Former first lady Michelle Obama may have appeared stoic and impervious to the steady barrage of negative remarks she endured during her White House years, but she now feels free to dispel that image as an untouchable queen.
Obama, whose husband Barack served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, said that she had trepidation about flossing her natural curls as she does now, or even flexing braids, due to the toxic racial climate at the time.
The woman considered part of American royalty told Ellen Degeneres that she believed the country wasn’t “ready” for her natural hair as they were still “getting adjusted” to experiencing their first Black family in the White House.
She pointed to how the conservative media vultures, for example, pounced on her husband for simply wearing a tan suit during a press conference.
“Let’s get health care passed [first],” Obama said. “They tripped out when Barack wore a tan suit.”
Obama then added saracstically: “The great indignity, the scandal of the Obama administration.”
The author of the phenomenal New York Times bestseller Becoming added that Black women have the added angst and pressure of how they should wear their hair in order to assimilate into the workplace
“The code of ethics at a workplace, as Black women we deal with it, the whole thing about, ‘Do you show up with your natural hair?’ ”
Noting the instances when she would joke with her employees about changing up her style, the Chicago native admitted:
“I would get my staff all worried, too. I was like, ‘I was thinking about getting braids,’ ” she giggled. “That’s the African American experience … but women in offices that are worried, ‘Should I wear skirts? Should I wear pantyhose?’ I hate pantyhose.”
Now that she is nearly six years removed from that suffocating bubble that is Washington, D.C., Obama is able to share the unnecessary burden that she carried.
“But when you’re carrying all this other stuff, this mask, these differences and you’re trying to do your job, it’s just an extra burden on overcoming,” she told DeGeneres.
