African-American women are a major force in the Obama administration. But will their success help other, less visible black women break down doors?
Watching the Democratic National Convention on my couch last year, I felt like such a geek, getting all choked up and teary as Michelle Obama spoke. As stereotype busting goes, this was a classic moment. It wasn’t so much what she said —although her words were wonderful—as what she symbolized: black excellence, black female excellence. As I would later find out, I wasn’t the only one crying. Michelle was representing all of us brown-skinned, dual-degreed, corporately employed integration babies. Watching Michelle, I felt that at last the world could see that we’re not neck-rolling, finger-snapping sistas with an ax to grind. That she isn’t—and we aren’t—as one political pundit put it, “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress.”
But then it turned out that Michelle was just the beginning. The newly minted president proceeded to pick one African-American after another for high-power positions, from White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to Susan Rice (United States ambassador to the United Nations) to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, to surgeon general nominee Regina Benjamin, MD (whose appointment was, at press time, still awaiting Senate confirmation).
For many of us, this apparent tsunami of highly visible black women has been great news but no great surprise. Seeing these women—standing with the president, holding forth on the Sunday morning talk shows or looking glamorous at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (the first at which a black woman, comic and former National Security Agency employee Wanda Sykes, emceed)—I thought, well, of course. After all, they look a lot like my friends and me.
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