Michelle Obama, multimillionaire, former first lady and sought-after speaker, says white people treat her and other black people as if they don’t exist.
“When I’ve been completely incognito during the eight years in the White House, walking the dogs on the canal, people will come up and pet my dogs, but will not look me in the eye. They don’t know it’s me,” she said in the latest edition of “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” reported Breitbart News.
Obama consistently has been ranked among the most influential women in the world, making Time magazine’s list of 100. She studied at Princeton and Harvard, worked for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, served as the University of Chicago’s associate dean of student services and executive director of community affairs, and was vice president of external affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“That is so telling of how white America views people who are not like them, like we don’t exist. And when we do exist, we exist as a threat. And that’s exhausting,” Obama said.
She recounted another incident in which she was offended:
“We had just finished taking the girls to a soccer game. We [she, her two daughters and a friend] were stopping to get ice cream and I had told the Secret Service to stand back, because we were trying to be normal, trying to go in. There was a line, and … when I’m just a black woman, I notice that white people don’t even see me. They’re not even looking at me.”
“So I’m standing there with two little black girls, another black female adult, they’re in soccer uniforms, and a white woman cuts right in front of us to order. Like, she didn’t even see us. The girl behind the counter almost took her order. And I had to stand up ’cause I know Denielle was like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna cause a scene with Michelle Obama.’ So I stepped up and I said, ‘Excuse me? You don’t see us four people standing right here? You just jumped in line?'”
“What the white community doesn’t understand about being a person of color in this nation is that there are daily slights, in our workplaces where people talk over you, or people don’t even see you,” she said.
Obama told her audience she had “a number of stories like that.”
She said “white people … don’t experience this in their lives.”
On her podcast, Obama previously discussed her “low-grade depression,” blaming it on President Trump’s administration.
She said it’s not “just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.”
