Summary

In A Lotus for Michelle, Jerkins writes a letter of adulation to the former First Lady, Michelle Obama. She describes a caricature deemed satirical, published by The New Yorker, that portrayed Michelle Obama with a large afro and with her head cocked to the side, eyebrows raised (106). Although she is an accomplished woman, she was portrayed as aggressive and violent, through racialized imagery and tropes. When Jerkins was young, she thought that a black president could only be a possibility in comedy skits. She conveys Michelle Obama's story as if it were a myth; her great-great grandfather Jim Robinson was born a slave on Friendfield Plantation in South Carolina (108). Michelle Obama went to Princeton in 1981, and Jerkins imagines the racial tension that she must have endured as a black woman in a primarily white and conservative Ivy...