Who's afraid of Michelle Obama: Salon

Quoted via Salon:

June 24, 2008 | As Barack Obama moved through the maelstrom of the primary season, I held my breath, along with much of black America. My fear increased in proportion to my exhilaration, at times outpacing it. What would a country that had criminalized blackness for 350 years do when it woke up and realized it was seriously supporting a black man for president? I tracked the bad signs big and small, from the Jeremiah Wright crisis to reports that Obama's young campaign workers were getting shellshocked by racism in Pennsylvania. I kept my eye on the ball with an obsession fueled by a half-sensible, half-quixotic belief that if I and other concerned citizens were vigilant, we could identify any racial slime at its source and contain it before it spread into a national, nonsensical conversation. The goal was not to keep Obama in a bubble, or even to get everybody in his camp -- this is a presidential election, after all -- just to allow a historic campaign to go forward as unimpeded as possible by scurrilous attacks rooted in his color.

But it turns out, I was looking the wrong way. Because increasingly the racial animus has been aimed not at Barack but at his wife, Michelle Obama. more