While listening to former First Lady Michelle Obama’s new advice podcast, IMO, co-hosted with her brother, Craig Robinson, a single thought kept hammering me: what advice would Michelle’s and Craig’s parents have given to young Americans struggling to make it in a country that has become prohibitive for young families?
I ask because the pair’s parents would have an invaluable perspective about the combination of personal discipline and social support needed to make it in America. Instead, their children offer a light and frothy piece of aesthetics, like the kinds of luxury goods that surround the rich.
Michelle and Craig were raised in a working-class milieu in Chicago’s South Shore area. Their childhood home was tiny, as they emphasise at length in the first episode, and the close relationship the siblings forged was in part a function of proximity; the two shared a room growing up. It’s a moving account, and Michelle, especially, radiates the grace that endeared her to Americans before the sharp polarisation of recent years.
Their mother, Marian Shields Robinson, was a secretary-turned-homemaker. Their father, Fraser Robinson III, was a civil servant with multiple sclerosis who never missed a day of work. From these humble beginnings, the children went on to earn three Ivy League degrees between them. Craig reveals in the podcast that he made millions as a bond trader before retiring to become a coach, while Michelle Obama’s estimated net worth with her husband, former President Barack Obama, is $70 million.
The two embody the American Dream at a time when many Americans who grow up as they did — especially black Americans — never make it out of poverty. Even black men from affluent families are much more likely to end up poor than to maintain the lifestyle they grew up with.
Michelle’s and Craig’s parents were possessed of immense personal virtues, but they made their way in a very different economy and society from the ones we have now. Young men, especially those without college degrees, have a much harder time finding material stability and spiritual dignity owing to the decimation of the real economy by financialisation and globalisation — processes that Michelle’s husband did precious little to stop and in many ways accelerated while he led the nation. It has led to the breakdown of broader family support networks. The two-parent family, defined by the irreplaceable mixture of “discipline and love”, as Christopher Lasch put it, is no longer the norm, and middle-class values are thus much more difficult to transmit across generations.
Alas, the younger Robinson siblings aren’t interested in addressing such pressing concerns. Instead, on IMO (internet slang for “in my opinion”), Michelle and Craig invite other fabulously wealthy people to sit in a rented Airbnb and wax philosophical about such pressing issues as when to decide you’ve given enough to someone else and it’s time to focus on yourself, when to break off friendships, how to be vulnerable, and how young women can get better at asking for what they want.
Their “experts” are mainly celebrities such as Issa Rae, Seth Rogan, Tracee Ellis Ross, Dwayne Wade, and Gabrielle Union. Put another way, the podcast’s heavy-hitting strength is also a perfect example of what ails the Democratic Party: it’s by and for the rich — specifically, rich women.
In the first episode, Michelle and Craig begin with an account of their upbringing. “We weren’t wealthy”, Michelle recalls. “And Dad was working class. We lived in the same apartment our whole lives. It was essentially two bedrooms”.
“No, it was one bedroom”, Craig corrects her.
“Well, that little offshoot bedroom that Mom and Dad stayed in, you would consider that a bedroom, right?”
“But that was the only bedroom”, Craig insists. “The room we were in was actually the living room, and the living room, what we called the living room, was actually the dining room.”
But the kitchen was the gathering place. “And in our house, you know, we as young people with our parents, what they did for us was they invited us to sit with them at the table and talk”, Michelle recalls. “They wanted to hear our ideas. They wanted to hear our opinions. I think that our parents offered us both the first table where we gained confidence in our voices, where we felt like who we were, what we thought, how we felt was important. And not because it was important to the rest of the world, but it was important to them”.
It’s a lovely anecdote that situates you in the Robinson’s warm home. But it is also revealing: the siblings were raised in a family that stressed what sociologists have identified as the habits that inform a middle-class upbringing. Middle-class parents ask their children a lot of questions. They raise kids in two-parent households. They put a premium on education and extracurricular activities. They convey to their children that their autonomy matters, but also that they have to take responsibility for their actions.
The middle-class culture of the Robinson home was made possible in a wider economy that stressed stability, full employment, and good wages and benefits. The loss of these common goods — as a result of a bipartisan push to liberalise trade, immigration, and social mores — is now fuelling populist uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic. These trends have also driven a sharp wedge between the Democratic Party, founded in the early 19th century as a vehicle for workers and farmers, and its traditional constituencies.
“The rest of us commiserate over getting fired — these ladies commiserate over firing unsatisfactory employees.”
This is perhaps the most compelling issue of our time. Yet such issues — whether from the standpoint of individual advice or social critique — are of little interest to Obama, Robinson, and their guests. After looking back on the Robinson home, the first episode is mostly devoted to a conversation with the Issa Rae (net worth estimated at $20 million), and the subject is friendship. The three address a “question” they “got from a listener” about how to react to a friend cutting off contact.
Throughout the conversation, the pure opulence of the trio’s lifestyle is recurring theme. Rae, it turns out, is a newly minted restaurateur, because she couldn’t find a restaurant she liked enough to patronise on her last birthday — so she opened her own. Later in the episode, when complaining about imbalances in friendships, the first example that comes to Michelle is a friend who never invites her on trips.
At another point, Michelle recalls checking in with a friend and asking if her friend had fired that HR person she was having problems with: “Remember that HR person you were going let go? What happened with that girl?” The rest of us commiserate over getting fired — these ladies commiserate over firing unsatisfactory employees. At another point, Michelle recalls picking up her nephews from school in a motorcade (relatable!).
The real problem with IMO, then, is that Michelle thinks her success would make her a reasonable person from whom to seek advice. Yet the part of her that achieved that success, and the social structures that made this possible, are utterly uninteresting to her. Meanwhile, it’s the part that’s completely unrelatable — the opulent lifestyle, the celebrity friends, the lack of real problems that leaves time to endlessly complain about her husband’s lateness and lack of curiosity — that takes centre stage. The implication is that it’s interesting because, well, she’s Michelle Obama. It’s not interesting. It’s actually quite boring.
There is a lot of talk about “vulnerability” and “opening up”, yet there’s precious little that reveals anything deep. Certainly, there’s nothing discomforting (one imagines Michelle Obama is seldom uncomfortable). Obama insists that emotional vulnerability is crucial in a friendship for her, but she doesn’t expose any weaknesses at all.
The one break in the façade of perfection is when Michelle complains about her husband, which she does more than you would have imagined. There’s a clear bias against men in general with their silent, masculine ways, their refusal to engage in small talk, or ask how people’s kids are doing. “That’s why y’all broken”, she tells her brother. “Y’all don’t talk about nothing”. At a time when the Democrats have a serious problem with two main groups — men and the working class — this podcast is a symptom of why that is. IMO.
