From Clutch Magazine: Last night’s speech delivered by First Lady Michelle Obama was a true testament to the tenacity and perseverance of black women.
After being dissected by the media and critics for the last four years: as being an angry black woman, a militant black woman, and most recently reduced to a modern day slave.
The minute Michelle Obama sashayed onto the stage last night. I automatically thought of the opening stanza to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Michelle Obama did what black women do best. She rose to the occasion.
Even if your TV was on mute during Michelle Obama’s speech, her aura spoke volumes.
Confident, graceful, genuine, and the ultimate defining symbol of a black woman’s aura.
An aura that has historically been mistaken (or manipulated) to be sultry, seductive, promiscuous, aggressive, head-twirling, finger-snapping, loud-mouthed, less-of-a-woman.
Luckily these are nothing more than stereotypes. Yet the negative generalizations that surround black women seem to create a feeding frenzy for modern day reality TV and opens the wound of black women’s beauty being perceived as secondary or non-existent.
You know the same wound that prevents you from the mere thought of showing your natural hair (because it’s “nappy”), the same wound that caused little dark-skin girls (and grown women) to secretly wish they were a tone or two lighter, the same wound that identifies Beyonce as the black standard of beauty.
That wound. That ugly little wound, that can now seek refuge in the era of Michelle Obama.
Read the rest of this story on Clutch Magazine.