Analysis

The Haagen-Dazs Incident Is Not The First Time Michelle Obama Called A Random Shopper Racist

(Photo by MARTIN SYLVEST/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)

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Former first lady Michelle Obama has a history of calling random shoppers racist.

Michelle most recently detailed an alleged experience at a Haagen-Dazs where she was cut in line by a white woman during “The Michelle Obama Podcast” uploaded on Aug. 26.

“We were stopping to get ice cream and I had told the secret service to stand back, because we were trying to be normal, trying to go in,” Michelle said in the podcast. “There was a line, and… when I’m just a Black woman, I notice that white people don’t even see me. They’re not even looking at me.” (RELATED: Michelle Obama Details Her Experiences With Racism As First Lady)

“So I’m standing there with two little Black girls, another Black female adult, they’re in soccer uniforms, and a white woman cuts right in front of us to order,” she continued. “Like, she didn’t even see us. The girl behind the counter  almost took her order. And I had to stand up ’cause I know Denielle was like ‘Well, I’m not gonna cause a scene with Michelle Obama.’ So I stepped up and I said, ‘Excuse me? You don’t see us four people standing right here? You just jumped in line?'”

As previously reported, Michelle claimed the woman “didn’t apologize” to her and “never looked [her] in [the] eye.”

It’s not the first time Michelle has accused anonymous shoppers of racism. There was the evolution of the infamous target story a few years ago, which evolved from a heart warming moment of shared humanity into yet another example of deep racism, all in just three years.

In 2011, CNN reported Michelle had been spotted at a Target in an article titled, “First Lady Steps Out, Quietly Does Some Shopping At Target.” Years later in 2014, Michelle accused a random woman she had met during the trip of not seeing her “as the first lady,” but as “someone who could help her” during an interview with People magazine.

“I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf,” Michelle told the outlet. “Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.”

However, Michelle described the Target trip and the woman who asked her for help in a very different light during an interview on David Letterman back in 2012. Michelle claimed the woman had been short and needed help from a tall person.

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“I thought I was undercover,” Michelle told Letterman. “I have to tell you something about this trip though. No one knew that was me because a woman actually walked up to me, right? I was in the detergent aisle, and she said — I kid you not — she said, ‘Excuse me, I just have to ask you something,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, cover’s blown.’ She said, ‘Can you reach on that shelf and hand me the detergent?’  I kid you not…And the only thing she said — I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down — she said, ‘Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.’ That was my interaction.

“I felt so good. … She had no idea who I was,” the former first lady said at the time. “I thought, as soon as she walked up — I was with my assistant, and I said, ‘This is it, it’s over. We’re going to have to leave.’ She just needed the detergent.”

Michelle has used both of these instances to claim white people treat black women like they “don’t exist.”

“And when we do exist, we exist as a threat,” Michelle recently said. “And that, that’s exhausting.”