The Re-Celebrification of Malia Obama: Girlhood, Race, and Celebrity in News Coverage

Abstract

During her years in the White House, media access to Malia Obama was carefully regulated by her parents, resulting in largely positive, one-dimensional news coverage. Critically analyzing news coverage of Malia Obama during her transition from first daughter to independent young woman college student in the post–White House years of 2016 to 2019, we identify two sets of competing media frames—celebrity girl versus ordinary girl and can-do girl versus Ophelia girl—that paradoxically constructed Malia during these years. We argue that, through these tensions, the press worked to challenge, even undermine, the high-achieving, successful Black girl narrative cultivated during the Obama White House years. The result is a re-celebrification and re-racialization of Malia that evidences a disturbingly regressive and almost structurally retributional tone that differs from coverage of recent White first daughters.

Keywords:

• Black girls
• celebrification
• First Daughters
• Malia Obama
• news coverage

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Emily Ryalls and Meghan Howe as well as the journal’s editor and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 Amy Carter was nine years old in 1977 when her father, President Jimmy Carter, was sworn in. Prior to that, the children of President John F. Kennedy were the youngest. Caroline was a toddler and John Jr. a newborn when their father took office in 1961.

2 Interestingly, during the 2008 presidential campaign and shortly after, Michelle Obama was framed as an “angry Black woman” (Meyers & Goman, 2017).

3 Thank you to one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers for suggesting this concept of structural retribution.