This reticence, although admirable in some ways, distresses many blacks who want the Obamas to be more open and forceful. They believe the Obamas helped to create the early pipe dream that the United States finally will enter a post-racial era. The reality, of course, is that race never went anywhere.
If the first lady is an angry black woman, she has every right to be. Conservative white and black Americans are hypocrites if they say otherwise.
They need to remember that Michelle Obama was born on Chicago’s South Side in 1964, the year the Rev. Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize. King won the prize as a fighter for civil and human rights, not in the Soviet Union, not in China or Iran, but in the United States — the land of the free, the world’s model of democracy and justice. During that same year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in public accommodations. The first lady grew up knowing this history, coming of age in a world that had not fully shed the racial injustice and brutality King had battled.