Comments on: Powerful images from the White House

By: Zoevinly

Zoevinly — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:43:15 +0000

Don’t forget that before she became First Lady, Michelle Obama was educated at Princeton and Harvard, practiced at a prestigious firm and worked for Mayor Daley. This mannequin has brains. She’s an animated, articulate (yes, that word), active and direct woman who also happens to be black.

Now juxtapose that upper-echelon black female lawyer against the Jackie-Kennedy-Chanel-style-sweater-wearing Laura Bush. I know a few wicked-cool librarians. Laura Bush is not cool. Nor is she wicked. If you’ve read her interviews, you may even wonder if she lives in the 21st Century.

This shift is major.

To switch gears: What if the specter of gender and sexual inequality were to enter into the mix? Imagine that Michelle was born in Kenya, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii; and Barack himself was born in Illinois. Would the public have embraced Obama more or less?

Switching again: Rumor has it that earning a graduate degree from a U.S. University has a profoundly negative effect on the dating prospects of a native-born Chinese woman. This makes sense if you consider the mobility of this woman compared to her partner. With a foreign degree, she has the liberty to leave her native country in pursuit of more lucrative work while her man stays at home in mainland China. That is unless she can find a native-born, foreign-educated (Chinese) man to meet her parents’ expectations. This mannequin has yet to be plastered all over Chinese TV.

By: Tim Hogan

Tim Hogan — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:32:42 +0000

Erich, any kid can see the Obama children as an example.

My son, Ben, realized the President’s children are the same ages as he and his older sister. Then, he asked if I could be President, to which I answered that I hold all the constitutional requirements, so “yes.”

I then said the Onion had it right about Mr. Obama; “Black Man Gets Worst Job in America!” I told Ben I’d rather try to broker a Middle East peace deal, get a Cardinals fan to like the Mets, or a Yankees fan to like the Red Sox than be President right now. Ben then said he thought I should pray for Mr. Obama, and I do. Then, Ben wiped out my Lego guys with a laser blast, and declared victory (again,according to “little boy rules” daddy always loses!).

By: Erika Price

Erika Price — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:57:44 +0000

I’ve even heard some tall women say that they feel empowered when they see that our new first lady is a person of height. But instead of feeling “good” that new groups of people sense empowerment by seeing powerful elites that look like themselves, I feel “bad” that people feel insecure about such silly things in the first place. The height thing to me just represents a slightly more absurd version of the “race” thing. It’s too bad that we still need to see visions of ourselves in order to identify with someone or their position.