Before they were the First Family, President Obama and Michelle Obama had trouble hailing cabs in Chicago and were mistaken for the help.
“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys,” President Obama told People magazine in an interview published online Wednesday.
Michelle Obama said that people at black tie dinners would ask her husband “to get coffee” and a store clerk asked her to retrieve something from a shelf during a widely-publicized trip to Target just a couple of years ago.
“Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her,” she said. “Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.”
The Obamas agreed that things have gotten better since they have lived in the White House but Americans can make more progress fighting racial prejudice in everyday life.
“The small irritations or indignities that we experience are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced,” President Obama said.
“It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala,” he added. “It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.”
The First Family shared their stories about race and class with the magazine in the wake of the nationally publicized deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island.