- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
It’s true that not all black women have big butts—I’m one of them. In fact, I was totally self-conscious of this fact most of the time I was growing up in a black neighborhood. Let’s face it, though not all black women have big butts, enough of them do have such gloriously padded tushies that I felt outside of the black norm as a child. To this day it burns me up to see a white girl with a bigger tush than mine. Anyway, I digress.
Black women’s big butts have historically been sexualized and objectified to such a degree, that the roundness of a particular black woman’s derriere has defined what she is like as a person, her very essence—that big booty signifies promiscuity, loose morals, being low-class and stupid. (I'm not lying when I say that people thought the bigger the booty, the more likely it was the possessor of said abundance was considered to probably be from the projects.)
Michelle Obama’s big butt turns this stereotype on its head exactly because, not only is she none of those things (Harvard graduate, high-powered executive, wife and mother), she will be the FIRST LADY. The author is screaming loud from the rooftops: I’m black and I’m proud! And despite my rather flat ass, I’m not holding it against Ayanna, Keisha, or Tamika that when they look at Michelle Obama they recognize themselves in her; that their big black booties don’t preclude going to Harvard, becoming a VP or being First Lady or President one day, that there is a future outside of being a video background dancer.
Perhaps some of you are getting something that I’m not, but I cannot fathom why this article is drawing such antipathy from Salon’s readers, especially since there has been an ongoing fascination with black women’s butts going back hundreds of years.
