In 2007, a young biracial senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was trying to convince Black voters that he was one of them. I traveled to South Carolina to see a set of speeches that would become a historic inflection point — Oprah and Michelle Obama code-switching to tell the state’s Black Democrats that he was the real deal.
On Tuesday night, Michelle was back. She stood before an adoring crowd at the Democratic convention and drew concrete parallels between her Black American story and Kamala Harris’ “person of color” immigrant story. Mothers were the linchpin of her cultural analogy. “Her mother is like mine, and like yours,” she said.
If you trust Michelle, you can trust Kamala. That was the gist.
Michelle went on to code-switch to the audience with a juggernaut of shots at Donald Trump’s privilege, his abuses of power and his inarticulateness. Then she owned the elephant in the room: naming Trump’s racist attacks on her, her husband and her children. She pulled no punches. “Who wants to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said to thunderous applause.