Someone, meanwhile, had dug up my senior thesis from Princeton, written more than two decades earlier—a survey that looked at how African American alumni felt about race and identity after being at Princeton. For reasons I’ll never understand, the conservative media was treating my paper as if it were some secret black-power manifesto, a threat that had been unburied. It was as if at the age of twenty-one, instead of trying to get an A in sociology and a spot at Harvard Law School, I’d been hatching a Nat Turner plan to overthrow the white majority and was now finally, through my husband, getting a chance to put it in motion. “Is Michelle Obama Responsible for the Jeremiah Wright Fiasco?” was the subtitle of an online column written by the author Christopher Hitchens. He tore into the college-age me, suggesting that I’d been unduly influenced by black radical thinkers and furthermore was a crappy writer. “To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake,” he wrote. “The thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
I was being painted not simply as an outsider but as fully “other,” so foreign that even my language couldn’t be recognized. It was a small-minded and ludicrous insult, sure, but his mocking of my intellect, his marginalizing of my young self, carried with it a larger dismissiveness. Barack and I were now too well-known to be rendered invisible, but if people saw us as alien and trespassing, then maybe our potency could be drained. The message seemed often to get telegraphed, if never said directly: These people don’t belong. A photo of Barack wearing a turban and traditional Somali clothing that had been bestowed on him during an official visit he’d made to Kenya as a senator had shown up on the Drudge Report, reviving old theories that he was secretly Muslim. A few months later, the internet would burp up another anonymous and unfounded rumor, this one questioning Barack’s citizenship, floating the idea that he’d been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya, which would make him ineligible to become president.
As we carried on through primaries in Ohio and Texas, in Vermont and Mississippi, I had continued to speak about optimism and unity, feeling the positivity of people at campaign events coalescing around the idea of change. All along, though, the unflattering counternarrative about me seemed only to gain traction. On Fox News, there’d be discussions of my “militant anger.” The internet would produce more rumors that a videotape existed of me referring to white people as “whitey,” which was outlandish and just plainly untrue. In June, when Barack finally clinched the Democratic nomination, I’d greet him with a playful fist bump onstage at an event in Minnesota, which would then make headlines, interpreted by one Fox commentator as a “terrorist fist jab,” again suggesting that we were dangerous. A news chyron on the same network had referred to me as “Obama’s Baby Mama,” conjuring clichéd notions of black-ghetto America, implying an otherness that put me outside even my own marriage.
I was getting worn out, not physically, but emotionally. The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person. It was as if there were some cartoon version of me out there wreaking havoc, a woman I kept hearing about but didn’t know—a too-tall, too-forceful, ready-to-emasculate Godzilla of a political wife named Michelle Obama. Painfully, too, my friends would sometimes call and unload their worries on me, heaping me with advice they thought I should pass on to Barack’s campaign manager or wanting me to reassure them after they’d heard a negative news report about me, or Barack, or the state of the campaign. When rumors about the so-called whitey tape surfaced, a friend who knows me well called up, clearly worried that the lie was true. I had to spend a good thirty minutes convincing her that I hadn’t turned into a racist, and when the conversation ended, I hung up, thoroughly demoralized.
In general, I felt as if I couldn’t win, that no amount of faith or hard work would push me past my detractors and their attempts to invalidate me. I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to “angry.” It was another damaging cliché, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.
I was now starting to actually feel a bit angry, which then made me feel worse, as if I were fulfilling some prophecy laid out for me by the haters, as if I’d given in. It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
I was exhausted by the meanness, thrown off by how personal it had become, and feeling, too, as if there were no way I could quit. Sometime in May, the Tennessee Republican Party released an online video, replaying my remarks in Wisconsin against clips of voters saying things like “Boy, I’ve been proud to be an American since I was a kid.” NPR’s website carried a story with the headline: “Is Michelle Obama an Asset or Liability?” Below it, in boldface, came what were apparently points of debate about me: “Refreshingly Honest or Too Direct?” and “Her Looks: Regal or Intimidating?”
I am telling you, this stuff hurt.
I sometimes blamed Barack’s campaign for the position I was in. I understood that I was more active than many candidates’ spouses, which made me more of a target for attacks. My instinct was to hit back, to speak up against the lies and unfair generalizations or to have Barack make some comment, but his campaign team kept telling me it was better not to respond, to march forward and simply take the hits. “This is just politics” was always the mantra, as if we could do nothing about it, as if we’d all moved to a new city on a new planet called Politics, where none of the normal rules applied.
Anytime my spirits started to dip, I’d punish myself further with a slew of disparaging thoughts: I hadn’t chosen this. I’d never liked politics. I’d left my job and given my identity over to this campaign and now I was a liability? Where had my power gone?
Sitting in our kitchen in Chicago on a Sunday evening when Barack was home for a one-night stopover, I’d let all my frustrations pour out.
“I don’t need to do this,” I told him. “If I’m hurting the campaign, why on earth am I out there?”
I explained that Melissa, Katie, and I were feeling overmatched by the volume of media requests and the work it took to travel on the tight budget we were on. I didn’t want to foul anything up and I wanted to be supportive, but we lacked the time and resources to do any more than react to the moment at hand. And when it came to the mounting scrutiny of me, I was tired of being defenseless, tired of being seen as someone altogether different from the person I was. “I can just stay home and be with the kids if that’s better,” I told Barack. “I’ll just be a regular wife who shows up only at the big events and smiles. Maybe that’d be a lot easier on everybody.”
Barack listened sympathetically. I could tell he was tired, eager to head upstairs and get some needed sleep. I hated sometimes how the lines had blurred between family life and political life for us. His days were filled with split-second problem solving and hundreds of interactions. I didn’t want to be another issue he needed to contend with, but then again, my existence had been fully folded into his.