Michelle: A Biography by Liza Mundy
Simon & Schuster, £16.99
MANY commentators, myself included, have pointed out that Michelle Obama’s husband Barack is not really black at all. But he sees himself as black which, in America, amounts to the same thing. I suspect many racists who did not vote Obama, for no other reason than his “blackness”, were more afraid of Michelle and his African-American daughters entering the White House.
Upper income black nationalist or committed integrationist? Resentful ingrate or the embodiment of the American dream? Washington Post staffer Liza Mundy’s first biography of the next first lady does little to dispel the reader’s prejudices, offering instead an analysis of Michelle LaVaughn Obama that I suspect has spent longer in incubation (and probably would have stayed there had her husband not won a landslide victory earlier this month) than in actual execution.
Of far more interest than her rapid rise from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton and Harvard law school to corporate America, before swapping the fat pay checks for a life in public service where she has undoubtedly achieved much good, is the all too brief history of Chicago’s town hall politics under Mayor Richard M Daley which effectively kept that city, and one of America’s largest contiguous black populations, segregated.
Blacks were given the worst jobs and housed in the worst accommodation. Black men with decent jobs, and these included Michelle’s father Fraser Robinson III, who worked as a city labourer and a precinct captain for the Democratic Party, where his job was to ensure his neighbours “voted well”, were made complicit in the segregation and mistreatment of the rest in Mayor Daley’s Chicago.
Whether Michelle was aware of this as she hiked, trained and bused her way to the progressive high school her parents chose for her every day is unclear. But having been presented with the opportunity to improve her lot Michelle was not going to waste it.
She arrived at Princeton at a time when the debate about affirmative action made life difficult for many black students. She kept her head down, seems to have kept her opinions to herself and succeeded, albeit uncertainly.
“It is conceivable”, she wrote in her final year, “that my four years of exposure to a predominantly white Ivy League university has instilled within me certain conservative values. I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my white classmates. Acceptance to a prestigious graduate school or a high paying position in a successful corporation. My goals after leaving Princeton are not as clear as before.” Thankfully – for Michelle, at least – they seem to have become much clearer after she met her husband.
In one of the most ironic sentences I have read for some time she says she does not look forward to her future: “The path I have chosen to follow 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.” If this book proves anything, I suppose it is that you never can tell…
Michelle Obama may yet prove to be as divisive a figure as Eleanor Roosevelt, as powerful as Hillary Clinton or as forgettable as whoever it was that married Jimmy Carter. Only time – and a much better book than this – will provide the answer.
Cary Gee
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