It appears First Lady Michelle Obama acknowledging racism in a commencement speech is in fact one of the most harrowing things Michelle Obama has ever done. It was so wounding to National Review editor Rich Lowry that it took to the pages of Politico to write roughly a thousand words on her "whining." The short version is that Michelle Obama is successful, isn't she, so why is she even
bringing these things up?
Yet, the first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America (her notorious comment in 2008 was that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.”). Her gloss on the famous Wallis Simpson line is apparently that you can never be too rich, too thin or too easily offended.
These seems an odd mantra for any conservative pundit to take, given that Fox News journalism would not exist without the sure conviction that every curious happening anywhere in the nation is evidence of deeper plots against conservative white American men. In a world where mop sinks are interrogated for sharia ties and strip mall florists have been elevated to positions of the highest religious importance, having Michelle Obama relate a brief few times she felt uncomfortable by race-based slights or things that she felt to be race-base slights seems like it would, if anything, serve to endear her to her ever-fragile foes.
No such luck, of course, because nothing sets off the alarm bells of a distinguished editor of the National Review quite like somebody, somewhere suggesting racism still exists. The National Review was founded on the premise that racism never did exist, it's just that the black people need to be barred from our schools and restaurants because reasons, and to this day no member of the magazine has ever had the good sense to Shut The Hell Up when it comes to telling black Americans how good they have it nowadays. And so we have this, a thousandish words in Politico explaining once again that black Americans have things great and are far too thin-skinned, because the real victims these days are the buttery white men who read Rich Lowry columns.
Even though Michelle Obama didn’t mention the word, what she was discussing was “microaggressions.” It is the trendy term on college campuses for often inadvertent offensiveness, such as Barack Obama, once upon a time, being mistaken for a waiter when he wore a tuxedo at an event.
The idiocy of the concept of the microaggression is its underlying premise that only people who belong to certain select groups ever suffer indignities or humiliations, when they are, of course, endemic to the human condition.
Head below the fold for more on Lowry's outrage.
You see, the problem is that (unnamed) people presume only minorities are subject to such minor acts of rudeness, and so only those lucky groups get the glorious privilege of complaining about it. This is yet another way in which women or minorities or non-Christians or your other not-Rich-Lowrys continue to lord their charmed lives over white Americans. If Rich Lowry were mistaken for a waiter at a fancy political event, nobody would think anything of it. (Any such onlooker would no doubt presume that Rich Lowry had finally whittled away the last shreds of his supposed credibility, been fired from his editorial position, and was indeed now a waiter. If anything it's a miracle that people continue to mistake him for an editor now.)
How foolish does Michele Obama sound, complaining about such things? Very, very foolish. She does not even understand that getting mistaken for the help or having news anchors furrow their brows over her terrorist fist bumps or having her husband constantly being accused of aiding the enemy because, c'mon, black—these things show just how well off black Americans are, these days!
The microaggression, properly understood, is a sign of progress. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow to innocent misunderstandings and occasional rudeness is a vast leap forward.
That would be the editorial head of the famously pro-segregationist
National Review, with the message: Sure some people say racist things, but at least it's not slavery, amiright? I think those little-bit-racists deserve a goddamn cake. The next time you're at a fancy event and someone mistakes you for the help, successful black Americans, you take a moment and you hug them. You hug them, and say
thank you for not enslaving me.
Michelle Obama doesn’t seem to fully realize that the narrative arc of being the wife of a political candidate celebrated by nearly every organ of elite culture on his way to a landslide victory in a presidential election, to becoming a “fully-formed first lady,” isn’t exactly that of the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
This, I think, fully encapsulates the National Review editorial position on race relations in America: Black Americans are no longer slaves, so shut up. You may
think racism is around, but black people get to vote now, for God's sake—we even have a black president—so why the
hell are the rest of you still talking about this? This is why Michele Obama makes torrid headlines in the conservative press every time she so much as touches on the experience of living as a black American. This is why every single mention of race by Barack Obama is considered "controversial," and why lily white conservative men make disappointed faces on TV and declare President Barack Obama to be
the most divisive president ever.
The conservative pundits from the not-racist magazines will mostly agree that some small amount of racism still exists, in certain pockets and in certain trivial forms. Whatever trials black Americans may still face, however, pale in comparison to the trauma inflicted upon white conservative pundits by black Americans bringing that up.