Sophia Nelson | July 21, 2008

Can Michelle Obama defy long-standing negative stereotypes?

THERE she is — no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek. It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of The New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me, the mischaracterisation of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves. Welcome to our world.

We've watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African-American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and being forced to undergo a politically mandated "makeover" to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.

Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it's on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African-American women. We endure this type of labelling all the time. So many of us are hoping that Michelle — as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother — can change that.

"Ain't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren't accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African-American woman's dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life?

Black women have been mischaracterised and stereotyped since the days of slavery and minstrel shows. In more recent times, they've been portrayed onscreen and in popular culture as either sexually available bed wenches in such shows as the 2000 docudrama Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, ignorant and foolish servants such as Prissy from Gone with the Wind, or ever-smiling housekeepers, workhorses who never complain and never tire, like the popular figure of Aunt Jemima.

Even in the 21st century, black women are still portrayed as loud, aggressive, violent and often grossly obese and unattractive. Think of the movies Norbit or Big Momma's House, or of the only two black female characters in Enchanted, an overweight, aggressive traffic cop and an angry divorcee amid all the white princesses.

On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a smart, accomplished black professional woman portrayed on mainstream television or in the movies? If Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show comes to mind, remember that she left the scene 16 years ago. The reality is that in just a generation, many black women — who were mostly domestics, school teachers or nurses in the post-slavery era — have become astronauts, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhDs. You name it, and black women have achieved it. The most popular woman on daytime television is Oprah Winfrey. Condoleezza Rice is Secretary of State.

And yet my generation of African-American women hasn't managed to become successfully integrated into American popular culture. We're still looking for respect in the workplace, where, more than anything else, black women feel invisible.

A 2007 American Bar Association report titled Visible Invisibility describes how black women in the legal profession face the "double burden" of being both black and female — they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.

Invisibility isn't the only problem. I run an organisation dedicated to supporting African-American professional women. At a recent workshop, I asked the participants to list some words that would describe how they believe they're viewed in the workplace and the culture at large. These are the kinds of words that came back: "loud", "angry", "intimidating", "mean", "opinionated", "aggressive", "hard". All painful words. Yet asked to describe themselves, the same women offered gentler terms: "strong", "loving", "dependable", "compassionate".

Where does the disconnect come from? Possibly from the way black women have been forced into roles of strength for decades. For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a price in our private and emotional lives. The more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.

Consider these statistics: as of 2007, according to The New York Times, 70% of professional black women were unmarried; black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at 40; black women earn 67% of all bachelors' degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71% of all masters' degrees and 65% of all doctoral degrees.

With all the challenges facing professional black women today, we hope that Michelle Obama will defy the negative stereotypes about us. And that, now that a strong professional black woman is centre stage, she'll bring to light what we already know: that an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfil her own dreams.

Recently, a friend who's a married professional mother of three girls wrote to me: "For a black man and woman in the US to be happily married, with children, and working as partners to build a life — let alone a life of service to others — all while rearing their children together is downright revolutionary."

It's how so many black professional women feel. Our hope is that if Michelle Obama becomes first lady, the revolution will come to us at last.

WASHINGTON POST

Sophia Nelson is president of iask, Inc, an organisation for African-American professional women.

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