Does Michelle Obama make you feel more comfortable being black?

{Source: Madame Noire}

via Chicago Sun Times:

It is a good time to be a black woman in America. 

Whether or not this assessment seems from the surprising popularity of the nation’s first black first lady, Michelle Obama, isn’t clear. 

But according to a recent nationwide survey by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, 73 percent of black women and 71 percent of white women polled responded that they think it is a good time to be a black woman in America. 

 In a series published last month, the Washington Post and Kaiser Foundation sought to peel back the many dubious labels often ascribed to black women. 

 We’ve all heard them: “angry,” “strong,” “nagging” and “loose.”

 Interviewers talked to about 800 black women about their worries, hopes and fears to determine how black women see themselves in the Age of Obama. The study itself represents change. After all, it isn’t very often researchers attempt to define black women from a perspective other than that of single mother or poor black women. 

 But the advent of Michelle Obama seems to have changed that. 

 Although you can’t really say Obama gave white Americans its first close-up of the accomplished black woman outside of Hollywood (that distinction goes to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice). 

 But Obama showcased a multi-faceted black woman too often ignored. The Harvard-educated wife and mother is both glamorous and practical. Her glamorous side has earned her a spot on the world’s best-dressed list, and among the nation’s elite trendsetters.  

 Her ability to keep it real, even under the brightest spotlight, has drawn criticism from some whites.   

For instance, a photograph of the first lady in Bermuda shorts taken when she was returning to the White House from a family vacation was seized upon by her critics.
 But black women likely saw the attire for what it was: practical. 

 Not surprisingly, in follow-up interviews by the Washington Post for its series, black women acknowledged having a special bond with Obama because of her gender and race.  

 The survey found that four in 10 black women said their overall impression of black women has improved because of Obama, while fewer than one in seven white women gave that response.

Obama seems to have done what Oprah Winfrey and others successful black celebrities could not: She has elevated black women in their own eyes.

Read more at the Chicago Sun Times.