Book Excerpt: On Michelle Obama, Body Language, And Love’s Revolution
As noted above, the key to creating oppressive black female stereotypes that live in the American imagination is to demonize, regulate, and desecrate black women’s sexuality. Moreover, in the contemporary culture industry, black bodies have long been circulated as voiceless icons designed to bestow consumables of all kinds with the stamp of mythic physicality, danger, and sexual power. In some cases, such as Michael Jordan’s trademark silhouette, which appears as the stamp of athletic virtuosity on Nike’s Jordan Brand basketball clothing line, these bodies circulate as derivatives of themselves. In other cases, live bodies become the stamps of power; hoards of scantily clad black and brown women decorate the videos of hip-hop’s most recognizable stars.
Michelle and Barack’s use of their bodies in public displays of love and affection is revolutionary for at least three reasons. First, as historian Stephanie Coontz observes, “We’ve seen love in the White House before, but in many cases it was the adoring wife, along the lines of Nancy Reagan. What the Obamas have is a jocular, playful love, a mutual respect, and on Michelle’s part, a lack of awe and of adoration.” Even without an intersectional lens, this poses a clear challenge to the idea of the First Lady. Second, the Obamas carry out acts of intimacy that are leagues away from the vulgar sexualization of love and romance that permeates so much of American popular culture. Photographs of Michelle and Barack dancing, touching each other gently and laughing, looking at each other amorously, and holding hands portray romance and underlying sexual attraction as fundamentally cooperative and subjective phenomena rather than explosions triggered by the visual stimuli of objectified bodies or body parts.
Finally, Barack and Michelle are black sexual beings with voices rather than icons or symbols silenced by the metalanguage of race. As mentioned earlier, Barack Obama writes extensively about his love for Michelle in The Audacity of Hope, demonstrating awareness that the meaning of their love resonates beyond their two-person partnership. Michelle reinforces this truth as she describes her physical intimacy with her husband.
My oldest daughter, now that she’s ten, she’s very precocious, and now can really articulate how she feels about this stuff. And she says, “you know, it makes me feel good to see you and dad hold hands.” We forget about that, or we think that they don’t care about that. But they like the fact that they know that we love each other. … They want to know that my mother and father love each other, and if they love each other that much, they’re going to love me.
This statement illustrates a connection between the bodily language of love (holding hands) and the stability of the family unit. Michelle reframes displays of affection between her and Barack as public statements received and interpreted by onlookers, including her children. It is important to maintain intersectional discipline and acknowledge the privileges enjoyed by the Obamas. This is not just “black love.” This is black love glamorized and legitimized because the couple is straight, married, wealthy, and monoracial (assuming Barack is considered solely black). But even as Michelle Obama benefits from those elements of her social identity that bestow her with privilege, her bodily enactment, self-awareness, and public statements about intimacy shatter stereotypes and expand the range of publicly available representations of black womanhood.
–From Paint The White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America by Michael P. Jeffries
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