he said in his acceptance speech, “so my generation has full responsibility to walk in the doors those brave people opened.”
In his brief tenure, Gordon used his corporate ties for Hurricane Katrina relief and brought in staffers with résumés impressive enough to lift morale in the beleaguered organization. He met three times with President Bush, who had shunned the NAACP for nearly six years. But after 19 months of constant warfare with the NAACP’s board over his lack of interest in protest, he was out. With him went the corporate funds and credibility desperately needed to save the NAACP.
In defending the NAACP’s change of heart about the leader who was doing exactly what he’d been hired to do, Julian Bond, chairman of NAACP’s ungainly 64-member board of directors, said, “Put simply, we fight racial discrimination and social service groups fight the effects of racial discrimination. Service is wonderful and praiseworthy and fabulous, but many, many organizations do it. Only a couple do justice work, and we’re one of those few.”
Gordon’s departure was only the beginning of NAACP’s troubles. Now, just three months later, the group has announced it will be “temporarily” closing its seven regional offices and slashing its national staff by 40 percent. It has also had to “delay” moving its Baltimore headquarters to Washington, D.C. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization is on the brink of extinction, defeated by its inability to evolve, a fact that no amount of rhetoric will be able to conceal at its 98th annual convention next month.
If it had been up to me to join a Freedom Ride or face Bull Connor or be spat upon and dragged from lunch counters to a Deep South jail, I’d be cleaning Salon’s office today instead of writing this column. I am in awe that civil rights activists, symbolized by the NAACP, found the courage, and indeed the hope, to lay their lives on the line in a seemingly lost cause. Which is why it breaks my heart to be writing this. Those of us who were not required to find out what we were made of then are required now to find the courage to speak truth to a venerated black power that has lost its way. Sadly, the NAACP seems to have outlived its usefulness.
Poor MeMe Roth. She had a misguided crusade against tubby “American Idol” contestants all ready to go, then the damned facts got in the way. All the anti-obesity crusader needed was a hapless scapegoat, but cruel fate denied her that simple request.
Roth, the leader of a wannabe movement called National Action Against Obesity, was surely praying that LaKisha Jones would win “American Idol,” so she could make her the poster girl for the nation’s obesity epidemic. Jones, for all that heavenly voice, was actually obese, whereas bubbly belter Jordin Sparks is merely kittenishly chubby. No matter. Roth was camped out at Fox News before Sparks finished the song that got her into the finals. Her message? Skinny Blake Lewis should win (a singing contest) because Sparks, according to Roth’s warped standards, is fat. Won’t someone please think of the children?
As unbelievably manipulative and self-serving as Roth’s agenda is (how she must regret having missed XXXL-size Reuben Studdard’s win in Season 2, before he dropped 100 pounds), she does help lead the way to a worthy point: the culturally accepted high level of obesity among black women and its related health problems. But Jordin Sparks isn’t the poster girl for this issue. Buffie the Body is.
According to a Village Voice article by Ben Westhoff, there are a slew of “urban” magazines finding success with men of color by replacing the traditional photo spreads of well-known bony models and actresses with unknown, “round the way sisters.” Looks and fitness — not required. Gi-normous butts (and weaves) — must have. Buffie, with a 45-inch ass, is the reigning queen of this scene and her popularity speaks to blacks’ normalization of a very un-p.c. fatness. Besides being a cover girl, Buffie appeared in the movie “ATL” as Big Booty Judy and is “as recognizable in the black community as some supermodels.”
Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder and need not justify itself. I love (non-steroidal) body builders’ physiques and, pre-kids, I was that hardcore gym rat haranguing co-workers over the contents of their lunch sacks. My own mother found my buff body distasteful, though it would have taken Gitmo to make her admit it (my family deputized a representative to ask me if I was gay). So, my issue is not with a butt fetish per se. Fetishizing large rumps (though “large” doesn’t tell you the half of it without the pix) is, of course, no better or worse than fetishizing plastic blimp-breasts, except that the latter could be considered safer. Their supply can be halted, surgeons are regulated, patients are monitored and, of course, the bearers themselves can have the implants removed. But the best way to get a gargantuan ass of urban-lad-mag size is to be obese; this is also the path to ill health and early death for black women, as Buffie’s lifestyle amply demonstrates.
According to the Voice, Buffie “eats nothing but junk food and sugary drinks, and she doesn’t work out.” Starting out at only 120 pounds 10 years ago, she developed her “attributes” by chugging supplement shakes in order to gain weight. “Black women don’t want to be skinny,” she said.
It’s fairly common knowledge that many black (and Hispanic) men prefer their women larger than do other groups, a reality that launched Buffie on her path to glory. It is perhaps less well known that that preference has contributed to extremely high levels of obesity among black women. While I’m all for subverting the dominant (white) Barbie paradigm that equates beauty with starvation, I’m also for subverting the black paradigm of thumbing our noses at mainstream beauty standards just because they’re mainstream. Obesity is killing us, and our obesity is in part cultural; Buffie’s butt-growing supplements and rejection of exercise are a choice, a preference. When significant numbers of black women tell researchers they don’t work out because the sweat will ruin their expensive hairdos, it’s time to take stock of black culture. Not everything about us should be either encouraged or celebrated.
Recent press reports show why black women should be alarmed: More than half of us are obese — 78 percent are considered overweight. And, according to the American Obesity Association, the pounds are not coming off easily, due to “cultural factors related to diet, exercise and weight among African-Americans.” The Centers for Disease Control finds that rates of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer and premature death are higher among black women, and when we get these diseases, we’re sicker than white women. But here’s the kicker: Womenshealth.gov reports that “compared with overweight white Americans, overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely to say their weight is average — even after they’ve been told they are overweight or obese by a doctor (emphasis added). It’s one thing not to “see” that you need to lose weight. It’s quite another to reject that knowledge from the medical professional you sought out.
To the degree that this black fat preference is simply a determination to pooh-pooh anything “white,” blacks need to grow up. If it’s simply ignorance, well, now we know and when you know better you’re supposed to do better. Sorry, brothers, but just as I learned to reject “hard bodies” that are the result of steroids, y’all need to reject “lard bodies” that are, at least in part, the result of slow suicide to please you. Just as other cultures have had to discourage certain customs — bound feet, corsets and hoop skirts — blacks have to learn to see a seriously overweight sister not just as freewheeling and “down” enough to enjoy her fried pork chops but as a woman who might be putting her health at risk. Sisters, there ain’t nobody to blame but yourself when you Southern fry yourself, complete with coveted ass, into Forest Lawn while your kids are still in elementary school. MeMe Roth’s anti-obesity campaign may be seriously askew, but so is sacrificing your health to blimp yourself into a Buffie.
You knew it had to happen.
Damn it all, Michelle Obama has quit her $215,000 dream job and demoted herself to queen. Though the party line is that she’s only “scaled back” to a 20 percent workload, I doubt her former co-workers will bother alerting her to many staff meetings. She’s traded in her solid gold résumé, high-octane talent and role as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.
Now, the energy and drive that had her up jogging before dawn and a gratifying day of work and family will mainly be spent smiling for the cameras. Just as we watch curvy, healthy-looking singers and actresses like Lindsay Lohan become anorexic too-blonde hoochies before our very eyes, so we’re now in danger of having to watch the political version of that process: Any day now, Michelle Obama’s handlers will have her glued into one of those Sunday-go-to-meeting Baptist grandma crown hats while smiling vapidly for hours at a time. When, of course, she’s not staring moonstruck, à la Nancy Reagan, at her moon doggie god-husband who’s not one bit smarter than she is.
My heart breaks for her just thinking about it. Being president will be hard. So will being first lady for the brilliant Michelle — imagine, having to begin all your sentences with “My husband and I…”
I’m in a feminist fury about Michelle (I’ll use her first name to avoid confusion with her husband) feeling forced to quit, but make no mistake: I’m not blaming her. Few could stand up to the pressure she’s facing, especially from blacks, to sacrifice herself on the altar of her husband’s ambition. He could be the first black president, you know! Also, she must be beside herself trying to hold things together for her daughters. I’m blaming the world and every man, woman, child and border collie in it who helps send the message that women’s lives must be subordinate to everyone else’s.
No doubt her modern, progressive husband assured her she didn’t have to quit — probably even tried to dissuade her. It’s also quite likely she’s making this sacrifice so her children will have at least one parent available. But the result is the same. Our daughters grow up knowing that their freedom to work at hard-won, beloved careers hinges on the doings of their husbands.
Still, there’s an opportunity in this setback. Now is the time for feminism to reach out to black women via the contingent of Obama-esque overachievers out there who ought to be chilled to the bone by Michelle’s retirement from work of her own. Given Secretary Rice’s, not to mention Oprah’s, persistent singleness, black women who have earned high status may well wonder why they should bother trying to both date and develop successful careers if one’s going to cancel out the other. No other group is less likely to marry. Given the innate conservatism of the black community, the burden to tend to hearth and home falls disproportionately on its women, sending the message to ambitious black girls that they can’t have both fulfilling careers and families.
It would be one thing if Michelle had tired of working, but she’s clearly ambivalent about leaving paid employment, as the Washington Post’s recent coverage made clear:
“Every other month [since] I’ve had children I’ve struggled with the notion of ‘Am I being a good parent? Can I stay home? Should I stay home? How do I balance it all?’” she said. “I have gone back and forth every year about whether I should work.” When she finally winds down her duties as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals in the days ahead…, she said, it “will be the first time that I haven’t gotten up and gone to a job.” “It’s a bit disconcerting,” she said. “But it’s not like I’ll be bored.” No, you’ll have your well-manicured hands full being your husband’s hostess in chief. Funny how she didn’t mention her husband’s parental angst; there have been whispers that he’s been pretty busy, too, what with being the great black hope and all. Wonder what finally made her decide to quit.
While I’m not blaming Michelle, I am issuing a challenge: This political and professional sutee won’t end until women refuse to step into the fire, disapproval be damned. Sen. Clinton can’t do everything: The rest of us women must stand our ground. Whatever else you think of Clinton, you can’t deny that she blazed a trail for women’s right to work and, like, be smart in public. And, man, what a beatdown she got. Since it was bringing about the end of the civilization as we know it, she caved, took her husband’s name and gave up a public policy role; she had to wait, like a good girl, until her husband couldn’t run for anything else. Valuable years of productivity, wasted. But at least giving up her career wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s first choice, as it is for most of the elite women who are abandoning their careers.
Linda Hirshman was an early observer of the phenomenon of top-tier women leading the retreat back to the kitchen. Following up a controversial article, “Homeward Bound,” with an equally controversial book, “Get to Work,” she harshly chastised elite, well-educated women for choosing not to work once they married high earners. Using census data and interviews, she argues that:
As a result of feminist efforts — and larger economic trends — the percentage of [working] women … rose robustly through the 1980s and early ’90s. But then the pace slowed. The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are choosing to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism … Among the affluent-educated-married population, women are letting their careers slide to tend the home fires. If my interviewees are working, they work largely part time, and their part-time careers are not putting them in the executive suite. I am not saying Michelle Obama is just another member of the so-called opt-out revolution; clearly, her reasons for leaving her job are historic — and even so, she clearly seems pained to do it. And I hate to add to Michelle’s load, but even though she’s made the choice to leave work, I hope she’ll keep her role in women’s history in mind and increase the tiny inroad political wives have made into something approaching women’s freedom of choice. With her personal wealth (albeit obtained by marriage) Theresa Heinz laid some groundwork, speaking her mind on the campaign trail and generally refusing to be mealy-mouthed and dull. Kudos to Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, too, for refusing to give up saving lives to chat up reporters on her husband’s tour bus. But until more women who want to work feel free to do just that, they’ll continue to be mere appendages of their men, and the American workplace will remain just as family-unfriendly as it is now.
What can Michelle do? If Obama wins, she should go for it and take on a meaningful public policy role, à la Hillary Clinton’s healthcare work. Just a lot more carefully. Why on earth should such an accomplished woman just arrange white-tie dinners? Until then, she should become more outspoken, building on her husband’s willingness to confront dysfunction in the black community — a black mother can get away with what no one else could. Obama has chastised blacks for apathy, for crime, for equating achievement with “acting white,” for allowing their neighborhoods to deteriorate; Michelle’s street cred as a churchgoing, “round the way” sister who made good makes her “ghetto pass” (her ability to operate as an insider) irrevocable. There will be no discussion of whether or not she’s “black.”
Since the Obamas are liberals, Michelle is bullet proof. Anyone who dares to insult her with the same level of vitriol as has been visited on Hillary Clinton and leading white Democrats like Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein will be trampled by a herd of black ministers, civil rights leaders and church ladies in big hats. (Condoleezza Rice doesn’t get the same protection.) In a post-Imus world, any critiques of Michelle had best be worded very carefully. She could also build on her husband’s interfaith pioneering with mainstream organizations to bring the resources of those well-endowed communities to bear on black problems.
Of course, “black” problems are really American problems; having the golden couple spearheading the fight will make it sexy to help blacks with their systemic problems (education and entrepreneurship, to name two). The two Obamas can de-race these issues (here is where she can use her fancy education) and help America understand that black progress is American progress.
Most important, though, I hope Michelle will bring feminism to black women.
Feminism is rightfully criticized for being irrelevant to black women and ignoring their issues. When it’s not plain arrogant, that is. An excellent example of mainstream feminism’s high-handedness is Maureen Dowd’s recent petty bitching about Michelle’s jabs at her husband on the campaign trail. She sounded like a 1940s white woman reprimanding a “sassy” black maid. But feminism’s failure to engage with black women is only partly its own fault; black men have worked hard to reinforce the image of feminism as not just “white,” not just lesbian, not just a plot to make contented black women unhappy with their lot but also (as usual) a war against black men. This black male victimology has been so successful at changing the subject whenever black women complain that, 20 years after Anita Hill was successfully demonized as a tool of white feminists for daring to “bring down” a prominent black man, here’s Michelle’s tortured answer to the Washington Post’s F-question:
“You know, I’m not that into labels … So probably, if you laid out a feminist agenda, I would probably agree with a large portion of it,” she said. “I wouldn’t identify as a feminist just like I probably wouldn’t identify as a liberal or a progressive.”
How difficult it must be for someone so whip smart and so famously blunt, according to insiders, to have to mouth these political pieties. But if we know nothing else about Michelle Obama, we know she’s determined to live in the world the way it is, not the way it should be. But she’s in a prime position to help change all that.
Now is the perfect opportunity for the movement to reach out to black women by embracing Michelle and black women’s causes in general. Progressive women should be working their way toward the middle ground a political wife must occupy and politely engineer ways in which Michelle can put her postelection time, win or lose, to worthy causes important to the black community — welfare-to-work, hiring and job training, for example.
But even as I seek silver linings, I’m still sad for Michelle. As the Times reports, “She expresses no regret about scaling down her job … where colleagues say she excels at tackling thorny problems. But this winter, after spotting a book on the Obamas’ coffee table celebrating Mr. Obama’s Senate victory, her staff created a matching volume of her accomplishments. Mrs. Obama wept when she saw it.”
Problems don’t come much thornier than this. You’ve got a right to sing the blues, Michelle, so go ahead and cry. Then take action.
