Politics & Power Quote by Kathryn Stockett

Stockett’s pride reads like a victory lap taken at the exact moment the baton is still being contested. Written in the afterglow of Barack Obama’s election, the line captures a cultural high that felt, to many Americans, like moral proof-of-progress: history has turned a corner, the country has redeemed itself, the arc is bending the right way. The energy is real. So is the convenience.

The subtext is assimilationist and symbolic: representation becomes the receipt. An African-American president and a charismatic First Lady are offered as evidence that the nation has matured, that the old racial order has been outvoted and outgrown. The phrase "look how far we've come" doesn’t just celebrate change; it quietly proposes closure. It invites the audience to exhale, to treat racial justice as a destination reached rather than a set of power relations still actively maintained.

Michelle Obama’s presence is doing double duty here. Calling her "stellar" and "setting the standard for American women" folds race into a broader national ideal, positioning Obama as an exemplary figure who validates American womanhood as much as she complicates it. It’s admiration, but also a kind of national branding: America looks better because she looks impeccable.

Coming from a novelist associated with narratives of Black domestic labor and white conscience, the statement also echoes a familiar posture in liberal culture: gratitude for progress paired with a quick pivot away from discomfort. The rhetoric isn’t malicious; it’s optimistic. Its blind spot is how easily optimism becomes permission to stop looking.