Sarah Willie-LeBreton:	Good afternoon, my name is Sarah Willie-LeBreton and I am a coordinator of the Black Studies Program here at Swarthmore. We have a wonderful lecture series this year in which we are partnering with the Black Cultural Center, and for each lecture different departments and programs on campus. On this day of memorializing the lives of those lost in the attacks of September 11th, 2001, it seemed fitting to inaugurate our series with another longstanding and challenging issue that has faced us throughout our nation's history, the subject of race, and that's why this year's lecture series is titled Race Reconsidered, and why it is especially appropriate to invite someone who has made the investigation of this subject and others in an intersectional approach his young life's work. 
	Our guest today is Dr. Michael Jeffries. Dr. Jeffries is the [inaudible 00:01:01] Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. He is a qualitative sociologist with emphasis on race, gender, politics, identity, and popular culture. A Swarthmore alum, Michael Jeffries graduated in 2002 and then went on to earn his Masters and Doctorate at Harvard University in the Department of African American Studies. His first book was Thug Life: Race, Gender, and The Meaning of Hip-Hop, for which he came back to Swarthmore to discuss with us. His second, which he will talk about with us here today is titled Paint the White House Black and on sale at the Swarthmore College bookstore and it's also in McCabe Library. He tells me he is at work on a third about comedians and their work lives.
	At Wellesley he teaches Introduction to American Studies as well as courses on race and politics and the Sociology of Sports. He also teaches advanced seminars for third and fourth year students on Barack Obama and Hip Hop Studies. His nonacademic writing has been published by the Atlantic and the Guardian, and you can follow him on twitter at m_p_jeffries.
	I want to thank the Department of Sociology. While you're welcome. Oh, thank you very much. And the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Foy for making Dr. Jeffries' visit possible. It is a personal delight to welcome Michael back to campus since it feels like just yesterday he was sitting in my classroom as an 18-year-old. He was, of course, an 18-year-old from whom I learned a great deal and that is one of the extraordinary experiences of getting to be a teacher at Swarthmore College. Of course, it was not just yesterday and he has matured into a wonderful scholar and colleague of whom we are all very, very proud. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Jeffries.
Dr. Michael Jeffries:	Thank you so much. Thank you for that generous introduction. I want to thank Professor Willie-LeBreton and Professor Foy, as well as the Mellon Mays folks, Department of Sociology, Black Cultural Center, Black Studies, and everyone else who helped bring me back. It's really good to be back. I have a lot of fond memories here. A special word of thanks to Professor Willie-LeBreton who's one of my greatest champions and one of my greatest friends and an irreplaceable mentor for me, has been for a long time. 
	I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the book then vere off course and return to the book. "This reconfiguration of repression in which depth becomes surface so as to remain depth, I call the public secret," Michael Taussig writes. "In another version, this is defined as that which is generally known, but which cannot be articulated. This 'long knownness' is itself an intrinsic component of knowing what not to know, such that many times, even in our striving to acknowledge it, we fall into even better-laid traps of our own making. Knowing it is essential to its power, equal to the denial. Not being able to say anything is likewise testimony to its power." Taussig's writing about race as a public secret or public secrets more generally and I think there are three really important ways that we can think of public secrecy when we talk about race. And here I'm planning on one small piece of the exert that I just read where he says that public secrets cannot be articulated because I think the idea that something cannot be articulated can manifest in these three ways.
	First, there are times when we can't say anything or don't say anything because there's some sort of fear of penalty or repercussion. These are times when we're faced with either microaggressions or truly heinous acts of racism, but we are scared to speak up because we will be penalized or viewed as crazy or angry or whatever it might be. For many of us this happens on a daily basis, as someone who rides the commuter train out to the Boston suburbs, I'm often the only person of color on the train. The only empty seat on the car is the one next to me very frequently despite the fact that I'm one of the stereotypically least imposing black folks you could ever imagine, right? I weigh a $1.25 soaking wet, light skinned, articulate, what could possibly be threatening about me? Right? But I don't, when I'm sitting on the train, scream about racism because it's a public secret that we all know and I'll be penalized for talking about it.
	The second way to think about race as something that cannot be articulated is in terms of the way that it gets sort of trotted out during implicit appeals, especially in political context, sometimes this is called the dog whistle. Right? One of these high-pitched things that's about race, but not really about race. Race is injected into these contests undercover and there are a couple of examples that I just want to trot out. There's our friend Newt. So, here's Newt Gingrich during the Republican Primaries in the 2012 election. Tali Mendelberg has a fantastic book about this and she explains that it's no longer okay to simply call people of color shiftless or lazy directly. To use racial epithets during political campaigns, so these kinds of ideas are injected more subtlety.
Newt Gingrich:	If somebody can't find a job and they show up and they say, you know I need help. The help we ought to give them is to get them connected to a business-run training program to acquire the skills to be employable. Now the fact is, 99 weeks is an Associate Degree. I think it tells you everything. I hope my four colleagues would agree here. It tells you everything you need to know about the difference between Barack Obama and the five of us, that we actually think work is good. We actually think saying to somebody, I'll help you if you're willing to help yourself, is good. And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country. 
Dr. Jeffries:	And so we can all hear the ques in this clip right? Invoking food stamps, is the same thing as calling black folks lazy. Trying to attach that sort of stigma to the president as a means to achieve a leg up in the Republican Primary. And this sort of thing, you know, the research varies on this because there are some folks who have shown that the appeal of this sort of thing has actually decreased in the past couple of decades and then other studies that suggest that situationally it can still be quite effective, so we're not quite out of the woods yet.
	Sorry guys.
	The third piece is this kind of trouble with racial language piece and this is a piece that I think is really important because it's about not simply sliding something in there under the radar or sliding something in there that becomes a reference to a public secret that we all know about, but really being unable to speak at all. One of the good ways to think about this, I think, is to think about the ways that language is directly tied to power. As Audre Lorde explains, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." So the terms we have to speak about racial oppression, sexism, class exploitation; the ways those conversations are built are insufficient. The entire system needs to be destroyed. Toni Morrison explains the perils of living without language that falls outside the bounds of hegemony. She writes, "One is obliged to cooperate in the misuse of figurative language, the reinforcement of cliche, the erasure of difference, the jargon of justice, the evasion of logic, the denial of history, the crowning of patriarchy, the inscription of hegemony; to be complicit in the vandalizing, sentimentalizing, and trivialization of the torture black people have suffered." 
	Here's where I want to make a right turn and talk about something that's not in the book. This case was obviously important for quite a few reasons. I'm gonna offer my commentary in just a moment, but we should probably start with some of the president's commentary about it. 
Audience Member:	When Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.  Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.  And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here. I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.
	There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often.
	And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida and it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.  The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws. Everything from the death penalty, to enforcement of our drug laws and that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.
Dr. Jeffries:	Okay. So, he spends a great deal of time talking about the African American community's interpretation of both the events and the trial. I suppose it's appropriate to do that. We might think about this case and it's repercussions or it's reverberations in terms of how it was interpreted and received. We might also think about the sequence of events though is not really things that are open to interpretation and narrative, but is facts, things that actually transpired. Despite the fact that this is a relatively reserved statement from the president, it elicited a huge emotional response from those who saw it and you could see him expressing a great deal of emotion as he delivered it because race was so buried during the trial itself this summer.
	An interview after the verdict was handed down, Natalie Jackson who was one of three lawyers representing Trayvon Martin's parents said, "That the prosecution's biggest mistake, 'biggest mistake' was to ignore race." Even though George Zimmerman had a history of reporting young African American men in his neighborhood to the police, the judge banned the term racial profiling from being used at any point in the trial. One juror told CNN that race was not discussed at all during deliberations. After the verdict, Trayvon Martin's father had a different perspective saying, "I think that if Trayvon had been white, this never would have happened."
	Let's be clear about what actually did happen and what the charges were, right? Zimmerman was charged with both second-degree murder, which usually involves killing on the spur of the moment or a case when someone intends to inflict harm, but not necessarily death and death ends up occurring by accident. He was also charged with manslaughter and a killing is manslaughter when the defendant did not mean to kill, but was grossly negligent. He was acquitted of both of those charges.
	This case, I think it's important to understand does not pivot on who acted first or who hit hardest, who did the wrong thing in the moment of conflict when the conflict was initiated. The case pivots on the notion as of self-defense, and law professors at Addie Rolnick and Priscilla Ocen explain, self-defense is "The reasonable fear of imminent death or serious bodily injury." So what we have then is a court ruling that Zimmerman acted in self-defense and therefore had reason to fear Martin, which brings me to a few things that I think are really important about this, right? 
	For Zimmerman to walk, first it is necessary not only for Zimmerman to be presumed innocent, but for Martin to be presumed guilty. There is no neutrality in this case. There is not neutral ruling in this case because self-defense is defined as reasonable fear. Fear is built into the definition of the defense. If Zimmerman is acquitted then you are condemning Martin. So the 16-year-old boy who was unarmed and followed by an armed man in a car, was put on trial and found guilty, not only of being fearsome, but of his own murder. 
	Second, the idea that we can either understand either the murder or the trial without talking about race is often framed as a commitment to neutrality, but silence about race is not neutrality. Silence about race, public secrecy about race, colorblindness, post-racialism, serve the interest of those who hold racial power. How does it serve these interests? It does not serve these interests in a neutral fashion. 
	I think this is another key piece here. Its not an absence of action when silence happens. We have to learn to understand silence as a direct attack. Silence as an act of aggression. That's what it is. Silence is an active denial of history. It's an action. It's an active denial of class exploitation, rape, other acts of heinous racial violence. Is an active denial of our biases and prejudices, which are empirically documented.  Is an active denial of the fact that whites and nonwhites are not treated equally by the criminal punishment system, which is not just a system or a set of laws, but a living breathing collection of human beings with biases and beliefs just like you and me.
	Questions like, what if Zimmerman were black and Martin were white are not irrelevant to the trial, they are fundamental to everything we know about the murder. Remember, we needed nonviolent protests simply for an arrest to be made in the first place. Race influenced the response to the murder, the reporting on the murder, the conduct of the judges and lawyers in selecting the jury, the ruling itself. We would not be having any of this discussion if Martin were white and so saying that I don't know what would have happened if Martin were white is pure self-deception. You do know what would've happened if Martin were white or at the very least you know the outcome would have been different.
	Third, and I was having this discussion with one of my closest friends who happens to be a white liberal. He made the case that it's difficult to speak about these sorts of things because we don't know precisely how societal patterns influence individual behaviors. So because we can't figure out that unknown, you could understand how we might arrive at this decision, but I think it's really important to pick this apart. 
	First, I don't think it's at all difficult to figure out how societal patterns influence these individual actions. Considering Zimmerman's history, he's since been in trouble again, right? Just this week for domestic violence. This is a violent man with a history of racial profiling. That's not irrelevant to the case. That's a pattern of individual behavior embedded in a social system, which we already know is toxic for nonwhites and leads us to associate black people with all sorts of criminal stereotypes. 
	Second, even if it is in fact difficult to make the transfer, difficulty is not sufficient grounds for pretending race and racism have no impact on the event. Saying it's difficult is like saying it's difficult to talk about race so let's not talk about it at all. Saying it's difficult to figure out what happened in the Zimmerman trial is the same as saying it's difficult to have a racial conversation so let's not do it. That choice not to talk about race, again is not a neutral act. It's an active aggressive choice and it's one that's enabled by white privilege.
	Third, we might or my friend might say, it is unfair to assume something about Zimmerman, and this question of fairness to Zimmerman is one that was spoken explicitly in the trial. In fact, the defense lawyer explicitly told the jury, "Do not give anybody the benefit of the doubt except George Zimmerman." There was no similar statement uttered with reference to Trayvon Martin, so the idea that fairness is linked to giving Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt is a bit strange considering the dead body in the case. 
	Finally, I want to return to the Morrison quote that I read. This is a picture of the defense attorney Don West posted by his daughter Molly West on twitter. This is after the Rachel Jeantel testimony, does anyone recall this testimony? One of Trayvon's closest friends who was on the phone with him at the time of the attack. Jeantel was subsequently pilloried by the media for all sorts of reasons. Not being articulate enough. Perhaps being racist because she used the word cracker and the "N" word in her conversation with Trayvon. Being disrespectful and/or hostile to West during questioning when the questioning lasted four hours longer than they told had would and she was in fact being treated hostilely. I think that if someone attacks, you have the right to defend yourself. It seems that self-defense is at the center of trial for everyone other than Jeantel.
	But this is posted immediately after the Jeantel testimony and I just think it's so striking Morrison's words about language, "Living with language that falls outside the bounds of hegemony," are so perfect here. We have so many different examples in this one tweet of the sorts of things that Morrison was talking about. Don West in fact opened the trial with a knock knock joke. His daughter posts this photo after Jeantel's testimony and Morrison warned us that, "Without proper language, without proper attention to race, we will be complicit in the vandalizing, sentimentalizing, and trivialization of black torture, the torture that black people have suffered." 
	What is more insulting than this sort of celebration? What is more insulting than leading off a murder trial of this caliber with a joke? There's also the hashtag, "Dad killed it." Morrison warns us, "We'll be obliged to cooperate in the misuse of figurative language." The figurative language here being killed. Again, Martin was in fact killed, but we see that term being ripped out of its context in the material world and cast up into the virtual world via a system of racial denial and delusion that is completely extracted this family, this version of white innocence from culpability and connection with the dead body in Florida.
	This is what happens when we accept public secrecy and give into cowards in the face of the language problems of race. So what should we do instead? And Morrison warns us about the linguistic problem, but Toni Morrison doesn't stop writing, right? She doesn't make up a new sort of language to talk about race. Instead what she does is she uses the best tools she has, both in the vernacular and the English language to attack race unflinchingly. To look the beast in the eye. To talk about sex and violence and the way their linked to racial discrimination and suffering, and to expose connections and co-dependence of racism and other forms of social control. And the reason I wrote the book is really to reteach what I think are some crucial lessons about intersectionality. 
	Does anyone watch SpongeBob? This is one these memes ... I didn't make this. This is one of these internet memes, if you google intersectionality this is something that comes up so then I had to read up on SpongeBob to figure out what is so intersectional about this character. From what I can gather, the real fans in the room can help me with this. From what I can gather, much of the drama in the show revolves around SpongeBob who is a working class figure, he works at the equivalent of an underwater burger joint does he not? Right? Something like this? Trying to figure out how he can climb up to some pedestal of honorable masculinity. So there's an episode in which he becomes a workout freak and lifts weights and grows muscles, and there's an episode in which he rides some terribly scary roller coaster to prove his manhood. The more sort of critical greetings of SpongeBob suggest there are all sorts of instances of homoerotic dialogue, same gender attraction being subtly sort of injected into the show. Have I lost the SpongeBob fans?
Audience Member:	Subtly, he is not.
Dr. Jeffries:	Okay, but that's not really the foundation of intersectionality right? It's the black feminist movement and the black feminist theory, and these are the two books that I draw on. The final chapter in the book and the one I'm going to spend the most time talking about right now is a chapter about Michelle Obama. I really had to start with Patricia Hill Collins' controlling images of black womanhood and there are four of them. One is the Mammy, right? Who is submissive and obedient to her white master then loves the white family as if it is her own. She is essentially an asexual stereotype representation of black womanhood.
	The second in the black woman as the emasculating matriarch. Someone who is in control of the family. Who undermines black male authority. Who is aggressive and is a cause for black familial pathology in the white racist imagination. 
	The third controlling image is the black woman as welfare mother, which Collins explains is an updated version of the breeder woman image created during slavery. This is an image that provides ideological justification for efforts to harness black women's fertility to the needs of a changing political economy. Incidentally, this need to harness fertility is not a historical problem or a problem that resides only in history. There was just a report in 2013 about unwanted sterilizations in California prisons and a couple of years ago similar documentation was found indicating that these sorts of sterilizations have been going on in North Carolina literally for decades. So this is an ongoing issue. 
	Finally, black women, Collins explains are represented as jezebels or whores. Characters defined by their hypersexuality on predatory orientation toward men. Each of these representations centers on the racist notion that black women are sexually deviant. The best case representation is an asexual nonthreatening caretaker who worships the white family and poses no threat to civility. If she is not a mammy, she is an angry bitter woman who's disgusting sexual moors result in personal debasement, the erosion of the black family, and the corruption of the nation's state. 
	These are the sorts of stereotypes that form the kind of foundation for so much black feminist criticism in the work after Collins and Michelle Obama's book about superwomen, about the model of the superwoman, was actually published I believe before the first Collins book actually. I'm going to update that, that image in just a moment, but I want to start with some of the classic representations of black womanhood as they pertain to Michelle Obama. 
	She's been repeatedly subject to mutations of the art type that I've just explained right? Some of these offenses have actually flown under the radar. Fox news ran a caption reading, "Outrage liberals stop picking on Obama's baby mama," during a segment about conservative attacks on Michelle Obama during the '08 presidential campaign. That barely made news. In another incident, Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner suggested that Mrs. Obama's campaign against obesity could not be taken seriously because she had a, "Big but," invoking a classic stereotype of black women's bodily and sexual abnormality. 
	Roughly one month after the Sensenbrenner gaff, Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal was embarrassed by the revelation of an email in which he referred to the first lady as Mrs. Yomama. So we see these kind of stereotypes of hypersexual deviant black ghetto pathology being applied to the first lady in all sorts of context, but the dominant stereotype is of course that of the angry and emasculating black woman, which she as explicitly critiqued. The circulation of this stereotype is complimented by public fascination with any and all conflict between Michelle and Barack, especially those instances reported by Jodi Kantor in her 2012 book, The Obamas. In an interview with CBS, Gayle King asked Michelle to respond specifically to the reports of tension between the first lady and president's staff and she insisted that they were false.
	In accounting for the fact that the relationships described in the book with being shocking or controversial, Michelle explained, "I guess it's more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here. I'm a strong woman, but that's been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced, that I'm some angry black woman." And indeed this was a very early image. During the '08 campaign at an event in Wisconsin, Michelle made the statement that during the campaign was the first time that she had been proud of her country and she back tracked from that a couple of days later saying that she was proud of the enthusiasm around the election. She was proud of the way that people organized, but Cindy McCain and the opposition jumped all over this comment and cast her as unpatriotic. 
	She is not only unpatriotic of course, but bitter, threatening, and angry, and here we can see just how the threat manifest itself in this New Yorker cover. This cover is intended to be a caricature, is intended as a joke, it is intended to poke fun at the sorts of stereotypes and racist insults that were cast at Obama during the 2008 campaign. Now, I'm presenting the image because I think it's such a perfect illustration of the importance of bringing an intersectional lens to racism and racial oppression and racial meaning. How is it that the blackness embodied in this photo acquires its meaning? What is or what are the stereotypes of blackness that are being acted upon? How are they activated? They are of course activated through gender. Michelle is presented in a highly masculinized getup. Right? Such that again, her sexuality is one that is far too threatening for a setting of this nature. 
	Racial meaning is generated through a combination with, an intersection with, religion as the president is dressed in a traditionally muslim outfit or I should say a Middle Eastern outfit that is often conflated with Islam. Racism is dependent on the discourse of nation. You see the American flag burning in the fireplace and the picture of the great threat Osama Bin Laden on the wall. So it is not enough to just say this is racist. It is not enough to say the threat here is blackness. If you want to understand, deconstruct, and ultimately combat this form of racism, you need to deal with all of the intersecting streams that are informing what this picture actually means and how this stereotype is circulating. If you address blackness on its own, if you address hegemonic masculinity on its own, if you address religious bigotry on its own, you will not understand what's going on in the depiction nor will you undo its damage. 
	The National Review cover adds a class dimension to this story that is absolutely vital for understanding Michelle Obama's public image. In a three week period between April 21st and May 7th in '08, the Review ran an assortment of articles elaborating on the criticism born from Michelle Obama's thesis at Princeton and the proud of America comment. Michelle's thesis at Princeton focused on, I believe Princeton alums, black alums who talked about their experiences at the college and the ways in which they felt it might have been improved by some sort of anti-racist practice or attention to racism on campus, racism and interactions between professors and students, and so on and so forth. 
	The author of one of these articles named Mark Stein, brings a critical eye to the thesis and makes a very particular argument about Michelle Obama's discontent. He says, "First, the thesis is dopey, illiterate, and bizarrely punctuated, but so are the maunderings of many American students." None of you here I'm sure. I'm sure all the thesis ... My thesis was an abject disaster when I was a sophomore, so.
Sarah:	No it wasn't. 
Dr. Jeffries:	Stein continues, "What makes Miss Robinson's youthful opus relevant is that the contradictions it agonizes over have dominated her life. Indeed, her apparent bitterness at a society that has given her blessings she could not have enjoyed anywhere else on earth seems explicitly to derive from her inability to live either as an integrationist who is ignorant to the plight of a black lower class or a separatist embracing its hopelessness and desperation. Instead," Stein goes on, "She rode her privileged education to wealth and success, and then felt bad about it. That's why she talks about money more than any other contender for the first lady ever has. It's like an ongoing interior monologue about whether she sold out for too cheap a price." 
	The claim here is not simply that Michelle is angry or that she has an uncontrollable temper, nor is the claim that she simply hates white people, well that's part of it, that's part of the argument. The complaint is that she has led a life of relative privilege directly facilitated by the institutions that America holds so dear, Princeton, the law firm she's been employed at, etc. Yet she still has the audacity to criticize America during and after college, so it's about the first lady's right to criticize America, to talk about racism in light of the tremendous privileges that she has enjoyed. This is a thread that frequently gets pulled on by her critics and we can hear it in the remarks of our old friend Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh:	The question is, what the hell is there to cheer for when Miss Obama and Ms. Biden show up? NASCAR people, as are most people in this country, are mature, tolerant people, who fully understand when they’re being insulted and condescended to. The first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it’s a little bit of uppity-ism.
Recording:	For this story and more.
Dr. Jeffries:	Okay. A couple of things here. First, we hear the same sort of implicit appeals that we heard Gingrich make when Limbaugh's talking about taking the 747 with the family and hangers-on, right? This is an indication of the classic black welfare mother stereotype, so he starts there. That grounds been well covered, but he moves onto casting Michelle as uppity, right? Uppity as an epithet that's rooted in the idea that black folks who demonstrate any sort of self respect are in fact acting presumptuous or people who have the audacity to go into a different part of town that doesn't necessarily serve them, are being uppity or look a white person in the eye, are being uppity, right? That sort of racist narrative is where uppity-ism comes from. 
	But it's important to understand this, not just because Limbaugh's a racist, I mean we can agree on that, you certainly don't need to write a book about that, but because it's tied to what I think is a much more insidious and relatively recent or updated version of a representation of black women. So we have Collins' classic representations, the four that I mentioned before and the other book that was up there is Michelle Wallace's, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 
	Wallace characterizes this sort of mythical strength of the black superwoman as one forged in the fire of black women's labor in arduous and undignified jobs. In other words, work has made black women strong. This is a black feminist analysis that talks about the reasons why black women do not have the same sort of privilege to engage in versions of femininity that are predicated upon, certain forms of leisure, certain forms of daintiness, and other characteristics or traits that are associated with weakness and/or sexual purity. 
	Wallace explains that the black women's labor makes her physically stronger than most women and therefore less feminine; however, the black superwoman's femininity is preserved, thanks not just to the work she does, but some sort of infinite emotional reservoir. In other words, it is not just that black women are working harder than other women, but that they're emotionally stronger than other women. She theorizes the black superwoman from her own experience, understanding its connection to long-held racist beliefs about black women as emasculating matriarchs, but the brilliance of Wallace's contribution is that she talks about this images' intuitive and seductive quality. Not only for those who which to deny or obscure black women's oppression, but even for folks like Wallace herself who want to destroy these images, but in looking at the representations that are available to them, this is the best they've got, the image of a superwoman.
	Superwoman does not simply stop and start with the idea of labor experiences on having some sort of infinite emotional reservoir. It is tied still to obsessions with black women's body and their sexuality, and we've seen this come out in all sorts of ways during Michelle Obama's public career. The I for mentioned comments about her behind, the obsession with both her arms and her wardrobe, which she has managed in all sorts of ways. Miss Obama notes that the media is responsible for her status as a symbol representing all black women while simultaneously validating the notion that black women do look to her as a reflection of themselves, so she's saying both things are going on.
	She says, "I know this superwoman stuff is in part a media creation, but in part what's going on is I know people are looking up to me as a representation of black womanhood. Other black women, in fact, are looking up to me as a representation of black womanhood." The Washington Post published such data in a survey actually. She says, "They recognize themselves in me, whether it's my shape, my dress, the way I walk." For a glamorous celebrity, Miss Obama has crafted a decidedly down to earth public image that is a weapon against the uppity black woman stereotype that she is subject to. This image is frequently reflected in her off-the-rack clothing choices and her fashion sense has heralded for being not just refined, but more sensible, proof that she is not the bourgeois elite that her education, occupation, and income would suggest. 
	Now, we might look at this and say quite critically, well Michelle is just kind of staying within the lines here. She's up against some pretty formidable forces of racism and sexism, and she's managing them in a fairly conservative way. When she first started campaigning with Barack she wore pantsuits. She dropped the pantsuits, went to the J.Crew dresses, and her approval rating went over 50% and has stayed there for her entire public career after the pantsuit mistake, "mistake," right? So we might say, well you're basically just capitulating to this form of oppression, right? You're not really doing anything to change the rules of the game, but I would trouble that a little bit. 
	I mean first, one of the things that's happening here is she's making some choice to style herself and to find her own notions of beauty, despite the fact that they have handlers and polling people, PR people who are making suggestions about what she wants to wear. She cares about how she looks. She changes her hair, the bangs, right? When was the bangs? 
Audience Member:	Right before the second inauguration.
Dr. Jeffries:	Okay, thank you.
Audience Member:	I'm paying attention.
Dr. Jeffries:	Yeah, see, right. She pays attention to this stuff, she cares about it, and [inaudible 00:47:45] writes that even though are intentions may be good when we offer rigid and unforgiving feminist critiques of sort of capitulating to this sort of logic, which cannot dismiss female longings for beauty. Michelle cares about being beautiful, that should not be a slight against her. Celebrating a woman's effort to actively construct herself as beautiful and for that matter sexual, is not capitulation to patriarchy and sexism by definition, yet is often read as such. When beauty and sexuality are rooted in objectification and infantilization, and physical appearance chokes at women's intellectual expression, that's when we have a problem, but it is not the pursuit of beauty or sexual attraction in and of itself that makes such acts and actions sexist. 
	So this is a sort of a conservative response to the kind of superwoman stuff that she's up against. Where she's kind of staying within the lines, not saying too much, right? Not giving too much credence or respect to her critics. Brushing off her shoulders so to speak, but there are a couple of other things that she does. The reason that it's important that she fight back at all against the superwoman stereotype is not only that it becomes a controlling image for her public career, but that it disguises the lived experiences of the majority of black women in this country.
	So if Michelle Obama becomes an icon that drowns out all black women's experiences and becomes a representative for all black women, we miss the continued impact of racism and sexism and intersectional oppression that impacts women of color in this country and diminishes their life chances. And the empirical reality is black women are experiencing horrible health outcomes with respect to cancer and HIV and AIDS that do not compare with white women in the slightest. The economic situation of black women in this country is still quite troubling. Poverty rates in the black community suggest that we're still looking at gender inequities that have been around for quite a long time. And in addition to the empirical stuff, right? The stuff that we can measure, there's the narrative stuff that we completely miss when we hold that Michelle Obama as the representation, the sole representation of modern black womanhood.
	Does anyone know who this woman is? Who is she?
Audience Member:	Marissa Alexander
Dr. Jeffries:	Right, Marissa Alexander. For it is notorious stand-your-ground law did not spare this woman, Marissa Alexander. This is the woman who fired a warning shot during a domestic dispute with her husband who had a violent history with her and was sent to prison. The stand-your-ground defense didn't work. 
	Another name to know besides Marissa Alexander is Rekia Boyd. Weeks after the Martin murder, detective Dante Servrin gunned down Rekia Boyd on the west side of Chicago, but she received no media attention. 
	Deanna Patrick was found dead in her bathtub two days after she called 911 for help in August 2012. Deanna had a known history of violence at the hand of her attacker, her ex-husband Delvecchio who was previously arrested for assaulting her. Deanna called 911 and told the operator that Delvecchio had tried to kill her before. The dispatcher failed to mark the calls as urgent. Subsequently, two police officers arrive at Deanna's home 50 minutes later, but left when no one answered. So this is about the erasure of black women's experiences when we elevate Michelle Obama's super womanhood to a place that it cannot and should not be.
	This also dovetails very nicely with the Martin case where we think of racism and we think of black oppression, and we think of black uplift in decidedly male and masculinized terms. Where Martin becomes the symbol of modern black American suffering despite the fact that there are dozens of cases like that of Marissa Alexander where injustice is taking root and nobody does anything about it. Not only was the Martin case itself masculinized, but the response to the Martin case was a highly masculinized show, right? Not only because the leaders of this response, figures like Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous, exerted their sort of hegemonic masculinity in every sort of way that they could, all be it for a worthy cause I would argue in this case, but even in the more grass roots efforts the Million Hoodie Campaign for an example, is an enactment of a highly masculinized pose as a form of resistance. As a form of mourning black death. 
	No such symbol of resistance in mourning exist for these cases. It's not part of the black revolutionary imagination. They're not treated the same. So the superwoman is quite dangerous even though we want to celebrate Michelle. It's dangerous because the economic stats are really troubling, the health outcomes are troubling, incarcerations, education, all those empirical pieces are troubling and it's dangerous because the narrative effects it has are quite troubling. 
	So what is Michelle doing about this besides staying within the lines and pursuing beauty in the face of all of her critics? I think one of the most important things that she does is display her love and affection for her family. Michelle and Barack's use of their bodies in public displays of love and affection is revolutionary for at least three reasons I would argue.
	First, as historian Stephanie Coontz who's a wonderful historian, for those of you who don't know her she has a great book about marriage called The Way We Never Were. Cootz' writes, "We've seen love in the White House before, but in many cases it was the adoring wife, along the lines of Nancy Regan. What the Obama's have is a jocular playful love, a mutual respect, and on Michelle's part a lack of awe and adoration." Imagine that, right? Even without an intersectional lens this poses a clear challenge to the idea of the first lady itself.
	Second, the Obama's carry out acts of intimacy that are leagues away from the vulgar sexualization of love and romance that permeate so much of American popular culture. In particular, representations of black people engaging in sexual acts in American popular culture. These pictures of Michelle and Barack dancing, touching each other, brushing crumbs away from their cheeks and mouths, looking at each other amorously, holding hands, etc. are fundamentally cooperative and subjective phenomena rather than explosions triggered by the visual stimuli of objectified bodies or body parts. 
	And finally, and this point is absolutely crucial, Barack and Michelle Obama are black sexual beings with voices rather than icons or symbols silenced by the [inaudible 00:56:14] language of race. Obama has written sensibly about his love for Michelle in The Audacity of Hope, which is a terrible book, but he wrote about Michelle in it so it's a good resource for that. Demonstrating awareness that the meaning of their love resonates beyond their two-person partnership and Michelle reinforces this truth. Don't you Michelle? 
Michelle Obama:	And what I found, which is interesting, is that our girls like it. You know, my oldest daughter now that she's 10 is she's very precocious and now can really articulate how she feels about this stuff and she says, "You know, it makes me feel good to see you and dad hold hands." You know, and we forget about that. Well we think, you know, that they don't care about that, but they like the fact that we take time ... That they know that we love each other.
Interviewer :	Because they see intimacy.
Michelle Obama:	That gives them security, so sometimes you lose sight of that when you think, well as long as we're taking care of the kids, the kids are okay. Well the kids want you to have a life together. They want to know that my mother and father love each other, and if they love each other that much they're gonna love me. So that was ... She just made that statement over the last months and we kind of looked at each other like, wow. So for all the parents out there, have your date nights because it's important to kids to know that their parents are connecting.
Dr. Jeffries:	This isn't some sort of canned statement about family values, which her husband has engaged in repeatedly I might add, right? But that's not what this is. This is a connection between the bodily language of love and sexual intimacy and the stability of the family unit. She re-frames the affection between herself and Barack as public statements. Public statements received and interpreted by onlookers including her children. It's important to maintain intersectional discipline. This is a love that's being celebrated. It's not simply black love that's being celebrated, it's black love glamorized and heightened and legitimized because the couple is straight, married, wealthy, and in this case mono-racial, assuming Barack is considered solely black, but even as Michelle benefits from those elements of her social identity that bestow her with privilege, her bodily enactments, self-awareness, and public statements about intimacy shatter stereotypes and expand the range of publicly available representations of black womanhood. 
	So I want to close with three points about intersectionality and Michelle's public image, and the reasons that this superwoman image is important to think about and deconstruct.
	First, the superwoman image is not Michelle's own doing, it remains tied to racist controlling representations of black womanhood and policing of black bodies and sexuality. The original explanation given by Wallace is rooted in class and labor exploitation of black women. It is then updated and glamorized by corporate machinery that seeks to profit of the iconography of people like Michelle Obama while ignoring the experiences of working class women of color, and just women more broadly I might add. So she is not in control of the superwoman image tied to the old stereotype.
	Second, even though it seems like a pretty good controlling image to have considering the other ones, right? Jezebel, mammy, welfare mother. It disguises black women suffering, including the first lady's. The key here is that Michelle is still subject to oppression, racism, and sexism even though she has privileges and derives them from her current position in the White House. This is one of the greatest contributions of intersectional thinking that we have. The fact that you may enjoy some privileges and you're able to leverage them into certain forms of social and/or political power, does not mean that you lose a claim to suffering or social and political criticism. That's what the angry black woman stereotype that's being applied to Michelle is driven by. This idea that she has no right to complain because she's wearing the Jackie O dresses and golfing in Hawaii. Once you do that, you don't have anything else to say. That's what the conservative critique is, but intersectionality teaches us that's not true. Racism and sexism are fluidly take different forms at different times and we may suffer and profit from hegemonic masculinity, sexism, national bigotry, nation-based bigotry, racism, etc. 
	And finally, I think there are a couple of really powerful weapons we have at our disposal to counteract some of these issues. The first is the one demonstrated and explained by Michelle here, right? These sort of performative acts of love, visible acts of love in the face of heinous violence. Not only the performative acts themselves, but testimony that explains why the acts matter for those of us who might not get it. She doesn't just say we hold hands and they think it's cute, right? She explains why the children think it's important. It's a combination of explanation and performative act.
	And the final one I think is a piece that Michelle perhaps doesn't do enough of, maybe she will as her career matures, and that is recognizing racism as anger and threat, and meeting with the appropriate anger and threat that it deserves. Audre Lorde has a great piece about the uses of anger. She talks about her experiences in a women's conference where she's being sort of looked at with crooked eyes by a bunch of white feminist who can't quite figure out why she's upset. And she says, "I'm upset and I'm attacking you because I'm being attacked. This is the response. My anger's the response that racism demands." So we need both. We need the love response, "What else but love," right? Faulkner, that was in a class with Phil Weinstein, English Department here. It was the title of his book. "What else but love," we need the love response, but we also need the righteous discontent. Maybe that's what's waiting around the corner of the next phase of Michelle's career or maybe she'll just go on to be the next Oprah.
	That's all I have, thanks so much.