If anyone thought that Black women were a monolithic group, marching in lock step, with one idea and purpose, they need only look at the blog, “Michelle Obama Watch”. While we can and have taken criticism and quietly risen above the negativity, there are times when a response is just in order.
The decision to use “Go, Tell Michelle” as a text at Bennett College is used as the context for comments that are neither warranted nor accurate. First of all, to say that “Go, Tell Michelle” “returns” presupposes that the book went out of print or has been retired somehow. In fact you can often find it on the Best Seller list of books in letters and correspondence on Amazon.com and requests for presentations and book signings fill our schedule. As for the statement attributed to Peggy; Brooks-Bertram has never said that this was a book particularly for dark-skinned women as women of all hues have letters in the book.
It’s interesting (trying to find a better word) that someone who describes “Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady” as “creepy” and “other Black women’s hustle” should do so on a blog that she entitles, “Michelle Obama Watch”. Further in the earlier review, quoted in her post, which she says “panned” the book soon after its release, she admits to not having read the entire volume and has cherry picked a few of the letters. This new post seems to share the same limited analysis and the “projection” of which she accuses the Go, Tell Michelle contributors of having.
I won’t go into a long treatise on the messages that “Go, Tell Michelle” seeks to impart to its readers. I don’t think that the author of the “Michelle Obama Watch” is looking for a healthy discussion as evidenced by the fact that she has already labeled the messages as “bizarre” and states that she doesn’t “know if I want young impressionable undergraduate women engaging in unhealthy projection”. But it is that healthy discussion that I know the young women at Bennett will/are having in their course on Black women’s issues. In fact, I am sure that other students throughout the country are having these same discussions and we are all better off for it.
The decision to use “Go, Tell Michelle” as a text at Bennett College is used as the context for comments that are neither warranted nor accurate. First of all, to say that “Go, Tell Michelle” “returns” presupposes that the book went out of print or has been retired somehow. In fact you can often find it on the Best Seller list of books in letters and correspondence on Amazon.com and requests for presentations and book signings fill our schedule. As for the statement attributed to Peggy; Brooks-Bertram has never said that this was a book particularly for dark-skinned women as women of all hues have letters in the book.
It’s interesting (trying to find a better word) that someone who describes “Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady” as “creepy” and “other Black women’s hustle” should do so on a blog that she entitles, “Michelle Obama Watch”. Further in the earlier review, quoted in her post, which she says “panned” the book soon after its release, she admits to not having read the entire volume and has cherry picked a few of the letters. This new post seems to share the same limited analysis and the “projection” of which she accuses the Go, Tell Michelle contributors of having.
I won’t go into a long treatise on the messages that “Go, Tell Michelle” seeks to impart to its readers. I don’t think that the author of the “Michelle Obama Watch” is looking for a healthy discussion as evidenced by the fact that she has already labeled the messages as “bizarre” and states that she doesn’t “know if I want young impressionable undergraduate women engaging in unhealthy projection”. But it is that healthy discussion that I know the young women at Bennett will/are having in their course on Black women’s issues. In fact, I am sure that other students throughout the country are having these same discussions and we are all better off for it.
