Читать книгу Black Women's Health - Michele Tracy Berger - Страница 10

Michelle Obama occupied a historic role as the first African American First Lady. The multiple roles that she claimed for herself—wife, mother, worker, and activist—were unique for a First Lady. One of her central and defining missions in that role was to “get America moving.” As First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS), she specifically took aim at the ways in which Americans thought about their diet and sedentary lifestyles. Her 2010 Let’s Move campaign sought to bring attention to childhood obesity and minimize the toxic environments in both the private and public spheres that contribute to childhood obesity. Her broader goal was to end childhood obesity in a generation.

Michelle Obama used her high-profile position to collaborate with an array of partners in government, medicine, science, business, education, and athletics that pledged to work together to get children “off their couches” and to consume fresher, healthier food. She consulted with a variety of health experts and policy makers and challenged grocers and city planners to add sidewalks to communities. She and President Obama used the creation of a community garden at the White House to inspire and underscore the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables as a pathway toward healthy living. Her vision stressed a multi-pronged approach that included individual changes for both parents and children, as well as changes at the structural level (e.g., nutritious school lunches and physical fitness programs, better availability of healthy foods in neighborhoods, along with neighborhood improvements including sidewalks). This multi-faceted approach, while not without criticism, has often been minimized in critiques of her approach.41

Michelle Obama’s communication and performance of health through her promotion of the Let’s Move campaign initiated a new discursive space for mothers generally, and Black mothers specifically, linking health with motherhood, family, and even nation.42 Her performance of fitness as a Black, middle-aged woman as desirable, and as achievable for some (especially for able-bodied and well-resourced women) was new. Despite justifiable criticism of aspects of the neoliberal framing of the Let’s Move campaign, what has been missed is Michelle Obama’s emphasis, in interviews and speeches, on pleasure, intimate connection, and joy in the pursuit of health for herself and her daughters. Her emphasis provides a distinct tension against the familiar and popular frame of individual and moral responsibility toward health. Moreover, Obama’s comments about valuing well-being as defined by feeling good on the inside and not outward appearance intervenes in the standard tropes of addressing obesity and weight gain as a moral crisis.

Although there were many press stories about Michelle Obama’s arms that objectified and sensationalized her body in a sexist way, Obama herself stressed her discipline in maintaining her exercise regimen which connotes accomplishment, yes, but also incrementalism, and more important, prioritizing pleasure and health over physical looks. She eschewed diets. She invoked pleasure and discussed what having a healthy body meant to her. Although she professed going to the gym often (and early), she also stressed the importance of pursuing fun as part of fitness, and even being silly, often remarking that “you don’t have to be a great athlete to get out there.”43 She emphasized the pleasure she derived with her daughters as a core motivation, both for her own fitness and as an example for her daughters.44

It is still too early to assess the long-term results or impact of the Let’s Move campaign, though some have argued that little substantive change was made in the policy realm to curb the decades-long lobbying efforts of certain corporate interests that oversee various food products and commodities that have been the beneficiaries of generous tax advantages and economic supports.45

Often the discursive space of health and wellness has been the terrain for white cisgender women, usually young and able-bodied. There are few spaces where African American women are positioned as experts and authorities on health, but Michelle Obama’s influence in the public sphere contested those multiple dominant frames.46 This was the first time that an African American woman had a public position that so thoroughly connected to and embodied a stance on health.47 During 1993–1994, Jocelyn Elders, the Surgeon General during the first Clinton administration, was a public voice for health. However, she was widely criticized (and demonized) during her short tenure for her open discussions of safe sex and encouragement of masturbation. Because Michelle Obama occupied multiple roles in the American imagination, she was well-suited to a discussion on health. Her open embracing of both the joys and complexity of motherhood validated mothers, specifically African American mothers. As scholars have noted, African American motherhood has historically been devalued, with Black mothers most often being portrayed as incompetent.48 Her health campaign relied on her public role as a mother (often referred to as the “First Mother in Chief”). This was a new moment for the country.

She credited much of her initial interest in creating a healthy lifestyle to her goal of “cooking a good meal for my kids.”49 She stressed how challenged working parents are, especially mothers, in facing the daily dilemma of meal preparation and cooking. Her interest in community gardens, fresh foods, and creating healthy meals was relatable to every working woman and especially mothers. President Obama is not absent in her discussions of cooking and the maintenance of family health, but Michelle Obama’s role as a mother is centralized, which reinforces a gendered division of labor in the house and also in the domain of health.50 Despite this more traditional positioning of motherhood, her story resonated so deeply because it struck many as true to many women’s experiences.

In the past two decades, clinicians and public health scholars have warned the public about the obesity epidemic in the United States and globally.51 Others have been critical about the framing of obesity, the resulting representation of who is obese, and the preponderance of neoliberal approaches that focus on individual versus structural solutions.52 There were many ways Michelle Obama’s discussion of obesity left unaddressed the larger structural issues that also contribute to obesity, such as environmental pollution. However, Obama’s statements also push back against framing obesity solely as a moral panic and crisis. Moreover, her comments shift the hyperfocus on weight and stigma that can become instilled in young people in particular, and instead stress emotional development and self-confidence.53 Drawing on her experience raising her daughters, she presents a narrative less interested in policing the body. During interviews she repeatedly stated, “I never talked to them [her children] about weight in the household, we just started making changes . . . I just surrounded them with foods that were healthy and they could eat whatever they wanted . . . and just try to make activities fun.”54 In one interview, FLOTUS advised parents (and others) interested in modeling healthy behaviors for their kids to not “make this an issue about looks” but instead “talk to kids about how they feel inside.” She argued that by doing so, people can look beyond “the physical manifestations of the challenge, but we’re really tapping into what’s going on inside the head of that child.”55 While naming an important and factual health issue—that one in two Black and Latino kids are obese and they will be disproportionately affected by diabetes—she periodically rejected the pervasive language of moral crisis and stigma. On this issue, she asserted, “we don’t need someone to label it to know that we can fix it, we can change it.”56

Although Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign did not focus on African American women’s and girls’ health specifically, I argue her rhetoric of exercise as fun, as a way to connect to loved ones, and as pleasurable created a discursive space that resonated with many African American women and girls. Her alignment with Blackness and femaleness through mothering and defining her own body both encouraged and inspired many. Obama’s health advocacy countered other negative public health messages that often framed Black women and girls as unfit and failed subjects. Given Obama’s orientation to Blackness and femaleness, it is also therefore not surprising that while still promoting health during President Obama’s second term, FLOTUS turned her attention to the issue of female empowerment and aligned herself with the extraordinary talent of pop superstar Beyoncé and many other Black women artists and cultural workers, making her message resonate globally.

Despite other limitations to Michelle Obama’s approach, her representation of mothering and health echoes the women in this study (and the general public) who struggle to balance healthy family and healthy eating. The mother respondents saw themselves in that primary role, with diet, exercise, and weight manifesting as central issues in their discussions of that role.