Black Power in the White House

A President Barack Obama is evidence of a turning point in America. But the far greater sea change would be a First Lady Michelle Obama.

When the United States came into existence, kings and emperors were the universal norm as heads of state, not presidents. And thus, in the first months of the republic, there were serious debates as to whether the president should be addressed as “your majesty” in order to signify a symbolic equality of the positions. Not only eccentrics and those nostalgic for the monarchy favored such a title; John Adams, second president and one of the founding fathers, also favored use of the form.

Anyone who wishes to understand the United States and its political system will find it instructive to cast a glance at these developmental years. The USA is a young country because European settlers or their descendants waged wars of conquest against the native peoples. The United States is the world’s oldest large republic – one of the few countries whose governmental institutions may be traced back through 200 years of history.

A great deal of what influences the political system in the USA today finds its political contextual roots in the late 18th century. The quasi-monarchial respect accorded the president and his family, despite the relinquishment of the royal forms of address, belongs to this period. There is hardly another republic in which the wife of the leader is accorded so much courtesy, position and deference as in the United States.

First Lady of Society

This tradition has very tangible consequences. It is one of the reasons why hardened political opponents and critical journalists treat the president with deliberate respect and maintain civil social discourse with him, even if he twists the law and the language to legitimize the torture of prisoners. It is also one of the reasons that potential First Ladies are subjected to scrutiny even before the election. Just as in a monarchy, the wife of the head of state is the uncontested and publicly visible First Lady of society. Her tastes, her choice of curtains, her wardrobe, all are legitimate subjects for publication in eminent newspapers.

All this makes clear what an enormous impact Michelle Obama would have if she enters the White House. In some ways, it would be a more revolutionary event than even her husband’s assumption of office. Americans are already used to having a black general in charge of their armed forces, and it’s because of the current president that Americans have a black woman as Secretary of State. But to serve in an important office is one thing. It is something else entirely for a member of a long-oppressed minority to take over a position that embodies social prominence so clearly as no other precisely because it’s not an office in the true sense of the word. President is a job that one does and then only later a position with which one is endued. First Ladies are not created, First Ladies just are. Whoever fails to understand that difference will fail as Hillary Clinton did when she tried to reform the health care system during her first year in the White House.

Michelle Obama is a different sort of black woman than Condoleezza Rice. She is one who painstakingly conceals the wounds of her skin color and the view of the United States that emerged from her experience. She conceals it behind a mask of proper behavior in her tactful contact with a complacent white majority. One senses that she never forgets that the prominence and success of a few social high-flyers – TV genius Oprah Winfrey, Secretary of State Rice and her predecessor Colin Powell – easily distorts the reality in which American blacks live as well as the history they have inherited.

The self-congratulatory celebration of America as the fatherland of freedom ignores the fact that Russia freed its kulaks from serfdom earlier than America did its slaves, that black emancipation had to be fought for in a bloody civil war, and that Michelle Obama, Rice and Powell were all born in an America that condoned and even organized the most severe discrimination. And today? Yes, there have been many successes. But nearly four of 100 blacks in America are HIV-positive and one out of eight between the ages of 20 and 30 sits behind bars.

A significant portion of the white majority considered it an offense against the first American commandment, unconditional patriotism, when Michelle Obama a few months ago said that she was proud of her country for the first time. The future First Lady has had to spend a great deal of time since then explaining that she had been misunderstood and her husband Barack now cultivates those members of the flag cult as if entry into the White House depends on it – and quite rightly so.

But the black minority knew what Michelle Obama meant. Conservatives sneer that blacks are just embittered – a mortal sin against the second American commandment, unconditional optimism. From the European point of view, the supposed bitterness looks more like a refreshingly clear perception of the realities in that country.

Michelle Obama would make an entry into the White House unlike anyone else could, directing the country’s attention toward the darker side of American society and history. Nothing better could happen for the United States or for us Europeans. The world would be thankful and the credibility of the United States strengthened if a First Lady Michelle Obama, regardless of re-election chances or the white majority, doesn’t forget the fact that America still owes something to its black minority.