Ta-Nehisi Coates has a touching feature at The Atlantic today on Michelle Obama.  So far, I’ve read it twice. Once to dissect its form so I can use it to up my own writing game, and a second time to grasp what he’s saying. Oftentimes when I read features by black writers on the Obamas and their American identities, I get the sense that the writer is writing  for everyone who doesn’t share a similar skin pigmentation.  Those features usually come off as a way of reiterating to those that aren’t black, that no matter the Obamas black cultural identity, ultimately they are still like everyone else.  They usually remind me of a stint in a sociology class where the professor tries to explain to everyone that race doesn’t exist.  Coates sort of does that too, but he doesn’t shy away from the Obamas black identity and how it has shaped them. He simply explains how that identity is another stitch in the American fabric.

 

Even though I grew up in a two-parent household, middle-class family, and was fortunate enough to obtain a private school college education, I still sometimes think the Obamas are a different type of blackness that is a rarity in this country.Yet Coates reminds us that there have always been affluent, hard working black folk, even in Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa. Deep down, it’s something that we’ve always known but it seems like we’re constantly being conditioned to think otherwise.  I was surprised at how shocked I was by this:

The black power struggle in Chicago literally dates back to the city’s founding by the 18th-century trader Jean Baptist Point Du Sable, who, like the president-elect, was a biracial black man. The South Side has been home to the largest black insurance companies in the North, such as Supreme Liberty Life and Chicago Metropolitan Assurance. Ditto for black banks like Seaway National and Independence. Half of the first 14 black CPAs came out of Chicago. The publications that defined black Americans—the Chicago Defender, Ebony, and Jet—were also products of Chicago.

 

Black owned banks? I feel like an idiot because that seems so odd to me. I’ve noticed more check cashing places in black communities than a Wells Fargo or Citibank, not a Seaway National or Independence.

 

Blacks have made strides long before the Obamas came along, but undoubtedly the next first family will be the mecca of black leadership for years to come.  Obama’s photo has already replaced or been nailed next to Malcolm and King photos in barbershops, hair salons, and the living rooms of black families throughout the country.  I can’t drive down Crenshaw anymore without seeing five dollar Obama t-shirts.

 

They seem to be everywhere, yet sometimes I forget what their presence means to me or, when asked, I can’t exactly form a logical sentence to explain myself. However, while reading Coates, the light bulb went off because he wrote what I’ve been feeling.  

 

Women like Obama have made it easier for me to breathe in America and to be myself.  Coates describes it as  taking the third road.  He says:

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

 

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road—being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity—not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience—then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

 

I know sometimes when we hear stories about young unarmed black men being shot point blank by police it’s hard to feel like black people are apart of the American fabric.  Our sense of being the other is magnified in these instances but it’s essential that we stop seeing ourselves like that.  It’s a ridiculous way of reiterating the notion that we are less than. If anything the Obamas are helping to prove that we can balance the equation and continue to shed the mask.

Tags: Barack Obama, Black Experiences, Black Owned Business, Michelle Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Obamas