In Praise of Michelle Obama
The former First Lady exemplifies elegance, class and beauty
Let me begin with the obvious: Michelle Obama is a beautiful and elegant woman.
And former President Barack Obama, her husband, is a handsome and elegant man.
It was said of Joe Louis that he was a credit to his race, the human race.
Michelle and Barack Obama are likewise each a credit to our race, the human race.
In the spirit of Michelle Obama’s longtime adage, “when they go low, we go high,” I will do my best to honor her wisdom.
As a result, I will pay as little attention as I can to the evil that was spewed at the former first lady the other day.
Instead, I will focus on the kindness of people, who are trying to bring us all together.
More than a decade ago, I used to eat somewhat regularly at Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian bakery, in the Americana, a shopping mall in Glendale, Calif., several miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
I got to know Kelly Howard, the manager, a lovely man, and I interviewed his wife, Myiea Coy, an actress, director and screenwriter, who had teamed up to make a movie Bully Avengers, which they showed in a number of schools, including that of their daughter, Jae Alana.
At the time, Jae Alana was being bullied, and Kelly and Myiea tried everything they could to stop it.
They talked to the teachers. They talked to the principal. They talked to the bully’s parents. They even talked to the bully.
But nothing worked until they screened their film, which led many kids in the Los Angeles area to apologize to one another publicly at morning assembly.
I wrote a piece about their film in the Huffington Post in 2014, “Bully Avengers Patrol the Schools of L.A.”
In the past couple of years, I have returned to Le Pain Quotidien with Carol, my wife, who is bringing me back to life.
As it turns out, Kelly Howard has also returned to Le Pain Quotidien in the past year or so.
Kelly, who is biracial, lived during parts of his childhood in Sweden; and Myiea Coy, Kelly’s wife, is African-American.
Kelly is a family man, who used to set up a table with toys and coloring books for children near the front of Le Pain Quotidien.
He exudes kindness and serenity, so it has been delightful for me that he has resumed managing the restaurant after spending some years acting and producing films and raising his children.
All this time later, Jae Alana is doing quite well. She has “glowed up,” Kelly told me, using what is evidently now current parlance to describe a youth’s successful growth into adulthood.
Back around 2014, when I used to dine at Le Pain Quotidien, I also became friends with a server named Arch.
Like Kelly, he too was a very kind man, and we shared a love for sports, in particular tennis.
Arch was a fan of Serena Williams, the greatest player in the history of the sport, he said.
While I have not followed tennis or other sports so much in recent years, I was well aware of Serena’s dominance.
Serena and Venus Williams, her sister, always struck me as being not only outstanding players; they also always struck me as having an elegance to them.
And their elegance was not limited to their attire or to their play on the court.
Both Serena and Venus radiated a sense of serenity, if I can again use that word.
It seemed to me that they handled the racism and misogyny directed at them with aplomb.
While I did not follow all their matches then or now, I remember that there were occasional attempts by other women players to intimidate or insult Serena and Venus.
My recollection is that the Williams sisters did not take the bait. They ignored the viciousness and bigotry directed their way.
And they became arguably the two greatest tennis players in history.
In the course of our conversations at Le Pain Quotidien, Arch once told me how horrified he was that some people referred to Serena as a “man.”
I too was horrified when he told me this, although it was not the first time that I had heard a vulgarity at the expense of Serena or Venus Williams.
I had a friend years ago, an African-American woman, who told me that there were some idiots who thought that Serena and Venus were ugly and who characterized the Williams sisters in bestial terms.
I had not thought about these matters in a while.
But then I watched a CNN segment on AC360, in which a UFC fighter, who competed at Trump’s birthday party in a cage constructed on the South Lawn, announced into a microphone, apparently after his fight, that “Michelle Obama is a man.”
Anderson Cooper and Donie O’Sullivan, who reported on the UFC event and the slander of Michelle Obama, indicated that the Trump White House, when asked about the hideous defamation of the former first lady, had, perhaps not surprisingly, no comment.
It is obvious to anyone with a heart and a soul that Michelle Obama is a woman of extraordinary class and dignity and beauty, and she has every right to respond to this insult in any manner she wishes.
She may not respond at all, which would be perfectly understandable, since the insult aimed at her is far beneath any human being.
I might point out that Trump and his social media team posted something equally hideous months ago when they created a video, in which they depicted former President Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.
I do not know if the Obamas responded to that racist and hateful attack.
But I am going to respond to this one.
When I worked for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation in the late 1980s, I had many close friends, none more so than my supervisor, Ann L. Buttenwieser, who was a surrogate mother to me.
Ann was an angel, who treated me like a son. She in fact had a son, who was almost exactly my age.
Ann also gave me a great deal of responsibility as her right hand in waterfront planning.
In addition to Ann, we had two other lovely people, who worked in the waterfront division, two women, who happened to be African-American.
One of these women was named Annie. And the other’s name, as it turns out, was Michelle.
While Ann Buttenwieser was my surrogate mother in NYC, Annie and Michelle were my big sisters.
They too looked out for me, and they too were angels.
Annie lived in Brooklyn, and Michelle grew up in that borough.
At one point, Annie suggested that I could be a big brother to her young son, if I am remembering correctly.
“You’re a sporty kind of guy,” she said to me, pointing out that I liked basketball, baseball and boxing, as did her son.
It was an honor that Annie even considered me to play such a role for a member of her family.
At the time, I was a bit too damaged and traumatized outside of the workplace to take on the role of a big brother.
But Annie was clearly a big sister to me, as was Michelle.
In this essay, I will focus more on Michelle, who had lived years before in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene, if memory serves, where she knew Bernard and Albert King, two basketball stars, who would later play professionally.
Bernard starred for the Knicks in the 1980s, and Albert, though not quite as talented as Bernard, played for the Nets for some years.
Michelle knew them, as I say, and we used to talk about basketball from time to time.
More importantly, Michelle loved the Parks Department. She was a longtime Parkie, as we called employees who were particularly devoted to the agency. She had been a Park Ranger for some years, and she had switched over to Parks headquarters at the Central Park Arsenal to work in the waterfront division not long after I arrived in 1988.
I was a very young man at the time, 22 and 23 years old, just a year or so out of college, when I worked with Ann and Annie and Michelle.
In some respects, I was going through a very difficult time when I lived in NYC.
My social life had not been great in college or high school.
I had very few friends, or so I felt.
And I was living all alone in my studio apartment on the East Side, where I was depressed and catatonic much of the time.
Back then, I did not realize the extent to which I was suffering from PTSD.
Nor did I realize that I was dissociating from the evil that had afflicted me when I was a little boy in kindergarten.
This is not the space to discuss at length that trauma, one that I have described before in pieces such as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Kindergarten” for Thrive Global in November 2018.
But this is a space to discuss bullying, character assassination, misogyny and racism.
Years ago, I was so clueless and inexperienced that I often did not pick up on signals of a fairly obvious variety.
It is not only that I was dissociating from the evil of sadists who were trying to ruin my life and get me fired.
It was also the case that I did not always know when some people, like Michelle, were being kind and loving to me.
If I am remembering correctly, Michelle was about 30 years old, seven or eight years older than I when I was a Parkie.
She loved the music of Robert Cray, and she was a fan of Lou Diamond Phillips, the actor.
And when several Parkies and I had dinner at a soul food restaurant a bit north of the Flatiron District, Michelle said that her favorite Beatle was Ringo Starr. Annie’s was Paul McCartney.
I said that mine was John Lennon, although George Harrison will always speak to me for his mysticism and because he wrote “My Lord,” a song I first heard when I was a little boy.
This may all seem to be slightly off-topic, but I am mentioning this because my colleagues at Parks meant a lot to me when I was a young man.
While I was aware of the racism that African-Americans suffer every day, I did not understand the extent to which African-American women in particular suffer indignities.
The late Herb Goodwin, a former judge in the Boston area, who was my dear friend and a mentor, once told me when we were discussing politics that Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for U.S. president, felt that she was victimized more by misogyny than by racism.
I don’t know if my friends, Michelle or Annie, or Shirley Chisholm were ever victimized by name callers, who slandered them as “men.”
I have no idea if they were treated with the same hateful indignities to which Michelle Obama and Serena and Venus Williams have been subjected.
But it is quite possible that no group of people has been more vilified or marginalized than women of color.
As I have written on numerous occasions, Trump has given cover or license to people to express what may have always been their racist and misogynistic views, views that most of us felt had, to a large degree, disappeared.
Sadly, the racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia of Trump and his ilk are becoming somewhat normalized. Hateful statements and lies seem to get little pushback.
But some of us will never accept these lies and that hatred.
We need to push back and return to a mode of decency and civility even as we engage in debates. And we need to be kinder to one another.
When I reflect back on my time at the New York City Parks Department, I remember more than just about anything else that we had a supportive community of people, who were for the most part idealists, people who wanted to improve the quality of life in the city.
My fellow Parkies, such as Ann Buttenwieser, Annie and Michelle, all treated me as if I were a member of the Parks’ family.
To return to Michelle, she indeed nurtured and cared for me, like a big sister.
And she was elegant and beautiful, like Michelle Obama and Serena and Venus Williams.
Michelle was a brilliant woman, too. She was salutatorian at her high school in New York City.
As it turns out, Carol, my wife, herself a brilliant and beautiful woman, was also a salutatorian, in Carol’s case, at nursing school.
I feel very blessed to be nurtured by Carol, my chief angel, who is my Muse and editor-in-chief in all of her incarnations, and ours.
Yes, we have all been here before.
In fact, we all originally come from the Horn of Africa, as I wrote years ago in a piece for Thrive Global, a piece titled, “Learning About Racial Injustice as a Young Man in the 1980s.”
In that piece, which came out on June 15, 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, I talked about my time at the Parks Department; and I mentioned Samson Mulugeta and Joe Richardson, two African-American men, who were two of my best friends back then.
But I did not talk about Annie or Michelle.
Like Samson and Joe, Annie and Michelle were dear friends of mine, two kind women, who looked out for a deeply depressed kid.
They were not unlike Charlotte Bruney, my math teacher at Hopkins, my high school in New Haven, Conn., who defended me when I was being slandered, when I was being bullied, when people were committing character assassination against me.
Charlotte Bruney, who became a pastor after she left Hopkins, was also African American. And she too was from New York.
There are very few people, who would have stood up for me the way that Miss Bruney did.
As I wrote in a piece for Thrive Global in September 2021, “The Gospel of Charlotte Bruney,” Miss Bruney, who was named the dean of faculty when I was a senior in high school, showed courage that I have rarely seen before in my life when she denounced almost everyone at my school, including members of the faculty, for the way that so many people had treated me.
Because I was dissociating from evil going back to my kindergarten trauma, when I was abused by my teacher, I did not realize for years what Miss Bruney did for me that day in the spring of 1983.
She saved me potentially from being kicked out of school, all because of a series of lies that were being said about me, lies going back to my early childhood.
Like Jae Alana, the daughter of Kelly Howard and Myiea Coy, I was bullied when I was a kid.
I was in fact abused by my kindergarten teacher, who, as I have pointed out elsewhere, was a racist and an anti-Semite.
And, like Michelle Obama and Serena and Venus Williams, I have been defamed.
As I stated earlier, Michelle Obama does not need me, or anyone else, to protect her from calumny.
She understands who she is, an extremely accomplished woman with degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School, a great mother and wife, sister and daughter, and a First Lady, who always showed warmth, dignity and class then, as now.
Without trying to overstate matters, I do believe, as I wrote earlier, that women of color, as a group of people, have shouldered great burdens over the millennia, perhaps greater than the burdens of any other group of people on this planet.
And they have done so overwhelmingly with love.
I have been blessed by many angels in my life, and I am forever grateful to God that I have found love with Carol, my wife.
Carol is clearly my Muse in all of her incarnations, and ours, as I often tell her.
And it is Carol, who inspires me to write all of my articles, including this one.
There are times that I can get depressed. But then I remember the love that I have received from so many people.
And I know that love will get us out of these times.
It is far more powerful than hatred.
And love spans all colors and genders.
I might also remind us that God is love.
There is nothing that we need more now in our world.
It would be a credit to our race, the human race, if we all tried to honor this.