revolution (but not the NY kind)

Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked.

By Sophia A. NelsonSunday, July 20, 2008; B01

There she is — no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.

It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves.

Welcome to our world.

We’ve watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: “angry black woman.” And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated “makeover” to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.

Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it’s on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We’re endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting — being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle — as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother — can change that.

“Ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren’t accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman’s dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life?

“Thanks to the hip-hop industry,” one prominent black female journalist recently said to me, all black women are “deemed ’sexually promiscuous video vixens’ not worthy of consideration. If other black women speak up, we’re considered angry black women who complain. This society can’t even see a woman like Michelle Obama. All it sees is a black woman and attaches stereotypes.”

Black women have been mischaracterized and stereotyped since the days of slavery and minstrel shows. In more recent times, they’ve been portrayed onscreen and in popular culture as either sexually available bed wenches in such shows as the 2000 docudrama “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal,” ignorant and foolish servants such as Prissy from “Gone With the Wind” or ever-smiling housekeepers, workhorses who never complain and never tire, like the popular figure of Aunt Jemima.

Even in the 21st century, black women are still bombarded with media and Internet images that portray us as loud, aggressive, violent and often grossly obese and unattractive. Think of the movies “Norbit” or “Big Momma’s House,” or of the only two black female characters in “Enchanted,” an overweight, aggressive traffic cop and an angry divorcée amid all the white princesses. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a smart, accomplished black professional woman portrayed on mainstream television or in the movies? If Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” comes to mind, remember that she left the scene 16 years ago.

The reality is that in just a generation, many black women — who were mostly domestics, schoolteachers or nurses in the post-slavery Jim Crow era — have become astronauts, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhDs. You name it, and black women have achieved it. The most popular woman on daytime television is Oprah Winfrey. Condoleezza Rice is secretary of state.

And yet my generation of African American women — we’re called, in fact, the Claire Huxtable generation — hasn’t managed to become successfully integrated into American popular culture. We’re still looking for respect in the workplace, where, more than anything else, black women feel invisible. It’s a term that comes up again and again. “In my profession, white men mentor young whites on how to succeed,” a financial executive told me, but “they’re either indifferent to or dogmatically document the mistakes black women make. Their indifference is the worst, because it means we’re invisible.”

As someone who recently left a large law firm to work in the corporate sector, I have to agree. I liked my firm, but I always felt that I had to sink or swim on my own. I didn’t get the kind of mentoring that I saw white colleagues, male and female, getting all around me. The firm was actually one of the better ones when it came to diversity, and yet of 600 partners, only five were black women.

A 2007 American Bar Association report titled “Visible Invisibility” describes how black women in the legal profession face the “double burden” of being both black and female, meaning that they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.

Invisibility isn’t the only problem. I run an organization dedicated to supporting African American professional women and often run empowerment workshops at various conferences. At a recent such workshop, I asked the participants to list some words that would describe how they believe they’re viewed in the workplace and the culture at large. These are the kinds of words that came back: “loud,” “angry,” “intimidating,” “mean,” “opinionated,” “aggressive,” “hard.” All painful words. Yet asked to describe themselves, the same women offered gentler terms: “strong,” “loving,” “dependable,” “compassionate.”
Where does the disconnect come from? Possibly from the way black women have been forced into roles of strength for decades. “Black women are the original multitaskers of necessity,” says one nonprofit executive. “We’ve perfected it because we’ve been doing it for so long. But people don’t appreciate the skill it requires, and they don’t recognize the toll it takes on us as human beings.”

For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a significant price in our private and emotional lives. A life of preordained singleness (by chance, not by choice) is fast becoming the plight of alarming numbers of professional black women in America. The fact is that the more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.

Consider these stunning statistics: As of 2007, according to the New York Times, 70 percent of professional black women were unmarried. Black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at age 40. In 2003, Newsweek reported that there are more black women than black men (24 percent to 17 percent) in the professional-managerial class. According to Department of Education statistics cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women earn 67 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71 percent of all master’s degrees and 65 percent of all doctoral degrees.

With all the challenges facing professional black women today, we hope that Michelle Obama will defy the negative stereotypes about us. And that, now that a strong professional black woman is center stage, she’ll bring to light what we already know: that an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfill her own dreams. The fact that her husband clearly adores Michelle is both refreshing and reassuring to many of us who long to find a good man who will love and appreciate us.

Recently, a friend who’s a married professional mother of three girls wrote to me: “I think one of the most interesting things about Michelle Obama is that what she and her husband are doing is pretty revolutionary these days — and I don’t mean running for president. For a black man and woman in the U.S. to be happily married, with children, and working as partners to build a life — let alone a life of service to others — all while rearing their children together is downright revolutionary.”

It’s how so many black professional women feel. And our hope is that if Michelle Obama becomes first lady, the revolution will come to us at last.

snelson@iaskinc.org
Sophia A. Nelson is a corporate attorney and president of iask, Inc., an organization for African American professional women.

the new yorker

My sister wanted my take on The New Yorker cover controversy. So, here is is:

I think that the cover was intended to be satire, but I agree with most people that it kind of missed the boat. Instead of subverting lies and misconception, it ended up reifying them.

I think Roland Martin had the best take on the issue. His point is that if the cover had a headline and an article attacking fear mongering, then the satire would have worked. But strangely, neither the cover's tag line or the inside stories had anything to do with the cover forcing the cover to be taken at face value.

I see what The New Yorker was intending to do -- i'm personally not offended by it -- but i'm concerned that they didn't think a bit more carefully before they put the picture on the cover. What could have been funny, cutting, controversial and started a real conversation about the way the Obamas are being demonized instead feel flat and didn't even call out the people it supposedly was trying to.

For Roland's take: http://essence.typepad.com/news/2008/07/new-yorker.html

The other question posed by anxious black woman is if we as a nation are ready and able to understand sophisticated racial humor or if most people take this humor literally and use it to prop up their biases. I think it is mostly the latter, unfortunately.

The other point explored by anxious black woman is that for satire to work it has to have a kernel of truth in it. So, what exactly is the kernel of truth? The New Yorker claims that the kernel of truth was the stupidity of those who demonize the Obamas, but like Roland says - without a tag line or a story attacking this thinking this falls short. So, then what is the kernel of truth? If you just take the image, it seems that the kernel of truth is suggesting that the Obamas might actually be what is being "parodied." I heard the editor of the NY arguing that this was basically Colbert in print, but Colbert uses his satire to hit directly at close minded conservatives so I don't follow.

Final thought: maybe as a culture, we are not as savvy as interpreting images critically as we think we are. Maybe this is one of the underlying issues of this whole controversy: we need everything spelled out to us in black and white because we have lost the ability to read and think critically.

Have we lost the ability to read and interpret satire?

Jon Stewart was pretty critical tonight about the media blowing up this issue, and Than shares his perspective.

a civil right's lesson

Well, I was discouraged by the New Hampshire results last night. However, I was inspired once again by Obama’s concluding speech: his clear indictment of privilege and injustice in this country and his call for all of us to stand (and vote) for change.

This whole process seems to me an interesting test of prevailing narratives in our country. Already, people are talking about the reasons behind the discrepancy between pre-election polls and votes.

There were several statements made yesterday that I’m still pondering:

Gloria Steinem’s op-ed in the New York times yesterday titled “Women are Never Front Runners.” There were many things that outrage me about her argument; most strikingly, her dismissal of history. Like it or not, the uncomfortable truth is that race does matter in America. Contrary to Steinem’s argument, gender is not “the most restrictive force in American life” – except when it’s paired with race and socioeconomic status, but certainly not for white educated women like Steinem. Steinem tries to argue for gender over race saying black men have “ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women,” and she cites the fact that black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark the ballot. Excuse me? While black men may have been legally able to vote long before women, it would be another 100 years before they would gain (along with black women) full voting rights at a bloody cost. This statement is offensive. In addition, currently there are 16 women in the United States Senate. To put things in perspective: Barack Obama is the third African American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction. I am a feminist, but I'm concerned by this posturing.


Furthermore, while I am not African-American, I find Bill Clinton’s disparaging comments about Barack Obama’s rise as a “fairy tale” disturbing. While perhaps unintentional, Hillary Clinton’s comments about Martin Luther King Jr in relation to false hope were equally patronizing and dangerous. "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Mrs. Clinton said when asked about Mr. Obama’s rejoinder by Fox’s Major Garrett after her speech in Dover. “It took a president to get it done.” Read about it here. Just what exactly is she implying? That the black dreamer needed a white man to actually get things done?

Finally, while not directly endorsed by the Clinton’s, this is perhaps the most insensitive insinuation:

"Today, in Dover, Francine Torge, a former John Edwards supporter, said this while introducing Mrs. Clinton: “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually passed the civil rights legislation."

While I recognize that Obama cannot afford to get mired in a debate about racial politics, white people should be ashamed that comments like these have been made unchecked. I have nothing against the Clintons, rather I think all of the above reflects white privilege at work, and it's the elephant in this election that no one wants to name.

On a final note, I love reading the stories about Obama’s family in Kenya praying for him and crowded around the radio. Who could have predicted a relationship between our national election and a village in Kenya - it's such an inspiring visible reminder of our connection to the rest of the world. Let us remember to keep Kenya in our prayers.