Erin Aubry Kaplan

Now history may be cycling back on itself, with some intriguing modifications. In March, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons — with 6,000 members the largest plastic surgery organization in the world — publicized a study that appeared in its medical journal, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, about new techniques in reshaping the African-American nose. The study, “Rhinoplasty in the African-American Patient,” advanced a novel-sounding theory that nose jobs for blacks are now less about diminishing ethnic appearance than about preserving it. Anticipating the skepticism that lay people like me might feel, the association quickly detailed its position. It explained that the timeworn European standard of beauty “has stepped aside, encouraging African-Americans to retain their unique ethnic characteristics while improving their overall look.” The pitch contended that “with this shift in attitude, plastic surgeons who appreciate ethnic concepts of beauty and the unique anatomic characteristics of the African-American nose can create the most consistent and best results.”

Good self-empowerment language, but I wasn’t convinced. This didn’t sound like progress, but American hucksterism at its most conniving. It looked like the ultimate in having it both ways, the plastic-surgery equivalent of a Ginsu knife ad that promises to cut ferociously and never hurt countertops. It also still felt like a massive fundamental contradiction: Why would a black person interested in preserving his or her ethnic identity consider having a nose job at all? Why would a plastic surgeon who embraces ethnic concepts of beauty want to make those alterations?

The lead author of the study, Dr. Rod Rohrich, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Texas in Dallas, insists the premise is both aesthetically logical and racially ethical. He sees plastic surgery not as a tool of black assimilation — that’s old school — but as a means of individualization, of sculpting each nose in proportion to each face to achieve what he calls “nasal-facial harmony.” Rohrich, who is white and who has been performing rhinoplasties for 15 years, says he won’t straighten a black nose unless the patient has angular features to match. When doctors do graft a Northern European nose onto a black American face, it results in what he diplomatically calls “racial incongruity” (and what the rest of us might call Michael Jackson syndrome). With nose jobs among blacks on the rise — which the ASPS can support only anecdotally — Rohrich believes the time is right for surgeons to take a more nuanced approach to altering black noses, for the good of the profession and patients alike. “Too many surgeons just give people what they want without considering what’s best for them,” he says, with some distaste. “But I won’t give somebody a pencil nose just because they ask for it.”

I don’t doubt Rohrich’s sincerity or the assertion that nose jobs are actually becoming more enlightened (I can see the “Oprah” promo already). But my initial suspicion of black folks getting nose jobs holds. It’s difficult for me to believe that anybody black getting their nose done isn’t doing it to some degree to look more white and less black — such is the still considerable burden of history. Because of a tortured struggle for mainstream acceptance that began with slavery and has never ended — drugstores still sell skin-lightening cream in the beauty aisles, after all — changing black faces is almost never a purely aesthetic consideration. As they are so often in matters of appearance, racial considerations are never far from the surface.

Plastic surgeon Julius Few understands the maddening complexity of what should be superficial and straightforward — a nose job — though he’s optimistic, like Rohrich, that the “self-hatred” stigma of the procedure has abated to the point that most blacks reshaping their noses are, like the majority of rhinoplasty patients, merely correcting anatomical inconsistencies. Few, who is black and an assistant professor of surgery at Northwestern University in Chicago, praises the study and says that, given that nose jobs among blacks are increasing, this is an opportune moment to promote the validity of whole black facial aesthetic. “We [blacks] grew up believing that seeking out plastic surgery was tantamount to wanting to be more white,” says Few. “But with increasing information on this subject, blacks can achieve what other groups have long had” — plastic surgery without the stigma of ethnic loathing — “and understand they’re not doing anything against their upbringing.”

In the photos of pre- and post-op black patients included in Rohrich’s study, the women did wind up with noses true to their faces — nasal-facial harmony prevailed. But frankly, I didn’t see much disharmony to begin with (this despite the women looking a bit haggard and bare faced in the “before” pictures, nicely made up and hair-doed in the “after” ones — an old fashion-magazine makeover trick to heighten contrast where too little exists. And the fact that the “after” photos invariably featured lighter, brighter complexions and straighter, neater hair should be lost on no one.) Sure, I’m making aesthetic judgments here — one person’s bothersome pug nose is another’s perfection. Yet ironically, those photos reminded me that black faces can better accommodate broad noses — the so-called imperfection that the plastic surgeons are targeting — and so it makes less sense to change them. But cosmetic surgery is predicated on ideals, which are elusive at best, unattainable at worst, and always in the eye of the beholder. “We don’t really judge,” says Barbara Porter, Rohrich’s assistant. “We just want to get the problem straightened out.” So to speak.

More than one of the photos revealed altered noses that were narrower and more pinched — not quite faithful to the original and not Michael Jackson either, but something in between. It is that gray area that plastic surgery is really good at staking out and that black people, like all other people, probably want: a change that is better than nature, but not obviously so. Blacks, who according to the ASPS make up 6 percent of all plastic surgery patients, may be more inclined than most to want to triumph over that nature, given that their looks have historically been used against them and been such an integral part of their oppression. Rohrich’s study unwittingly evinces that oppression in the medically dispassionate descriptions of the typical characteristics of a black nose: “Broad and flat dorsum,” “Slightly flaring alae,” “Ovoid nares.” It detailed one patient’s complaint of having a nose that was “large and unrefined” — a common complaint that always involved flaring alae — which a surgeon transformed into a “narrowed, more refined nose with improved tip definition.” The study is commendable for putting the phrase “African-American beauty” in a sentence more than once, but it is a beauty still clearly searching for mainstream context. Few admits he winced at the descriptions himself because it made blackness feel like something not to celebrate but to overcome. Few hopes that his field, the last place anyone would look to for reinforcing the idea that natural is best, will in fact do just that. “Medical technology doesn’t make black noses sound attractive,” he says. “But they are. They have an inherent beauty.”

Certainly they do — that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves since the ’70s. I personally don’t know any blacks who’ve fixed their noses or plan to. The procedure (which costs about $12,000) is perhaps being done more frequently though not more overtly, which may mean that blacks still fear that their inner tragic mulatto could rear its ugly head at any moment. As for me, I’m still pretty content with my pugness. Not only does it harmonize with my face, but it also helps me assert myself racially and otherwise — when I get mad, nothing makes the point better than flaring alae. Of course, I still have misgivings about the size of my butt. But that’s a final frontier in the black-image war that may be a few years — and a couple of cosmetic-procedure trends — in the future.

And I was right about one thing: They have done it this time. But not at all in the way I imagined. Far from being some exploitative spectacle for whites, the hard-hitting tale of “Precious” is a film for blacks and a challenge to drop our own emotional armor and embrace a real-life story we have been minimizing for a long time — that of a big, black, sullen-faced, illiterate girl who lives in the depths of the ghetto and in all likelihood will stay there. She is the bogeywoman not just of white society but of black society, too, especially for a middle class that’s been trying for years to rescue its “negative” racial image from the likes of Precious. But while we in the real world preach community ad nauseam, it’s girls — and boys — like her who remain at the bottom of the well. In making the bottom dweller eminently human, the movie forces blacks to assess their own humanity. And I found myself squirming in the seat more than once.

Of course, my squirming speaks to how comfortable we’ve all gotten with set paradigms in black film. Hollywood has long favored comedies or “urban” dramas, both of which mine the deprivation and depravity of the ghetto for entertainment (a phenomenon I call “ghettotainment”). Movies like “Menace II Society” and “Barber Shop” sit comfortably atop the Netflix queues of a multicultural audience. And at the opposite end of the spectrum are the uplifting dramas, stories of dignified black folk overcoming oppression and/or segregation, movies often set in a distant, racist past — “Glory” or “Remember the Titans.” But “Precious” is jarring, because it breaks all these rules. The movie is about racial oppression, but it’s modern; its protagonist is inner-city but a female, not an archetypal gangbanger or would-be criminal; though she perseveres, Precious is clearly a victim, not a victor.

Perhaps the best thing about “Precious” is how it dismantles the well-honed defense mechanisms of the black audience. As viewers, we tend to be ready commentators, snickering at our own pain; we make fun of these on-screen moments because they’re frequently so unconvincing. Movies, among other things, have taught us not to take ourselves seriously. But in drawing black pain so specifically and unsentimentally, “Precious” makes those cavalier attitudes impossible. When Mo’Nique snaps, “Shut the fuck up!” for the hundredth time or Gabourey Sidibe, the remarkable actress in the title role, tearfully confesses to her own sense of nothingness, the largely black audience I sat with was silent; I could feel a rare chill of recognition. In one of the film’s most heartbreaking moments, Precious stands on the cold sidewalk with her new baby, looking longingly through the window of a church at a gospel rehearsal in joyous full swing. It’s rare to see a black church portrayed as impotent. But it isn’t a condemnation so much as an illustration of her isolation — our isolation.

The truth is that all blacks harbor a bit of Precious inside them. To one degree or another, we have all lived her, been her. Who hasn’t looked in the mirror and wanted “better” hair, less body mass, lighter skin, more confidence, more assurance that we’re worthy? Who hasn’t lashed out in anger at a world that we know holds us in subtle and not-so-subtle contempt? Who among us hasn’t retreated behind an emotional mask in order to get by? Precious is a fully realized character but also a metaphor representing blacks at our lowest psychological ebb, a place we’ve always feared because we know it has the potential to swallow us whole. We tend to refer to that low ebb via statistics — rising levels of depression and suicide — but those are sociological abstracts that keep black people at an emotional distance from each other. “Precious” unceremoniously closes that gap. And just in time for the Obama era, which urges us to believe in the president as a symbol of success for blacks everywhere. Role model? Not hardly. To Precious, Obama is only another light-skinned black fantasy boyfriend with a dazzling smile and good hair.

It’s perhaps not surprising that this project comes to us from Oprah Winfrey. Yes, she is the queen of love-yourself affirmation, but she’s also a dark-skinned black woman with a history of weight problems. She is also a lightning rod for political controversy. When Stephanie Zacharek’s review of “Precious” ran last week, some commenters groused about Winfrey’s involvement, complaining that she too often mined the depressing territory of rape and degradation in projects like “The Color Purple” and, I suppose, “Beloved.” But this is nonsense. Why should Oprah or anybody else in Hollywood have a quota for certain stories? How many harrowing Holocaust or violent mob stories has America embraced with fresh enthusiasm for each telling? (It’s worth remembering that few Oprah fans supported the ambitious “Beloved,” probably because slavery itself was unending sexual degradation that nobody wanted to stomach — not even for one movie, even one with Oprah in it). Even more intriguing but less discussed is the involvement of Mo’Nique, the plus-size actress/comedian who plays Precious’ Joan Crawford-like mother, Mary. Mo’Nique has graced several covers of Essence magazine and is rightly considered a touchstone of black female empowerment. Her no-holds-barred performance as the black woman of everybody’s worst nightmares carries a certain risk — will people think this harridan is the “real” Mo’Nique? Such are the questions of authenticity that dog every black film, whatever it is.

I give even bigger props to the film’s co-producer Tyler Perry. Unlike Oprah, whose tastes run to the literary, Perry has become famous making simple stuff — broad cross-dressing comedies and black family drama with overtly Christian messages of hope and redemption, movies that are really more propaganda than art. Those movies may top the box office, but they don’t do much to humanize black folk or expand our story. But Perry has shifted gears with “Precious,” at least temporarily. Maybe he’ll even stay on this courageous course, something that is the polar opposite of crowd-pleasing pablum like “Why I Got Married” and “Madea Goes to Jail.” But “Precious” proves you don’t always have to choose between artistic and commercial success; the film’s first opening weekend was record-breaking. It’s a sign how much we needed to tell this story. And, perhaps, how many stories there are left to tell. 

The latest example of this cautious coming out was Tyra Banks inaugurating the fifth season of her eponymous talk show on Tuesday with “Hair Liberation Day,” in which she promised to appear minus any flowing weaves, clip-ons and wigs that she has professionally never been without (watch a video clip here). She delivered on that promise — the hair was indeed weave-free and, compared to the cascading looks of the last 10 years, downright minimalist. But Tyra pulled a rare punch. The hair was all hers, all right, but it was still straightened in the manner of lots of black women’s hair, including the first lady’s. And when Tyra’s stylist got through with it, the supermodel emerita had a cloud of shoulder-length curls that was technically more ethnic than a weave, but as “done” as any ‘do she’s ever sported. A change? Certainly. Pretty? For sure. Revolution? Not hardly. Black people may be getting more honest about their hair habits, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to go cold turkey. Can’t get too crazy now.

This was a letdown to those of us who were hoping Ms. Banks would show the way back to natural hair — that is, curly-to-kinky black hair not beaten into submission with chemicals or straighteners. My letdown peaked into indignation when Tyra urged one black woman “challenger” on the show who confessed to hating her nappy, natural hair to chuck the weave to which she had become almost psychologically addicted. The chastened woman joined Tyra on stage — with real hair that was a bit shorter than before but straight and shiny as glass. The stylist declared it beautiful, while the audience applauded and Tyra praised the woman for beating the demons of racial self-hatred. Really? That must be another show.

Of course I was expecting too much. The latest Tyra event was a mere gimmick, another top-this move typical of the overheated talk show/reality show/extreme-makeover circuit. But the drama surrounding the scaled-back look of a black celebrity, underwhelming though it turned out to be, did speak to something genuine. The constant critiquing of the Obamas’ looks, from Michelle’s shorts to the girls’ braids, has black people thinking harder about an old racial wound that’s never gone away: the tyranny of beauty standards. White people talking about black hair practices now doesn’t mean we’re giving those practices up — when the dust from the black-power ’60s and ’70s settled, the hot combs and hair grease were still around — but we are talking more frankly about them and what they represent. There is a very practical reason for black women to liberate their hair in 2009: money. The cost of maintaining weaves and other hair enhancements, considerable in any era, is especially prohibitive in a recession. It also helps that the blinged-out, ghetto-fabulous looks of the ’90s and early aughts — weaves, colored eye contacts — seem to be finally running their course. The Obamas are adding a welcome new definition to the tired black descriptive, “urban,” and it’s about time; long defined by image extremes, blacks are now in a mood to champion image moderation.

There is some leftover ’60s mojo in all this. No, the Obamas and Tyras of the country are not the poor or oppressed who raised their fists 40 years ago. But the black middle class has gotten beat up, too. Ongoing conservative backlash has killed affirmative action and dried up any empathy for the inner cities and ghettos from which the black middle was grown. Blacks, especially successful ones, know they have fit in as much as they’re going to fit in — what have we really got to lose now by taking off the wig? Far from post-racial, blacks are post-assimilation. We’ll keep the fake hair and hot combs if we choose, but with a new attitude that doesn’t fear white discovery — or black shame. When Tyra announced last week that her hair would be “out and free,” it’s clear she was talking mainly to those black girls (like her, no doubt) whose self-regard is too closely measured by the length, texture and general acceptability of their hair as pretty or “good.” She meant free from the burden of white-as-pretty, free as in free at last.

She did make a good messenger. Tyra’s famous for letting it all hang out; in the past she’s been almost proud to pull the curtain back by chatting about her cellulite and letting herself be photographed with no makeup. Clearly, hair is the last frontier for her, though it’s a bigger field to conquer than she might have imagined.

To wit: I couldn’t help noticing that Tyra was working that weave right up to the day of the Tuesday unveiling. I thought, will this bit of progress last? Will Tyra, like James Brown before her in his brief “I’m Black and I’m Proud” moment — in which he jettisoned his famous process and went Afro — return to form? Maybe, though I’m sure by then Tyra will describe going back to a weave as nothing more significant for her than putting on a hat, which is what she said Tuesday. It also could depend who’s in the White House three years — I mean, three seasons — from now. 

But first, let’s take a look at Michelle. Her hair represents the highest aspirations and also the limitations of a certain black style. It’s always immaculately done, straight and shiny. On Inauguration Day, it complemented her cheekbones; it riffled gracefully in the frigid wind. Nothing wrong there at all. And that’s potentially the problem: Nothing’s wrong. It’s perfect. It’s the look Michelle’s had since we’ve known her, and it’s already starting to look locked in, like armor (Condoleezza Rice, anyone?). Certainly first ladies have their signature looks, including hair — Nancy Reagan’s coif never moved an inch in eight years, wind or no. But I wonder whether such a young, high-profile black woman who gets her hair straightened or relaxed as a matter of course will occasionally let it be something different: unstraightened, less straightened, or anything that doesn’t bounce, lie flat or swing like a pageboy. In other words, a do that suggests her ethnicity rather than softens it.

I know firsthand how complex these choices of style and identity can be: I’m a black woman with curly hair, but it’s not curly enough to be considered kinky (aka nappy) and typically black. Yet my blackness dictates perceptions and expectations about my hair; non-black people assume I have a relaxer or a weave and are always curious about what I’ve had “done.” I’ve had very little in the way of chemical or heat straightening in my life, but I didn’t escape black hair rituals altogether: Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to wear my hair “natural” or “out” because that was simply too ethnic. To this day I have childhood anxiety about how to wear my hair for special occasions or photo-ops. Do I hot-roller it, pull it back? How do I look my best, or look like myself? Is it even possible to do both? Poised as she is, I would wager Michelle Obama asks herself such questions too.

A hair change shouldn’t be a radical notion; every beauty magazine I’ve ever read trumpets makeovers every month. But black images — indeed, the very idea of beauty — are still inherently political, mirrors of our national mood about race and ancient tensions between reality and what we prefer to see. Hair is a particularly good mirror. A reality check: In this alleged new era of racial enlightenment, how would we see Michelle if she switched to braids, twists, curls or dreads, if she looked more like the black person she is? We applaud the sparkling new role models in the White House. But do we expect the Obamas to define a new black mainstream or to hew to an idealized model created by a white mainstream that blacks internalized long ago?

Hair is a very complicated piece of that model, historically speaking, as brutal a demarcation of worthiness as skin color. Hair texture and skin color work in tandem: The darker you are, the harder you have to offset it with “good” hair in order to be considered attractive or acceptable. If Michelle weren’t dark-skinned with classic black features, she might not be so wedded to super-straight locks. Of course, this is also about class and station — most professional black women of a certain pay scale adopt the relaxed look as part of the overall look of success. And then there’s convenience. A good friend of mine pointed out that processed hair is often more convenient than unprocessed black hair, which requires quite a bit of maintenance and time. But she also agreed that issues like practicality are virtually impossible to separate from the pressure on black women to have relaxed hair in the first place. Which is why I suspect that even a mild curl on Michelle, à la Oprah’s lioness look, would make people nervous. It was no accident that last year’s instantly infamous New Yorker cover that depicted the Obamas as White House terrorists featured Michelle with a huge Afro. Barack’s turban was a bad joke; Michelle’s big hair was a legitimate threat that could materialize at any moment.

 One of my favorite inaugural moments was the Rev. Joe Lowery invoking that crude but accurate black folk saying about the hierarchy of skin color: If you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back. A parallel saying for hair gradations would be something like: If you’re straight, you’re great; if you got curl, you got a pearl; if you’re nappy, you’re unhappy. Lowery was voicing that sentiment in order to bury it, but he was also admitting that it still has great power. Weaves and relaxers have become de rigueur for black women past the age of 13. The unprocessed black woman is assumed to be a vegan, a rebel, a Rasta, a nationalist, an artist, or some combination of the above. And for a black woman to wear her hair “out” — that is, to wear it in its natural state with minimal moderations — well, she must be so far out on the fringe that everyday presentation doesn’t matter. Most likely she’s an entertainer — Erykah Badu, Diana Ross or Rufus-era Chaka Khan. But in the real world that Michelle Obama represents and that most of us inhabit, there is no black equivalent for the wash-and-wear “out” style that white women wear all the time, and have worn for 30 years. For them, it’s become so routine that we now have all sorts of expensive products meant to create untamed, wind-tossed, day-at-the-beach hair. But natural, of course, is a loaded description. You really don’t want to see me with beach hair.

While I appreciate Rachel Maddow’s singular ability to breach racial etiquette in a thoughtful and good-humored way, I cringe at the thought of once again having to educate white people who have no clue. And I don’t think they really want to know about intensive black hair rituals that bond black women but can seem downright medieval to anybody else — hot combs, chemicals, wearing scarves to bed. It’s absurd and not a little maddening to think of all this as being a “moment” for whites, when it’s so much ancient history for us.

The way out of this tangle is, I believe, Sasha and Malia Obama. Throughout the campaign and  the inaugural, they were regularly pressed and straightened for the public — “Sunday hair,” we used to call it. And like their mom, they look wonderful. Adorable. But the public also sees that in the girls’ everyday lives, they literally let their hair down with braids and cornrows and puffs and whatever else black girls wear. Now that they’re no longer groomed for the Corn Belt voters on the campaign trail, I see the Obama girls casually affirming the black mainstream in a way perhaps their parents can’t yet. It helps that they are wildly popular now amongst pre-teen girls of all colors; there are even Sasha and Malia dolls on the market, though they don’t resemble the girls much, from the hair on down. But a recent cover in the family section of the Los Angeles Sentinel, my hometown black paper, spoke volumes. One photo was Sasha and Malia dolled up for the inaugural in their Sunday hair, and the photo below it showed them at a more relaxed event — a fourth of July outing — sitting on picnic benches in summer clothes. Malia wore cornrows, Sasha a voluminous, unmoderated ponytail. An American flag sits in full view on the table behind them. That’s a modest vision of the future and of equal opportunity, perhaps, but one too rarely seen. Long after the glitz of the inaugural and the president’s first 30 days in office has faded into the mundane, they’ll be the show to watch.

But what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack’s better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has coruscating intelligence, beauty, style and — drumroll, please — a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I’m going to talk about the first lady’s butt.)

What a bonus! From the ocean of nastiness and confusion that defined this campaign from the beginning, Michelle rose up like Venus on the waves, keeping her coif above water and cruising the coattails of history to present us with a brand-new beauty norm before we knew it was even happening.

Actually, it took me and a lot of other similarly configured black women by surprise. So anxious and indignant were we about Michelle getting attacked for saying anything about America that conservatives could turn into mud, we hardly looked south of her neck. I noted her business suits and the fact she hardly ever wore pants (unlike Hillary). As I gradually relaxed, as Michelle strode onto more stages and people started focusing on her clothes and presence instead of her patriotism, it dawned on me — good God, she has a butt! “Obama’s baby (mama) got back,” wrote one feminist blogger. “OMG, her butt is humongous!” went a typical comment on one African-American online forum, and while it isn’t humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay. Try as Michelle might to cover it with those Mamie Eisenhower skirts and sheath dresses meant to reassure mainstream voters, the butt would not be denied.

As America fretted about Obama’s exoticism and he sought to calm the waters with speeches about unity and common experience, Michelle’s body was sending a different message: To hell with biracialism! Compromise, bipartisanship? Don’t think so. Here was one clear signifier of blackness that couldn’t be tamed, muted or otherwise made invisible. It emerged right before our eyes, in the midst of our growing uncertainty about everything, and we were too bogged down in the daily campaign madness to notice. The one clear predictor of success that the pundits, despite all their fancy maps, charts and holograms, missed completely? Michelle’s butt.

Lord knows, it’s time the butt got some respect. Ever since slavery, it’s been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho’s, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they’re certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)

But Michelle is bringing those two falsely divided minds together in a single presentation — finally, unity for the real world! Talk about a power base. Thanks to Michelle, looking professional and provocative in a distinctly black way will become not only acceptable but also part of a whole presidential look that’s more, well, inclusive. Now we’ll all be able to wear leggings to board meetings; we’ll sport pencil skirts sans the long jackets meant to cover the offending rear at big conferences where we have to make a good impression. It turns out that Sir Mix-A-Lot, he of “Baby Got Back” fame, was not a novelty but a prophet. Who knew? Give that guy a Cabinet post.

Many comparisons have already been made between Michelle and Jackie Kennedy. While I appreciate the spirit, I beg to differ. To put it bluntly, Jackie had no back. Same can be said for gaunt Cindy McCain and the short-lived Republican sexpot Sarah Palin. Jackie was trim and perfect, an inoffensive figure who bucked the curviness of the ’50s and put American femininity on the treacherous path of smaller-is-better. Jackie was also a blue blood and a society woman — an elite! — so although she set new beauty and fashion paradigms, she also followed old ones.

Michelle radiates something entirely different. She’s black high society but by definition that’s not silver-spoon; it’s the result of navigating the rough shoals of racism that bet against your success every day. It’s hard work. Michelle looks great but also physically strong — she looks ready to leap into action if she’s called to it. She looks like she could kick Barack’s ass, if need be. She has a physicality that’s unprecedented in a first lady. Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, but she broke from family tradition; Michelle represents black striving that is the tradition. Her very presence, butt and all, is a rebuke to all those presidents who’ve dragged their feet on equality and justice even though they paid it lip service, from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton. Even more clearly than her husband’s, Michelle’s prominence is saying to the old guard, step aside. Fist bump? Nah. Booty bump is more like it.

Ordinary black women have waited a long time for this. Oh, we’ve suffered. In a country simultaneously obsessed with consumer excess and weight control, we’ve been caught in the middle. Throw race into the mix, and we’ve been downright strangled. The expectations run something like this: It’s OK for black women to be heavier than most, but we still have to conform to a universal (that is, white) standard of thinness and shape. This means that, even if you’re 120 pounds, your butt better not account for more than 2 percent of that.

Women’s magazines talk endlessly about whittling down thighs and waistlines, even jawlines, but butts are still so racially loaded — so to speak — they’re not even part of the conversation (the closest it gets is “hips,” but even white women know that’s not equivalent). In other words, butts have never been mainstreamed. And like so many other black characteristics, it endures a double standard. A white woman with an ass can claim to have an exotic appendage that boosts her stock; a black woman with a booty is merely ordinary — worse than that, she’s potentially uncultured, unqualified, ghetto in the most unfabulous sense of the word.

I winced when I heard about “The  Daily Show” spot in which two people in Florida disapprovingly described Michelle as a “horse” with a big “tuchis” — I give them the tuchis, but the animal reference was jarring. Of course, Michelle’s been described very unkindly all year; one blogger called her King Kong’s sister. The primal antipathy to all things black has stood right alongside the euphoria of the Obamas’ rise, and it’s unnerving, to say the least. Michelle, for her part, gritted her teeth — she actually does that — and continued smiling and waving. That’s politics, but it’s also what aspiring blacks have always done in the face of insult and resistance: Bear it. Walk through it.

I can’t talk about Michelle’s butt without acknowledging her hair, another physical feature that stirs anxiety about black female difference. Let me just say that I hope that gets unleashed, too. How sad that, in order for a black family to prevail — because Michelle and the girls were all running for office, not just Barack — they had to sublimate their blackness like crazy, starting with the visuals. Michelle’s ethnic butt might have snuck under the radar, but an ethnic do wouldn’t have stood a chance.

But now the game is over. The jig is up. Time for us all to let the hair down and let the booty hang out, to put our hands in the air like we just don’t care. Will the black aesthetic take over the White House, as many whites openly fear? As that Republican sexpot might say, you betcha. Of course the reality is that black aesthetic is a huge part of American aesthetic and American culture, from fashion to music, language to a physical sensibility that can only be described as bodacious. It’s time that we admit all this and give it its place. Michelle started the official coming out with that blazing black-and-red Narciso Rodriguez dress she wore on Election Night, complete with dangly silver hoops that gladdened the hearts of sisters everywhere. She was hiding nothing, and this time she wasn’t gritting her teeth about it. She was smiling.

And it was bootiful.

But it turns out, I was looking the wrong way. Because increasingly the racial animus has been aimed not at Barack but at his wife, Michelle Obama.

I should have seen this coming. It was established early that while Barack was striving for the middle ground, trying to strike a balance between strength and inoffensiveness, Michelle was the loose cannon who didn’t bother to hide her identity or racial concerns. In the matter of blackness, she was the id to his superego. And unlike Barack, she was a typical black American with no transcendent story about immigrant parents and being raised in exotic locales; she had the black Everywoman name of Michelle Robinson. She grew up on Chicago’s ethnically isolated South Side — wasn’t poor but was hardly rich, was raised with a keen awareness of racial barriers but was also raised to achieve. She went to Princeton, excelled, retained her racial conscience but also eventually commanded a six-figure salary. All of this confuses white people mightily, far more than Barack’s biracial status. In their frame of reference, Michelle has no reason to be angry and every reason to be content.

Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know. This is wonderful news for us — we finally see an accurate reflection of ourselves in someone who may one day occupy the most exclusive address in the country. But for a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem. Michelle’s frankness about the ills of America and how they’re connected to race taps into an anxiety about such a story becoming prominent and representing us all. Like so much about the whole Obama phenomenon, this has never happened. The black story has always been marginal by definition; now, suddenly, it isn’t. And Michelle’s is a story that’s much more nuanced and challenging than the hardcore urban tales or middle-class fantasies we’re used to ascribing to all black folk. Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself. Not exactly flattering, right? Not quite what happened in high school history, right? No wonder people are at a loss.

Not just people, but also the media. Even the most sophisticated outlets struggle to make sense of Michelle. When conservatives decried her “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country” remark as hateful, few in the media dissected the charge. The Los Angeles Times, in covering a campaign speech Michelle made to working-class blacks last year, wondered how on earth the wealthy Obamas could relate to that demographic. (Funny, I don’t remember anyone questioning how former presidential candidate and millionaire John Edwards could relate to poor whites.) The scrutiny got tighter, at times resembling a National Geographic Channel show on the lifestyles of isolated populations in remote corners of the world: Who is this woman and what does she mean? What ‘s the significance of the fist bump? Why did she write that thesis in college about the struggles of racial assimilation? Lacking answers, pundits denounced Michelle even louder. Fox News slung an ultracheap shot in labeling her “Obama’s baby mama.”

It’s interesting, by the way, how John McCain’s hotheaded ways are admired as part of his so-called maverick qualities, a willingness to follow his passions and go against the grain; it’s part of his essential Americanness. Michelle Obama’s candor, by contrast, is seen as entirely foreign and not a little threatening. Yes, he’s given more slack because he’s a man. (And yes, Teresa Heinz Kerry, another independent-minded presidential candidate’s wife, got similarly roughed up by the media in 2004.) But Michelle is given zero slack because she’s a woman and black. And let us never forget, in the bigger picture, black anger — or even just plain old dissatisfaction — always raises the specter of slavery and the unfinished business of social justice. In any context, to say nothing of a presidential election of historic proportions, such anger threatens a still widely accepted narrative of America as a good place, a fair place. Presidential elections are all about voters connecting emotionally to candidates, identifying with them, and Michelle is not making that connection happen as easily people would like. But her reasonable expectation that we see her reality, some of which is shaped by a difficult racial reality, is part of the paradigm shift that we are resisting like mad. In a discussion of what Obama’s candidacy could mean, NBC’s Chris Matthews lauded Barack but dispensed with American racial matters as “all that bad stuff in our history.” A recent New York Times profile, in distinguishing Michelle’s background from that of her husband, described her as being “a descendant of slaves” — as if that’s a unique fact rather than a collective one that applies to the vast majority of the millions of black Americans whose families have been here for hundreds of years. That slavery is even remarked on at all says much about how blacks are still viewed by their fellow Americans, even sympathetic ones, as the ultimate outsiders.

It’s worth noting how Michelle was admired as long as she filled the prescription of a successful black woman on paper — college grad, married to an equally successful black man, a working but attentive mother, financially secure, immaculately turned out. But as soon as she began revealing herself as a person and airing her views a bit, she began shape-shifting in the public eye into another kind of black woman altogether: angry, obstinate, mouthy — a stereotypical harpy lurking in all black women that a friend of mine calls “Serpentina.” The consternation about Michelle suggested an old racist sentiment that you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can never take the ghetto out of the girl. Michelle’s physical appearance encourages the consternation; sure, she’s tall, but she’s also dark-skinned. She doesn’t try to minimize either characteristic, favoring heels, bold colors and sleeveless tops. For me, it’s fashion as usual. For lots of my fellow citizens, it’s a cultural revolution.

But here’s the thing: Her “makeover” notwithstanding — such as her recent sunny appearance on “The View,” in which she debuted as a kinder and gentler candidate’s wife — Michelle is who she is, a child of post-civil-rights sensibilities who took splendid advantage of what the movement gave her but did not abandon a black cause — indeed, it drew her closer to it. She is friendly and open but is not “post-racial” and has no intention of going there. Folks, take a deep breath and say this with me: This, too, is America.

As I said earlier, Michelle’s story is mine as well. I was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles by parents who were themselves raised in the segregated old South; when I was born in 1962, there were black people who still couldn’t vote. I grew up in an entirely black neighborhood that was working class but by no means deprived. I earned a couple of college degrees and eventually became a journalist (alas, not for six figures) focused on issues of racial equality. Along the way I’ve run smack into racism both subtle and not. I don’t wave flags and never have, but patriotism has never been a simple issue for me or any other blacks I know, even for those who do wave flags. And I know that if I were under the klieg lights as Michelle Obama is now, I’d never pass political muster — I have way too many documented criticisms of my country, to say nothing of undocumented ones. YouTube would have a field day.

But now, for the first time in my adult life, there’s a strong possibility that those criticisms and the context that goes along with them will make it to the White House and officially enlarge the great American story in a way it should have been enlarged long ago. Got to say, makes me proud.