Former president Barack Obama had a fallback argument for whenever someone — anyone —took issue with one of his policies: They must be racist.
He deployed the canard often, and usually subtly, playing the race card while not playing the race card. Like this time in December 2016, when he said: “I think there is a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in northern states are very different from whites in southern states.”
Huh. He said it, but he didn’t really say it. “Attitudes” are “different.”
No one could criticize Obama without being called a racist. One could not oppose his policies for being counter to conservative principles — or, frankly, un-American — no, it was always racism.
So it should come as no surprise that his wife would fall back on the same argument, claiming that any critic must simply be racist.
Michelle Obama, making her largest public appearance since her husband left office, spoke before some 8,500 people at the Women’s Foundation of Colorado’s 30th anniversary celebration in Denver.
The foundation president, Lauren Casteel, said Michelle Obama had broken the glass ceiling as the first black first lady, but asked about the fallout of doing so, the Denver Post reported:
“The shards that cut me the deepest were the ones that intended to cut,” she said, referencing being called an ape and people talking about her bottom. “Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country, there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin color.”
She said she can’t pretend like it doesn’t hurt because that lets those who do the hurting off the hook.
“Women, we endure those cuts in so many ways that we don’t even notice we’re cut,” she said. “We are living with small tiny cuts, and we are bleeding every single day. And we’re still getting up.”
Of course, Michelle Obama benefited often from her race. “Michelle Obama is part of the affirmative action generation of above-average but far-from-stellar performers who were granted preferential admission to America’s most elite institutions,” Dinesh D’Souza wrote in 2008.
Michelle notes that she graduated with honors in her major. Again, the problem is that her undergraduate thesis is on the web. You might expect that she wrote about Shakespeare’s sonnets or the political evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois. Well, no. Essentially Michelle Obama wrote about the problems of being a black woman at an Ivy League university.
Here is a typical passage: “By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.”