This article startled me initially. As I read on, I realized that it just said what I have thought many times since June about Michele. I am an RN and have had some very good co-worker friends who are very pretty black women. I have gone to a couple of Womens' Group meetings at their churches and gotten to know them very well. The one thing I noticed was that black women, no matter their size, their physical appearance, were all happy with who they were and what they looked like. If they were heavy and overweight, they did not bemoan it or put themselves down; they groomed, dressed well, had hair fixed pretty, and I wondered why white women think so little of themselves. They have a strong sense of self and self worth and seem to celebrate their woman and sisterhood. I look forward to seeing a healthy, strong, happy, beautiful, smart woman as our First Lady. I hope she manages to stay that way!

It is NOT simply about the fact that the word "butt" (oh, horrors!) was mentioned. It is about reducing her to her "exoticness" at best, and summarizing her (more or less "traditionally black," so to speak) figure as somehow "ghetto" at worst. Last I heard, "ghetto" was not a compliment to anyone over the age of 25.

And I'm sorry but Michelle Obama simply does not have a prodigious ass. Undeniably present, yes, but especially prodigious, not so much. We do not have anything like a case of steatopygia, here. (Yes, I've actually felt compelled to go and LOOK THIS UP now, to see if I have a viable thesis. I have felt the need to go and VERIFY the size of the First Lady's butt and formulate a thesis about it.)

If she had an actual big butt, the discourse would be different, and the usual letters-column suspects would be up in arms about the article "glorifying fatness while the fat use up too many resources and health care" or other such garbage. But we don't wax rhapsodic about THOSE sisters of ours.

Once again, the merits or value of a woman is reduced to what she looks like. No wonder America's young girls are starving themselves to fit into their size zeros.

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.

michelle obama looks like patrick ewing

jackie o was divine

also, i agree that this article was totally sexist. you stupid liberals couldn't see it when you were dissing sarah palin, but now you will see, via extremely stupid articles like this, that 90% of liberals/democrats don't know sexism when it hits them in the face.

Michelle Obama is the soon-to-be First Lady of the United States of America and this article in essence depreciates the value of her accomplishments as a wife, mother and career woman by debasing her and her husband's historic feat to a discourse concerning Mrs. Obama's physical attributes. Please give her the respect you would of any other woman in her position.

Not to mention that this is absolutely SEXIST. For shame. Pathetic. Disgraceful. Unimaginative. Banal. A WONDER it got passed the editors, because this article should have been SPIKED. Note to editors: Just because the person who wrote it is Black doesn't give you a pass to negate your own news judgment.

Wow, this article made me sign up on Salon.com just so I could post this message.

Erin Aubry Kaplan writes, 'to hell with biracialism!' apparently in an attempt to refocus the attention on blackness and away from Obama's biracial background and message of unity, which she argues has been treated as 'exotic' in America. To try to to understand her perspective better, I read her critique (right here on salon.com) of Jennifer Lopez's character in the movie 'Out of Sight' where she questions whether 'the public's embrace of Jennifer Lopez's abundant butt signal[s] a cultural revoultion -- or simply the triumph of watered-down multiculturalism?' While I agree that multiculturalism is a poor stand-in for the real nature of race relations in a society that is still very much racist, I beg to differ with her analysis in these two cases.

Being biracial is also beautiful. I never liked those comments I heard in the media that Barack Obama 'wasn't black enough': he is who is he is, and there is beauty in that. If those white racists back in the day were not so paranoid of losing their 'pure white blood' then they wouldn't have created the one-drop rule that basically classified mixed (black and white) children as black. That's why biraciality was first squashed - because it was a threat to white supremacy. I realize that championing black characteristics is a good cause, but why can't we champion biraciality at the same time? Parents of mixed-race children are undoubtedly breaking racial barriers and simultaneously undermining the bogus classification of races. Emphasizing biraciality is a powerful tool to undermine racism, just as championing blackness is. And no, I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. Just ask Michelle Obama's husband; and I'm sure Michelle herself would agree.