Who makes you most comfortable, Barack or Michelle Obama?

Michelle Obama made her case on Monday night with her smart, warm and sometimes humorous speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Observing her mother, Marian Robinson, watching proudly from the audience moved me for tears, because Michelle made it clear that she became who she is through the support and sacrifice of her family. Just in case we thought she was a happy accident, we also heard from her only brother, Craig, whom she followed to Princeton and authorized to vet her boyfriend, Barack, on the basketball court. If there’s a better advertisement for the middle class black family, I’ve yet to see it.

But there’s the rub. Many Americans don’t know any middle class African Americans. Despite decades of civil rights legislation, it’s still possible to live in an all-white enclave from which you can project whatever ideas you have about race onto the people with brown, black, yellow and red skin around you. And those isolated white people bubbled into my consciousness after the first night of the 2008 Democratic Convention.

Follow up:

It was Michelle’s job, commentators said, to make us “comfortable” with her husband. Odd when you think about it that the campaign sent a woman with two African-American parents out to make us more comfortable with a man with a white mother and a Kenyan father. From Hawaii. Does Hawaii make you uncomfortable? I guess it seems a little exotic, but more exotic to white America than the South Side of Chicago? I think not. To quell fears raised by the right that the Obamas were “elite,” the Democrats sent one Princeton/Harvard lawyer to reassure us about one who went to Harvard from Columbia. While those schools may be bastions of white privilege, I would guess they’re pretty intimidating the a majority of working class Americans.

Nevertheless, Michelle Obama did her convention job well. She spoke articulately but with a liberal sprinkling of “you knows.” She said she was proud of her country. She spoke movingly of her father’s illness, her brother’s coaching and her mother’s nurturing, all of which occurred in a one-bedroom apartment. Then out came little Malia and Natasha to say hello to daddy on the monitor.

The thought I had as a middle class white woman watching Michelle was that by comparison I’ve been lazy and complacent. This is not a new sensation, because I’ve often enjoyed the company of sharp, funny African Americans who are better educated than I am. But what if in the years my child was young I’d stayed at home with only the Cosby/Huxtables and Oprah Winfrey as guides to the black middle class? (I know, I know, they’ve so far surpassed middle class that the façade takes real acting ability, but they are many people’s window into another world.) People I know (Republicans) are still passing around that old Bill Cosby speech to the NAACP in which he scolds African-Americans for giving their children “funny” names. And Oprah is estimated to have lost seven percent of her astonishingly large audience when she moved to support Barack Obama.. Only in Medialand could Oprah have survived so long, cosseted by white friends and consultants in splendid virtual isolation. By endorsing fellow Chicagoan Obama,, she demonstrated her connection to him and his goals—and their shared racial identity—and that made a lot of people “uncomfortable.”

Monday night’s convention presentation demonstrated that the Democratic Party has been transformed by rules changes in the eighties that opened the party. Not only is the presumptive nominee a person of color, we heard from an eloquent Jesse Jackson, Jr., the congressman who will probably run for Obama’s seat if he goes to the White House, and via video, Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia civil rights leader who gave a moving tribute to the ailing Senator Ted Kennedy. By comparison, the performances of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach, seemed, well, pale. My vote for the Best Speech Given By a White Person (on Monday night) goes to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, who introduced the tribute to her uncle and gave a stirring endorsement of both him and Obama.

The complete roster of speakers for Monday night’s convention opener reveals an even more culturally diverse group who were not visible in prime time, something the party should consider as it heads to the election. http://www.demconvention.com/monday-schedule/

The Republican Party plays hard on fears that the waning dominance of white men will undermine our society. It’s up to the Democrats to demonstrate that those fears prevent us from becoming the great nation we claim to be.

Comfortable or not.