Hey Y’all.
Lemme ask you somethin’… what kind of white man looks at Michelle Obama, or any other Black woman beyond his reach, and needs her to be a man? I’m asking because once again, a racist white man tried to remove the former First Lady from womanhood.
It happened this past Sunday night at Donald Trump’s 80th birthday party when UFC fighter Josh Hokit defeated Derrick Lewis on the White House South Lawn. He stepped to the microphone and said: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
According to news reports, the reaction from the crowd was a mix of cheers, boos, and stunned silence, and nobody bothered to check him in the moment. Now, I want Y’all to really think about this for a sec . . .
I’m not surprised that he said it. These racist goblins have been attacking Obama’s femininity for years because she is beautiful, tall, elegant, brilliant, wealthy, composed, adored, and unbothered. She is married to a man who visibly loves and respects her and she won’t perform fragility for the white gaze. But what was strange to me was when Hokit said those words.
Like dude, you just won a fight in front of the POTUS, with likely millions of people watching at home. Wasn’t you out of breath? Wasn’t your adrenaline pumping hard inside your body? Weren’t you flushed with triumph in that moment? This was supposed to be the fight of your career!
But instead of showing gratitude or giving us the usual post-fight nonsense about dominance and male destiny, you were thinking about humiliating a Black woman’s body that was nowhere near you.
Why were you so fixated?
Either somebody in the Trump regime slipped you a little extra cash to say that shit, or that racial-sexual obsession was already waiting inside you for a stage and a microphone.
And now, days later, we are watching the usual round of defensive scholarly takes across social media and think pieces explaining where the history of that racist trope came from. Folks are reminding readers about the architecture of white patriarchy and the function of these lies against Black women.
I want to talk about the pathology inside the men who keep digging through the dusty plantation and Jim Crow drawers for this insult. Because Y’all know I love performing a good ole return-to-sender on racist degenerates. What I heard from Hokit was a public confession: “Michelle Obama is a man. I am angry because she is a Black woman who does not need me. Am I right, America? And, I miss Mammy!”
What Hokit was confessing on behalf of himself and millions of other racist white men is that Obama’s beauty, stature, and freedom have produced a psychic injury for them because their racial imagination requires Black women to be accessible, obedient, inferior, servile, penetrable, punishable, and grateful. So it is not surprising that they continue to reach for the oldest defense mechanism in the white masculine psyche: projection.
Because they feel emasculated, they say Obama is masculine. Because they feel small, her height and stature make her too large. Because they cannot whip her, sexually assault her, or make her bow, they try to disfigure her in their vile language. Their lies reveal the erotic, racial, and psychological sickness of white masculinity which is obsessed with grabbing, marking, mocking, regulating, caging, raping, deporting, humiliating, and misgendering all kinds of bodies when they feel like they’re losing control.
In psychology, there’s something called ‘regression.’ The argument is that when people, or nations, find themselves experiencing profound stress, they return to their earlier psychic formations. This is where America is right now. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that we witnessed the spectacle of a UFC fight on the White House lawn and a white man using the stage to attack a Black woman.
Men like Hokit are not confused about Michelle Obama’s gender. They know she’s ain’t a man. They’re pissed because she is beyond their reach. And . . . and . . . and they are grieving the loss of Mammy. Yes, they are still grieving the loss of Mammy more than a century and a half since the end of slavery.
Now, I need Y’all to understand that Mammy was not just a historical person. She was a psychic object. I already know that somebody is gonna be like: “Most white folks didn’t own slaves. How can you say that every white man had a Black wet nurse?”
Shhhhhhh. Just listen.
I know that not every white man grew up with a literal Mammy during slavery. That ain’t my argument. What I’m saying is that white America built a whole racial fantasy around the Black woman as first comfort, first food, first softness, first service, first body that gives to their needs without demanding. Mammy became the imagined origin point of white male entitlement.
In the racist degenerate imagination, Mammy represents the Black woman as a kind of pre-political intimacy. During slavery, before the white boy learned anything about law, property, labor, race, or sex, he came to know the Black woman as warmth, food, touch, smell, voice, breast, lap, lullaby, and survival. She was the first body that gave him life outside his mother’s body. And then white supremacy had to step in, redirect his attention and energies, and teach him to betray her.
Y’all still with me? Because that betrayal is the key.
Because at some point, the white boy had to be taught to stop seeing Black women as human attachment figures and start seeing them as property, labor, racial inferiority, sexual target, or disposable servant. This rupture between white boys and Black women caused a profound psychic wound. His father, the plantation, the law, the culture all intervened and said: Do not love Mammy. Rule that Negro wench!
I need Y’all to understand that the white boy’s first lesson in white supremacy was not always hatred of Black people. It was betrayal. White males were taught to detach from the Black woman who held, fed, soothed, and kept him alive so he could become a future degenerate. Once he reached adolescence, he had to be trained to convert his genuine attachment into racial domination. Do you see how this is a psychic wound that white masculinity never metabolized? Black women in America were first made necessary, then inferior, then made available for punishment.
And listen, this rupture between white boys and Black women became intergenerational, somatic, cultural, and psychically inherited. Meaning, it became a cultural memory lodged in white bodies. Let’s call it a wound that became epigenetic and got passed down not just through law and customs, but through white nervous systems, family rituals, sexual entitlement, racial panic, and the inherited scripts of white masculinity that we’re seeing get played out in our modern political environment.
And this is where Michelle Obama comes in. These grievance goblins HATE her because she refuses the psychic function Mammy performed. She does not soothe, feed, forgive, or absorb their shame. She is not a breast without a self, a lap without a will, or a Black body without boundaries. And what really enrages them is that she is not the Black woman who keeps white boys and men alive while asking nothing for herself.
They call Michelle Obama a man because her existence humiliates the white male fantasy of access. She is proof that slavery didn’t not destroy Black people. She is a Black woman they cannot possess, nurse from, whip, or rape with impunity. Because her milk, children, labor, flesh, and fear are no longer part of the white household or psychic economy, the denied child inside them tries to retaliate by trying to symbolically remove her from womanhood. That’s all they’ve got.
Hell, just this week hordes of MAGATs left me emails and voicemail messages calling me a man, angry, ugly, bitch, cunt, and everything else under the sun because they hate that my sentences won’t curtsy or flatter them.
When they call us men, what they’re really saying is that they are angry because: “My masculinity cannot depend on this Black woman’s exhaustion.” When they call us men, they’re saying they’re angry because: “This Black woman is not available for domination.” That is the offense.
They miss Mammy. Mammy who bent over cribs and wiped their stinky butts. Who bent over stoves and washboards, who nursed, swallowed terror, hummed spirituals, and survived white households. Hokit’s words were an echo of the white male hallucination of the Black woman who existed to absorb everything: their hunger, their tears, their rage, their lust, their violence, their incompetence, their need to be soothed, mothered, obeyed, forgiven, and never feared.
So, they will keep calling Michelle Obama a man because they cannot call her theirs. They will keeping calling other Black women men because when they turn to us with their shrill cries, their grievances, and their weak, fragile, flaccid selves, they will get no breast, no lap, no lullabies or spirituals, nor a warm place to nurse themselves back to confidence and purpose. And they know that our bodies will no longer keep their future children alive long enough for them to become monsters.
THIS CONTENT WRITTEN, IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
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