This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(29)

Tell me, did you have these same anxieties while you were at Princeton? Did you date anyone and worry that your dreams alongside the simple fact of you being a black woman made you an unsuitable partner for anyone, black or not? Did you question your worth?

At least, during my time there, my classmates and I were fortunate to have you, an example of a black woman who excelled and fell in love with someone who did nothing to diminish her. Your story was referenced so many times that your importance became biblical, deserving of a book or chapter of its own somewhere after the book of Ruth and before Proverbs 31. You were never “easy.” At Harvard Law, you dated Stanley Stocker-Edwards, the son of Patti LaBelle, and you later said, “My family swore I would never find a man that would put up with me,” as though you were a nuisance rather than a blessing standing beside a lover. What was it about your personality that anyone would have to put with? What does it say about your family that they thought that the life you sought to live would be met with a scoff from a man? In those moments, did those comments bounce off you like Teflon or stick like molasses?

In the introduction of your senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” you wrote, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong . . . These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” This might have been the case when you were at Princeton and later at Sidley & Austin, but what about as our nation’s First Lady? What happens to white people’s eyes when you eschew the periphery, when you become the most visible woman in the world? When they turn on the television, they see you meeting with heads of state from all over the world. When they flip through magazines, there you are smiling and wearing the finest of fabrics created by designers who seek to put the best of their wares on your statuesque black figure. When they close their eyes and think about this country’s direction, blackness is carved and curved into two figures: you and Barack. That is inescapable. It is the kind of upheaval that black people have patiently waited for white people to experience, even if your eight years in front of us are not enough to overturn centuries of oppression. But I pray that they at least briefly knew what it meant to feel like the “other” whenever they saw your smile and the elegance of your stride and that it scared them. Damn, those eight years felt good.

Do not think that they have not tried to grapple with their inner turmoil, a kind that was collective across the world. Before writing you this letter, I researched images of racist photos of you, and I swore not to look at them the night before I began writing out of fear that I would not sleep. Once I woke up the following morning, I realized that I had made the right decision. There is an image of you dressed in a red gown with your back exposed, your face beautifully made up, your wrists bound and tied together with a thick rope presumably hanging from a tree. The Ku Klux Klan is in the backdrop. Another image is from a Spanish magazine called Fuera de Serie. It’s your face superimposed on an African Guadeloupean slave painted by the French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist in 1800 and one of her breasts is exposed. This is what they need: to create images of you as an object en route to a cruel, racist death. But hey, at least you look beautiful. At least you have on a red gown or a beautiful headscarf while you’re on your way to being cast out of this world.

You were the only First Lady to have two Ivy League degrees, you tied with Eleanor Roosevelt for tallest, and, of course, you were black. You were not the kind of blackness that could make white people feel at ease. You are not light-skinned with gray or green eyes, and your hair is not curly. Unlike Barack, you cannot claim a white parent and in turn white people cannot claim any stake in your success. You did not get pregnant out of wedlock. There are no images of you smoking weed or any other substance. You do not have a criminal record. It is a shame that you had to be this spotless, that you had to be, in every sense of the word, perfect.

Because no one could find any flaw in you, they made you feel worthless just by being in your body. Photographers shot and dispersed images of you with your mouth open while in the midst of a conversation to “show” that you were animalistic. Cartoonists exaggerated your five-foot-eleven frame by adding extra muscle in your arms and bones in and around your cheekbones to make you appear more masculine and Neanderthal. Snapshots of you with your lips pursed were circulated to make you seem like the typical sassy black woman with an attitude. Fuck the Ivy League degrees, the high-powered attorney position, the many accolades to your name. You were still black. And even worse, you were a black woman, and they would never allow you to forget that.

What did you do to take care of yourself during all this humiliation? Did you pour love into your family, and did they reciprocate? Did you read the works of Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Cade Bambara to realize that you were never alone? Did you listen to Nina Simone as you applied a pomade to your skin and hair before going to bed? What did you do to remind yourself that you are brilliant and accomplished despite the efforts they made to belittle and squish you into a narrow prism so that they could live peacefully? What did you do?