Erin Aubry Kaplan, a writing professor at Antioch University, attacked Michelle Obama in a New York Times Sunday op-ed for caring more for white opinion than the plight of black Americans.
“Mrs. Obama still follows the rule of assimilation: It’s more important to retain white empathy than to be truly empathetic to ourselves,” wrote Kaplan, an African-American professor and writer of the book “I Heart Obama.”
Kaplan wrote her piece in response to Obama’s book “Becoming,” released last November. Her criticism centered around two brief sections of Obama’s book, where she recalled saying,”for the first time in my adult life … really proud of my country” during the 2008 campaign, and where she rejected their family’s longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr.
After reading Obama’s reflections on the incidents in the memoir, Kaplan accused her of trying to appease white people while paying lip service to black oppression, believing Obama fears expressing the full discontent of black Americans will cause her to be labeled “anti-American.”
“And yet reading ‘Becoming’ made me realize, with a sinking heart, how much further we have to go before we routinely hear the whole story about black people’s experience,” said Kaplan, a story of oppression she accuses Obama of helping cover up.
Kaplan’s complaint comes as Obama travels around the country promoting her book to crowds as large as 20,000 people. In 2017, Kaplan wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times criticizing gentrification as “shrinking black space” and “ominous.”
[Related: Michelle Obama memoir is best-selling book of 2018]
