Michelle Obama, the wife of former President Obama, said it is her “life’s work” to help to remove the “scabs of discrimination.”
It is a noble cause and one that everyone should support, but her way of doing it is to continue to blame white people.
“As people doubted us coming through — ‘Are you Princeton material? Can you really make the grade?’ Can you cut it?’” she said.
“What do you do in those instances? All you can do is put your head down and do the work and let the work, your truth, speak for itself,” she said.
“I can’t make people not afraid of black people. I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t explain what’s happening in your head,” the former first lady said.
It is presumptuous to assume that every white person is afraid of black people, but she takes it further by saying white people run from black people.
“But maybe if I show up every day as a human, a good human, doing wonderful things, loving my family, loving our kids, taking care of things that I care about.
“Maybe, just maybe that work will pick away at the scabs of our discrimination. Maybe that will slowly unravel it.
“That’s all we have,” she said. “Because we can’t do it for them, because they’re broken. Their brokenness in how they see us is a reflection of this brokenness. And you can’t fix that. All you can do is the work.”
“Being the first black first family gave America and the world [the chance] to see the truth of who we are as black people, as others.
“That we are just as, and often times better than, many of the people who doubt us,” she said at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago.
“As families like ours — upstanding families like ours who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better — as we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented,” she said.
“I want to remind white folks that y’all were running from us … This family, with all the values that you read about, you were running from us.
“And you’re still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in,” she said, omitting the world “illegal.”
“The families that are coming from other places to try to do better. But, because we can so easily wash over who we really were — because of the color of our skin, because of the texture of our hair — that’s what divides countries, artificial things,” she said.