Michelle Obama is out with a new coffee table book about her fashion as first lady, but don’t for one second think that it is a frivolous or feel-good project about her widely acclaimed style. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Titled The Look, Obama has explained the work as her chance to “reclaim” the narrative surrounding her White House style because, as she tells it, the way she looked – from what she wore to how her hair was styled – was “constantly being dissected.”
So it should come as no surprise then that Obama has been using her book-related media tour – first in an interview with People magazine and then in a primetime sit-down with Robin Roberts on ABC Sunday night – to rehash her longstanding, racially charged complaints about her time as first lady.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Walter Kirn, editor-at-large of County Highway, to discuss the book tour and what Obama gets wrong about the United States.
Hair Trigger
Obama largely sported straight bobs and blowouts during her eight years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And despite the fact that she chose that same exact style for her latest People cover and ABC interview, she wants you to know that it is not authentic.
“We understand as women of color that the way our hair naturally grows out of our head is beautiful,” she told People. “But if we struggle to make it look like the standard, that means we are spending thousands of hours and lots of money straightening out What is naturally curly hair, right? And that takes time out of your life. It costs money.”
This is not the first time Obama has talked about her mane. While promoting another book back in 2022, she told a crowd that the United States “wasn’t ready” for her natural hair. “As black women, we deal with it. The whole thing about do you show up with your natural hair? You know, braids y’all. As first lady, I did not wear braids,” she claimed.
At the time, she said it “would have been easier” to wear the protective style, but she felt like she had to “ease up on the people” because she was already the first black first lady and “they weren’t ready for it.” She brought that up once again with Roberts, saying her decision to wear her hair in braids to the unveiling of her White House portrait in 2022 was a crucial one:
“That was intentional, but it was like having me, the former first lady, a black woman, show up in the world, in her natural hair, even if I didn’t do it for those eight years, I understood the importance of doing it at some point and signaling a message to young girls and to professionals out there: Stay out of our hair, you know? We’re just trying to get to work and do it fast and efficiently. Don’t tell a black woman how to wear her hair. How I wear my hair should be my choice. And it shouldn’t be illegal. It shouldn’t be something that can’t be done if you’re part of the military.”
Megyn said Obama’s message is clear. “What she’s saying is she’s bitter because society’s standards, in her view, don’t allow black women to just walk around with their natural hair. That is bullshit,” she contended. “Black women can walk around with whatever hair they want. Only in Michelle Obama’s warped mind do white people not like them unless their hair looks like white hair.”
“And here’s the other thing: The nerve of this woman to pretend that black women are the only women who have to spend a bunch of time getting their natural hair to ‘conform’ to these alleged society standards,” Megyn added. “If I went out there with my natural hair, I would look like a toddler, which is why I don’t… Virtually every woman I know spends a shit ton of time on her hair and wants it to look better than God made it. It’s not a black thing. It’s a human thing, and it’s especially a woman thing. But she is always reducing everything to race.”
Saving Grace
To that point, Obama told Roberts that her family was held to a different set of standards while her husband was president… because of their race.
ROBERTS: You said, ‘We were all too aware that, as a first black couple, we couldn’t afford any missteps.’ And you also say, ‘As a black woman, I was under a particularly white, hot glare.’ Did you feel that?
OBAMA: For sure. You can’t afford to get anything wrong because you didn’t get the– at least until the country came to know us, we didn’t get the grace that, I think, some other families have gotten. Now, don’t get me wrong, every first lady faces the kind of scrutiny, every woman in the public eye faces a certain level of scrutiny because of her physical appearance. I mean, we live in a culture, sadly, where, you know, if somebody wants to go after a woman, the first thing they do is go after our looks, our size, our physical being as a way to, you know, make us feel small, to keep us in place.
In Kirn’s view, she has it all wrong. “It is exactly the opposite of what she said. She got more grace. She could have done almost anything,” he explained. “And does she forget she had just been elected by a majority? We’d just shown that we approved of her. We did know her. We elected her. America had put her in the White House. The same America that wasn’t going to allow her any grace? What, they put her in the White House as a joke to trip her up? This is ridiculous. None of it happened. What is she talking about?
Megyn agreed. “Everything is a grievance with this woman… ‘We weren’t given the grace of the whites’ – that is basically what she’s saying,” she noted. “[And yet] they were on every magazine cover. They were treated like Camelot reincarnate. Everybody celebrated them… Even the right-wing media gave them, like, a nod… They didn’t like his policies, but they were nice to them. They were universally celebrated.”
Revisionist History
While Obama has been bringing up the same racially charged lamentations since she left the White House nearly a decade ago, Kirn wondered if there is a larger reframing effort underway. “I think they’re doing this because they’re trying to convince young people that something is true that the young people don’t realize has always been true,” he said.
“I have a store nearby me that says, ‘We accept all people’… and it’s a big sign in the front of the store. And I want to tell young people, ‘Even before stores had those signs, they still accepted all people,'” he explained. “Well, you know what? They’re trying to convince young people now that there was some persecution of her and her husband that never happened… If you’re starting to vote now and you don’t remember what it was like in 2008… now you can have this revisionist history that they faced persecution. And I think they’re actually trying to convince people who weren’t there.”
Megyn said that Kirn was definitely onto something with his theory as Barack Obama was campaigning for Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia over the weekend with a similar message. “The nerve of Barack Obama to be out there on the campaign trail… saying, ‘Oh, the Republicans are obsessed with DEI. They think DEI is responsible for everything. Why are they so focused on DEI and dividing people,'” she said. “You, sir, and your wife are the ones who are focused on DEI and dividing people. You see everything through a racial prism. Everything. It is ridiculous.”
She also had a message for the former first lady: “I got news for you, Michelle Obama: White women have to pat the weave too. It is not just a black thing anymore… I have also burned my hair out of high heavens with those irons. Who is she f-cking kidding? Everything is about poor Michelle Obama, especially when you get around the topic of race.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Kirn by tuning in to episode 1,185 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.