On Mothers, Michelle Obama, & growing up in Chicago
For International Women’s Day 2021, I was intrigued by the theme: Choose a Challenge. I know, I thought, I’ll pick implicit bias, and my mother! What could be more challenging?
Photo by Alex Nemo Hanse on Unsplash
For International Women’s Day 2021, I was intrigued by the theme: Choose a Challenge. I know, I thought, I’ll pick implicit bias, and my mother! What could be more challenging?
On January 10, 2017, during Barack Obama’s Farewell Address to the nation, I first learned Mrs. Obama’s maiden name. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. I remember Mr. Obama pronouncing it in full and being surprised by how “Black” it sounded. My name is Michelle too, and since 2008, whenever I met someone new I’d introduce myself by saying: “I’m Michelle, with two LLs, like the First Lady.” Over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency, I became, and remain, a fan of his wife. And like most fans, my interest in Mrs. Obama was based more upon what that interest said about me as an individual, rather than on anything in particular about her. During the turbulence leading to the 2016 election, I took comfort in the speech where Mrs. Obama coined the phrase: “When they go low, we go high.” But it wasn’t until Mr. Obama’s Farewell Address, when I heard him say his wife’s name in full, that my interest was piqued. She had a name that sounded like Jenny’s, from the Block. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Hm, I thought, before she became a political and feminist icon, and international emblem for simple decency, had she just been an average, middle class Black woman? I wasn’t sure, so when her autobiography Becoming was published, I read it.
The description of the home where Mrs. Obama grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and where she lived when she worked as a lawyer and met Mr. Obama, captivated me:
“On Euclid Avenue, we were two households living under one not very big roof. Judging from the layout, the second-floor space had probably been designed as an in-law apartment, meant for one or two people, but four of us found a way to fit inside. My parents slept in the lone bedroom, while [my brother] Craig and I shared a bigger area that I assume was intended to be the living room. Later, as we grew, my grandfather...brought over some cheap wooden paneling and built a makeshift partition to divide the room into two semiprivate spaces.”
This living situation sounded familiar; in fact, it replicated almost exactly what my mother wrote about her experience growing up in an Italian neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, near Grand and Pulaski. Here’s how my mother describes it:
“The inside of the basement apartment had a small bathroom, two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small living room. Whenever I was in the house, I was only an arm’s length away from someone else. I slept in one of the small bedrooms with my mother, my father slept on a hideaway bed in the living room, and my brother slept in the other small bedroom. The emphasis on my place was, you guessed it, small.”
The likeness was so obvious, my immediate thought was: as an average, middle-class white woman, my mother should see herself in Mrs. Obama. Except she doesn’t.
My mother credits her upbringing with endowing her with fortitude and resilience. And although my relationship with my mother is complex, one thing I know for certain is that she created an enriched environment for me to grow up in. It astounded me to think that Barack Obama’s wife, the First Lady of the United States, had grown up in a tiny space almost identical to the one my mother grew up in. That would mean, I realized in wide-eyed astonishment, that Michelle Obama’s mental fortitude rivals that of my mother! [Duh!]
Politically, my mother and I are at odds, but fundamentally I revere my mother, I love her, and fear her, but in a good way. The unsettling thing, for me, is that I did not see my mother in Mrs. Obama the minute she took the stage in Chicago, after Mr. Obama’s victory, in 2007. I didn’t see her there because Mrs. Obama is Black and my mother is white.
The only encouraging thing about all this, is that although my mother may not see herself in Mrs. Obama, I do, now. And my daughter, who was born on the day Barack Obama won re-election, always will.
Woke
Eventually, I came around on the subject of white privilege. Growing up where everyone was white, at first I didn’t believe in white privilege. Privileged over whom, I always asked. Ourselves? But, I respected the theory and agreed I was probably prejudiced, just in ways I couldn’t necessarily perceive.
Photo of Shirley Chisholm during a campaign speech
“I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” - Taylor Swift
My grandmother was a big-boned Italian with full lips, thick red hair, abundant, well-placed moles and a sculpted Roman profile that would make Helen of Troy jealous. She was prejudiced, but no one considered her to be racist. For one thing, she worked with Black people. Mostly Black women, as a keypunch operator for the city. She climbed the ranks to become supervisor and retired with a decent pension, and described what she endured as “reverse racism.” All those years, those Black ladies refused to invite her to sit with them at lunch, they never asked for her to join their card game, and that hurt her feelings!
My mother was definitely not as prejudiced as her mother had been. She even invited a Black couple to her wedding. The picture of Dr. Green wearing a long-sleeved, floor-length, floral gown and her husband, in a color-coordinated ruffled shirt, is the first wedding photo in the album she’d show off for company. Dr. Green was her thesis advisor in graduate school, and a woman, and Black. My mother couldn’t praise her enough.
My parents raised me in the suburbs and in high school I joined the Cultural Awareness club. Eventually, I came around on the subject of white privilege, which the Club’s second-wave feminist sponsor venerated in hushed tones. Growing up where everyone was white, at first I didn’t believe in white privilege. Privileged over whom, I always asked. Ourselves? But, I respected the theory and agreed I was probably prejudiced, just in ways I couldn’t necessarily perceive, in the same way I probably benefitted from systemic injustices in American society, again, unknowingly so.
In college I was more fearful of befriending the Black women who shared my dorm suite then I was my white Jewish roommate, though I’d never met another Jewish person before, either. Around Black people my speech ground to a halt; if my suitemate had given me a present wrapped in festive wrapping paper, I would not have known what to do with it. [open it, duh!] At functions hosted by Black students, I didn’t, for example, offer to clean up, which I had otherwise been taught was rude. There was a chasm of difference that frightened me. The world I moved in simply wasn’t very diverse, but not for lack of trying! I attended Delta Sigma Theta and Delta Gamma rush events. I listened, attention rapt, as one of my suitemates’ boyfriend’s explained football was about white men defending a goal bound by two white poles - representing the open legs of a prone white woman - from penetration by a brown phallus. I even attended a Louis Farrakhan rally and became hysterical, asking my Black neighbor: “Do you think I’m evil?”
I was, frankly, relieved to discover the concept of microaggression. It felt good to name the feelings of alarm that overcame me, apropos of nothing, as I passed a Black man walking in the opposite direction. I tried not to, but as I shifted my purse to the shoulder furthest from him, relief and shame washed over me simultaneously. Whenever I heard a “Black” voice at the other end of a customer service call, I felt justified, instead of undignified, if I “had to lose my temper.” When a Black child wandered over on the playground, instead of greeting him with a smile, as I would a white child, I found myself ignoring the boy, and as my awareness grew, struggling to consciously include him, which seemed worse.
I knew I would never see the same potential that I saw in my daughter, in a Black teenager crossing the street with his jeans belted below the curve of his buttocks, his cotton boxer briefs raging. Until reading Becoming, I thought Michelle Obama was just another “angry Black woman.” And when I read Between the World and Me and asked myself, am I the type of white woman who would have pushed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s five year old son off the escalator? I knew in my heart the answer: maybe yes, maybe no, which wasn’t good enough.
So, what I do about it?
My husband and I enrolled our daughter in a preschool that catered to immigrant and refugee communities; meaning, the school was majority Black. It also happened to be the public charter school with the most economical before- and after-school-care program in our vicinity. Our daughter was one of only two white children in Ms. Mary Anne’s preschool class, where she flourished, she blossomed, she became beloved. I would hear, as I entered the school building, echoes of her name being sung like a hymnal. Everyone knew her, all the other students wanted to be her friend. I thought my daughter’s experience would mirror that of the few Black kids I’d grown up with; they had been the only ones. I thought my daughter would be an outsider, an other, that she wouldn’t belong.
But the funny, and terrible, thing is instead of being ostracized, she was adored. She was popular, her attention was constantly sought after and playtime with her was jealously guarded. I had wanted for her the experience of being excluded, so that she would learn not to exclude others, especially those most different from herself, and learn to welcome the outlier in her midst. Instead, she was put on a pedestal, almost worshiped.
My daughter wasn’t born a racial minority, and only spent a single year at the charter school that served them. But my daughter turned out differently than me, and my mother and grandmother before me. She wandered around the playground looking longingly at groups of Black girls to befriend before approaching the white girls at school. She deferred to Enesio and Tanisha and Aaliyah in a way that she didn’t defer to their white counterparts. She was more comfortable talking to Black women commuting home on the “L” than to white.
Did I do my duty, I ask myself, as a self-described woke white woman? I guess it’s a start. It’s not enough [it’s not reparations], but it’s a start.
Unpublished, but not Unsent v6
For some of us, the 2016 election ushered in the post-compromise era. As an idealistic, former Cultural Awareness club member in high school, this was a precarious position to be in. I was taught to both respect, and have, an open mind.
Photo of notorious friends Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia
Dear Editor,
For some of us, the 2016 election ushered in the post-compromise era. As an idealistic, former Cultural Awareness club member in high school, this was a precarious position to be in. I was taught to both respect, and have, an open mind. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" and all that. My initial reaction, when criticized for not having an open mind with regards to Republican policies, is to fall back on the obvious: I am a single issue voter, as I have made clear via social media. Reproductive justice and abortion rights are what I care most about; I will vote for any Democrat who supports the pro-choice movement, no matter what else (I’m ashamed to admit) s/he has done. But this got me thinking: how many Republican voters are single issue voters too, and simply supported trump in the same vein? The reason I asked myself this was because the 2020 Democratic presidential victory has given me the energy to begin to look at compromise as once again possible. If we are all single issue voters at heart, how can we compromise if those issues are in conflict?
One thought I had was to connect over the issues we do agree on, so I did an online search for pro-choice Republican groups. DM me if you know of any! I didn’t have much luck finding one; the Republican Majority for Choice doesn’t seem very active.
My next idea was to force myself to expand beyond my single issue. If I could do it, maybe some Republican could do it, too, and we could finally connect over that issue. Holding myself accountable to my yearning “to be more than an ally, but an accomplice” with the Black Lives Matter movement, I volunteered with Chicago Cares to be trained to “coach” [I am not a fan of this word] local job-seekers at the North Lawndale Employment Network to develop and practice job-seeking skills. When asked about the meaning of implicit bias, I said it was when you didn’t see the same potential in, for example, a Black child (like Barack Obama) playing basketball as you do a white child (like Alexander Pichushki) playing chess, when neither child is known to you. That really got me thinking, but more on that later. If a radical, pro-choice militant like myself is able to broaden her activism to encompass additional (albeit social justice) issues, maybe your everyday Republican can, too? So, if you’re, say, a fiscal conservative, we won’t be able to compromise about the economic viability of that, but perhaps we can connect around a shared disgust for a former president recorded saying:
“I did try and fuck her. She was married…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there…When you’re a star, they let you do it…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Then again, perhaps not:(