Welcoming Michelle Obama

 By Agnes Krup

“Mama, ich brauche eine schwarze Frau – I need a black woman,” said my daughter, in German, on a grey October night, looking up from her homework at the kitchen table.

“I thought you were going to be Medusa this year?” I replied absent-mindedly, focused on the just boiling water for the pasta.

An eyeroll in my direction. “For President.”

This morning, I think back on that day, just a few weeks ago. Aren’t we almost there? She may not be President, but Michelle Obama will be this country’s first African-American First Lady. She will face the daunting task of making the White House the First Home to two young daughters, close in age to my own child. She will have to recreate the kitchen table crucial to doing homework on, far removed from the Chicago’s South Side.

Michelle Obama is a gracious as she is intelligent. She is as much of a professional as she is a devoted mother. She combines stupendous generosity with being a feminist and being of no two minds about racial issues – topics many wives of candidates always seem to avoid. As if being feminist and holding strong, well-founded political opinions and ethical values made them less feminine.  Michelle Obama has proved all of them wrong.

The speech she gave at this summer’s Democratic convention was every bit as gutsy, compassionate and rousing as the one that put her husband on the international political map at the convention in 2004. The most poignant statement she made, perhaps the most important of this whole year of campaigning, was that neither her husband nor herself would be anywhere near where they are now had it not been for their education – and their families sacrificing for it.

My daughter has witnessed my tears when Hillary Clinton’s candidacy came to an end. She knows of the deep support of our European family and friends for Senator Obama throughout his campaign. She has also been taught, in two out of the last three years in her elementary school, by very seasoned, impassioned African-American teachers, strong women both, who have for decades weathered the storms this small public school faced. In second grade, my daughter’s class was asked to write essays on Harriet Tubman, of whom I, with my European education, had never heard until then. I was humbled to learn my lesson along her.

This is where my daughter gets her sense of justice. This is how her vision of a future is formed, beyond anything I could ever have dreamed. She is rooting, as Michelle Obama laid it out in her speech in late August, for the world as it should be as opposed to the world as it is. My daughter has been inspired, beyond anything I could have done for her, by extraordinary women. And now she has an advocate for anything she could ever dream of in the White House.

My child is right. It is time, indeed, for a black woman. Welcome, Michelle. We have been waiting for you.

Agnes Krup grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and has called New York City her home since 1994. She is a literary scout, working for a select group of publishers and literary agencies in Europe, Asia and Latin America. She lives in Brooklyn Heights with her daughter.

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