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Michelle Obama Goes After Black Voters For Helping Elect MAGA: Our Folks Didn’t Show Up, People Think This Is A Game

Michelle Obama Goes After Black Voters For Helping Elect MAGA: Our Folks Didn’t Show Up, People Think This Is A Game

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama goes after Black voters for helping elect MAGA: “Our folks didn’t show up … people think this is a game.” Former First Lady Michelle Obama speaks with student Lauren about her book “Becoming” during a roundtable discussion at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Nov 12, 2018, in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

Former First Lady Michelle Obama, 56, expressed her frustration at the low Black turnout at the polls in 2016, and said it was a “slap in the face’’.

In an upcoming new Netflix documentary called “Becoming,” Michelle Obama said part of the blame for Donald Trump being in office is on Black people who failed to go and vote.  “Becoming” is set to air on May 6.

Black voter turnout decreased in 2016, while white turnout increased, according to Pew Research

The Black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6 percent in 2016 after reaching a record-high of 66.6 percent in 2012. The 7-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for Black people, Pew reported. It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2 percent in 1992 to 60.7 percent in 1996. The number of Black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016 — a sharp reversal from 2012. With Barack Obama on the ballot in 2012, the Black voter turnout rate surpassed that of whites for the first time.

The Netflix documentary “Becoming” chronicles Michelle Obama’s book tour for her bestselling book of the same name.

“I understand the people who voted for Trump,” she said. “The people who didn’t vote at all, the young people, the women, that’s when you think, man, people think this is a game. It wasn’t just in this election. Every midterm. Every time Barack didn’t get the Congress he needed, that was because our folks didn’t show up. After all that work, they just couldn’t be bothered to vote at all. That’s my trauma,” The Daily Beast reported.

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Michelle Obama talks in the documentary about the famous phrase she uses — “When they go low, we go high.”

“It takes some energy to go high, and we were exhausted from it…when you’re the first Black anything,’’ she said of her and her husband, former President Barack Obama.

She reflected on the pain of the 2016 presidential election.

“You know, the day I left the White House, it was painful to sit on that stage, and then a lot of our folks didn’t vote — it was almost a slap in the face,” she said, speaking to a group of Black schoolchildren in the clip while reflecting to the 2016 election, The New York Post reported.

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