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Title : When Robin Givhan violated the sacred cordon around Michelle Obama.
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When Robin Givhan violated the sacred cordon around Michelle Obama.

The other day I skimmed Robin Givhan column, "Michelle Obama wanted to gain the public’s trust. So she started with a garden,"  but I didn't post about it, because I moved on to other things, I don't want to blog every single Robin Givhan column, and I'm tired after the years and years of fawning over Michelle Obama. And I'm not a not a Michelle Obama hater — see my February 18, 2008 post, "The lovely and expressive Michelle Obama spoke in Madison, Wisconsin today." I'm just tired of all the pro-Michelle propaganda.

But now that there's a dispute about the column — discussed in the previous post — so I'm going to read it closely. The dispute is ostensibly about writing anything about the Michelle Obama/Valerie Jarrett conversation Givhan had access to, but I suspect some of the anger at Givhan has to do with the substance of the column — a failure to genuflect and adulate? — so now I want to read the whole thing carefully.

The occasion [for the Obama/Jarrett conversation] was the opening evening of Leading Women Defined, a private gathering of supremely accomplished black women organized by Debra Lee and BET aimed at networking and uplift. 

Supremely accomplished? So far, this is fawning. But the point is that Michelle Obama usually does lucrative speeches to a big audience of whoever chooses to pay to attend, and this was "a far more intimate crowd."

Topic #1: The scene at the White House on Trump's Inauguration Day. Michelle cried but didn't want to be seen looking like she'd cry, she was surprised by that Tiffany box, and when she waved from Marine One, leaving the White House, what she thought was “Bye, Felicia!” ("Bye, Felicia" has its own Wikipedia page. It means: Get out of my face!)

Topic #2: Michelle had to work at not being perceived as angry. "I had to learn how to deliver a message," basically by smiling all the time and not showing so much passion. Givhan writes: "And here the audience murmured understandingly, because they all knew what it means to be called angry when really you’re just emphatic."

Topic #3: Michelle's hurt pride. "With two Ivy League degrees and a résumé that included executive positions in hospital and city management, she was dismayed that people seemed to question whether she could handle being first lady."

Topic #4: The real meaning of the vegetable garden. “The garden was a subversive act... It was the carrot." The real carrot was a metaphorical carrot.* "You can’t go in with guns blazing until people trust you... What’s more innocent than a garden?"

Topic #5: Michelle's standing up for herself. She's writing a memoir, and it's "about refusing to place herself last, which is not just an act of self-love but is also a public, civic, political obligation."

I can see why I passed on this when I skimmed it before. It feels much like all the fluff I've seen about Michelle over the years. But I want to try to see it from the perspective of the other women — the "supremely accomplished black women" — who felt special and important gathered within the "safe"/"sacred" space within which Michelle performed intimacy.

These women — or many or some of them — must have wanted to feel that they got some material that is not available to the general public, something that related to their own status as "supremely accomplished black women."

In that light, I focus on "And here the audience murmured understandingly" — because that's where Givhan appropriated their precious intimacy, their murmur that said — just to their beloved Michelle — I know, I, like you have suffered the pain of being regarded as that angry, scolding woman when I was simply being the energetic, lovely, passionate woman that I am.

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* I've talked about metaphorical carrots before, and this is not that. (Click that link to get back to one of the all-tim biggest dustups on the Althouse blog.) Michelle is using carrot in the sense of the "carrot and stick."

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