African-American women are a major force in the Obama administration. But will their success help other, less visible black women break down doors?
Includes an exclusive Web extra.Watching the Democratic National Convention on my couch last year, I felt like such a geek, getting all choked up and teary as Michelle Obama spoke. As stereotype busting goes, this was a classic moment. It wasn’t so much what she said —although her words were wonderful—as what she symbolized: black excellence, black female excellence. As I would later find out, I wasn’t the only one crying. Michelle was representing all of us brown-skinned, dual-degreed, corporately employed integration babies. Watching Michelle, I felt that at last the world could see that we’re not neck-rolling, finger-snapping sistas with an ax to grind. That she isn’t—and we aren’t—as one political pundit put it, “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress.”
But then it turned out that Michelle was just the beginning. The newly minted president proceeded to pick one African-American after another for high-power positions, from White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to Susan Rice (United States ambassador to the United Nations) to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, to surgeon general nominee Regina Benjamin, MD (whose appointment was, at press time, still awaiting Senate confirmation).
For many of us, this apparent tsunami of highly visible black women has been great news but no great surprise. Seeing these women—standing with the president, holding forth on the Sunday morning talk shows or looking glamorous at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (the first at which a black woman, comic and former National Security Agency employee Wanda Sykes, emceed)—I thought, well, of course. After all, they look a lot like my friends and me.
Like me, the “Obama women,” as insiders have named them, are part of a generation of accomplished black women. Living in my buppie bubble, I was surprised that so many non-black people were surprised that there was such a deep bench of talent for Obama to draw from. For although Jarrett, Rice and the others are exceptional people, among black women they are not the exception.
Let me be clear: Not many individuals, black, white, brown or other, achieve that level of power, whether at the White House or at Xerox. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of us, highly qualified and highly educated, available to be tapped. As the first lady told Time magazine, “My mother said this in an interview and I completely agree with her, and it’s something that, you know, I want young people to remember. [She said] Michelle and Barack aren’t new; there are thousands of [them] all over this nation. And that is true . . . I know them, I’ve gone to school with them, I live with them. So the truth is, there are thousands of role models like me. I just happen to be the first lady.”
“We’re not unicorns,” concurs Tanya Chutkan, 47, an attorney who is a partner specializing in litigation and white collar criminal defense at the high-profile Washington, D.C.– based law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. “We do exist. People always say, ‘Oh, your mother must be so proud.’ And I say, ‘Actually, she’s a lawyer too.’ ”
So we’re here, and we’re waiting—but will we now, finally, ascend? Will the Obama women have a trickle-down effect on how the rest of us are perceived and, ultimately, employed? Some say yes. Already we’re seeing some zeitgeisty changes on the cultural landscape: More black women on the cover of Vogue (so far this year: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé and model Liya Kebede—a big contrast to 2008, when the only person of color who appeared on the cover was LeBron James). Then there’s BET, long known for its booty-shaking music videos, which recently announced plans to launch CENTRIC, a new channel targeted to upscale midlife black Americans. It is, apparently, now hip to be middle-aged, gifted and black.
Seeing yourself reflected in the pub-lic arena is gratifying, to be sure. But will this moment of fashionability trans-late into a new wave of black professional women rushing up the corporate ladder? Is it, as one hopeful journalist put it, “Christmastime”?
Andrea Berry has her doubts. “What did it do when Condoleezza Rice was there on the cabinet for those eight years?” retorts the 48-year-old senior vice president for broadcast operations at Fox Networks. “It didn’t change. I didn’t see anybody rushing to hire black women. I don’t know that [Rice made] a difference. And she’s extremely brilliant.”
Berry has a point. Our generation has been here before. By the 1970s, affirmative action had brought about a heightened sense of opportunity and possibility. But while affirmative action opened doors, it has also been used as a hammer against us, as in: “You just got in because you’re black. And a woman. A twofer!” It was more than a little disheartening in 2003 to hear some of my colleagues at the Washington Post blame the whole Jayson Blair plagiarism debacle on affirmative action at the New York Times. (Where do we place the blame for Stephen Glass, a white male who admitted to inventing stories wholesale for the New Republic?) Skip forward to this past summer, and check out a Washington Post article that, noting the increased number of black women reporters covering Michelle Obama, poses the question: “Are the beat reporters inadvertently invested in her success?” An alarm that of course has never been raised about white reporters covering white politicians or white first ladies.
Which is why so many of us feel as if we’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far. In the decade between 1996 and 2007, the number of black women getting master’s degrees increased 130 percent, while the increase for white women was 38 percent. There’s a reason we earn degrees at such a high rate. It’s been drummed into us both by birth and by history.
