The Obamas: How We Deal with Our Own Racist ExperiencesPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Interviews, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2014-12-18 01:00Z by Steven |
The Obamas: How We Deal with Our Own Racist Experiences
People Magazine
2014-12-17
Barack and Michelle Obama (Gillian Laub)
The Obamas open up about raising their daughters, the impact of stereotypes, and what’s on the POTUS dance party playlist.
The protective bubble that comes with the presidency – the armored limo, the Secret Service detail, the White House – shields Barack and Michelle Obama from a lot of unpleasantness. But their encounters with racial prejudice aren’t as far in the past as one might expect. And they obviously still sting.
“I think people forget that we’ve lived in the White House for six years,” the first lady told People, laughing wryly, along with her husband, at the assumption that the first family has been largely insulated from coming face-to-face with racism.
“Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs,” Mrs. Obama said in the Dec. 10 interview appearing in the new issue of People.
In a 30-minute conversation, the president and Mrs. Obama candidly added their stories to the national discussion of race and racial profiling that was sparked by the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.
“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys,” said the president, adding that, yes, it had happened to him…
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