Former first lady Michelle Obama felt under siege for much of her eight years in the White House. She had very few political allies to learn on and had scores of enemies from both sides of the political aisle trying to snuff out the light emitting from her soul.
Obama was very candid and transparent in her interview with Gayle King Saturday night at the 2019 Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, where she broached multiple topics, including being forced to sit through “the other presidential inauguration”; her daughters Malia and Sasha sobbing because they had to leave their childhood home, the White House; being helpless as her husband was being relentlessly “raked over the coals”; withering under the pressure of trying “to be perfect,” and many other topics.
She admits she was injured by the torrent of unwarranted, vicious ridicule she was subjected to during her husband’s first presidential campaign in 2008, particularly the noxious label as the “angry Black woman.”
“For a minute there, I was an angry Black woman who was emasculating her husband. As I got more popular, that’s when people of all sides — Democrats and Republicans — tried to take me out by the knees and the best way to do it was to focus on the one thing people were afraid of: the strength of a Black woman,” she said.
Obama discussed with King how debilitating it was to have her soul constantly “X-rayed.” She was also assailed during her husband’s presidency repeatedly for her physical attributes and for allegedly upstaging her husband at important functions. One example was, as TMZ pointed out, the night she flossed a sleeveless Narciso Rodriguez dress during the former president’s 2009 State of the Union address.
Check out the snippet here as well as the complete interview, both by CBS News.
The complete interview, also via CBS News, can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K3vyAsKZyw
