Michelle Obama, the Media Circus, and America’s Racial Obsession

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.