Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked.

Kudos to Sophia Nelson…her article in the Washington Post, “Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked.” speaks truth to light regarding the negative stereotypes associated with black women.

Take a moment to read the article and let me know your thoughts about it. I’d really love to have a serious dialog about why Michelle Obama was depicted as a gun toting Black Panther in the mold of Assata Shakur on the cover of The New Yorker. (Although I personally fail to see how that is a negative caricature seeing that Assata was a freedom fighter that resisted American terrorism during the Civil Rights Movement.)

Personally, as a black man who is a husband to a strong black woman, father to a future strong black woman, as well as, a son and a brother to strong black women…I am completely surrounded by them. And to be honest, I could not imagine my life without them.

Here is a small sample from the Washington Post article written by Sophia Nelson:

There she is — no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.

It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves.

Welcome to our world.

We’ve watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: “angry black woman.” And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated “makeover” to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.