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PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

First lady Michelle Obama isn't holding back.

During a commencement speech at Tuskegee University on Saturday, Obama spoke frankly about the role her racial identity played during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others,” she told the class of 2015. “Was I too loud or too emasculating? Or was I too soft? Too much of a mom and not enough of a career woman?”

Obama referenced her satirical portrayal on a July 2008 cover of the New Yorker magazine as a terrorist.

“Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover,” Obama told the graduates at the historically black Alabama college. “It was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and a machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I'm really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder 'just how are people seeing me?'”

Directing her remarks to her African-American audience, Obama spoke from her own experience on how racial inequality impacts opportunity.

“The road ahead is not going to be easy,” Obama said. “It never is, especially for folks like you and me.”

Obama then aired a laundry list of slights she said black Americans deal with on a regular basis.

“We've both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives. The folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety, the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores. The people at formal events who assumed we were the help,” Obama said. “And those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country, and I know that these little indignities are obviously nothing compared to what folks across the country are dealing with every single day. Those nagging worries about whether you're going to get stopped or pulled over for absolutely no reason. The fear that your job application will be overlooked because of the way your name sounds.”

Obama also stressed that those experiences were “not an excuse” to “lose hope.”