This article, framed epistemologically and politically by women of color theory, examines Michelle Obama's response to her racist and sexist treatment in the mainstream U.S. media's coverage of the 2008 presidential election campaign. I argue that Obama uses the very tools of postidentity, a conservative ideology that promotes the fiction that the country has arrived at an ''after'' moment of racism and sexism, to argue against postidentity, a safe manner to engage in racism and misogyny in the 21st century. Understanding Michelle Obama's speaking back to postidentity ideology provides minoritized 21st century subjects with a means to understand how power, privilege, racialized and gendered discrimination, and resistance function in the new millennium United States.
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