Melania Trump owes Michelle Obama an apology. On Monday, Trump plagiarized several lines of Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. Not only did Melania Trump claim that she wrote the speech, "with as little help as possible," but the Donald Trump campaign has doubled down in support of her, suggesting that the lines she borrowed included "common words and phrases," and therefore represent nothing particularly unique or remarkable about Obama's own words. I guess this is what Melania Trump, and generations of white women, mean by "help." It seems to mean that they rely upon black women's labor to help them look good, sound good, and gain influence, while treating that labor as wholly expendable.

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Obama had a lot riding on her 2008 convention speech. Early in her husband's campaign, she had been roundly disparaged and condemned by the public as being angry, untrustworthy, and unpatriotic. After Barack Obama won the Iowa primary, Michelle Obama told an audience that for the first time in her life, she was proud of her country. Right-wing critics feigned outrage at her supposedly unpatriotic remarks, and suggested that her willingness to reference even indirectly America's history of racial discrimination and injustice was divisive.

When Obama stepped to the podium in 2008, her speech was not only a referendum on her husband's fitness for the presidency, but on her fitness for the position of first lady. Trump labored under no such pressure Monday night. Yes, the wives of powerful men are always under extreme scrutiny about their dress, comportment, intelligence, and performance of femininity. Trump is no exception. She has and will face sexism. But even the brouhaha over exposure of her nude photo shoot in British GQ has fallen out of the news cycle. Trump did not have to prove the worthiness of white women to be granted the status of ladyhood, in the same way that Obama had to do as a representative black woman in 2008.

Melania Trump has kept a low profile for most of Donald Trump's campaign, so her speech was in many respects an introduction to the American public, and in particular to Trump's constituency. Reportedly, she was understandably nervous. For a party that still retains deep skepticism about its top man, her speech was an opportunity to unify the GOP and offer a clear visual of Donald Trump as traditional family man.

Instead, Melania Trump or her speechwriters chose to plagiarize several lines of text from Obama's 2008 speech. After a journalist exposed the plagiarism on Twitter, the Trump campaign vehemently denied that use of direct quotations from Obama's speech constitutes plagiarism.

Words mean things. And plagiarism means using the ideas or words of another person without proper attribution. Rather than acknowledge this, Paul Manafort, the head of the Trump campaign, argued that this is all an elaborate ruse by the Clinton campaign. "This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down," Manafort claimed.

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Clinton has nothing to do with Trump's choice to steal Obama's words. And it is an insult to every thinking American to suggest otherwise. I am a college professor. I have had students plagiarize material. And those students have received severe consequences for plagiarizing far fewer words than Trump has done.

Beyond the clear ethical violations here, there is a larger principle at play in the way that a Republican vision of the world relies on both the manual and intellectual labor of black women, while hating black women in practice. The GOP is the party of strident dog-whistle politics. It is known for using buzzwords like "welfare" and "food stamps," words that conjure visions of poor black women with too many children, to appeal to the biases of their base. The GOP's stances against Planned Parenthood, the Affordable Care Act, regulation of big banks and corporations, and the social safety net have disproportionately bad impacts on the lives of black women. For instance, the failure of the Republican Party to rein in big banks means African American women became disproportionate victims of the subprime lending and subsequent foreclosure crisis after 2008. Moreover, poor women of color rely on the reproductive care services provided by Planned Parenthood; the GOP platform even calls for the defunding of the organization.

Now the wife of the Republican nominee boldly steals the thinking and words of the current first lady. And now pundits and commentators on the right and the left suggested on morning news programs that we should feel sympathy for Trump. I believe that Trump's speech suggests at some level that she identifies with and admires Obama, but I have no sympathy for white women who appropriate and steal the intellectual labor of black women. The idea that white women are always sympathetic, even when they have lied, cheated, or stolen, is morally repugnant and offensive to black women who are often viewed as untrustworthy even when we are at the top of our respective games. Taylor Swift has also profited from this vulnerable white femininity narrative by trafficking in ideas that she was being picked on by Kanye West, even when he clearly obtained consent to make reference to her in his music. In black feminist circles, we refer to this never-ending procession of sympathy for white women in the face of clear offense as "white lady tears." Black women are afforded no such kindnesses.

Ask Michelle Obama.

In 2008, she retreated into the safe and acceptable role of "mom-in-chief" after her earlier comments on the campaign trail caused Americans of all stripes to characterize her as angry and divisive. A July 2008 cover of the New Yorker unwittingly reinforced the narrative of her as untrustworthy, when it attempted to satirize the outsize public reactions to her by representing her as an afro-wearing, gun-toting, Black Power revolutionary, who shared a threatening fist bump with her Muslim husband.

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Her femininity has been challenged on multiple occasions, as congressmen have referred to her "large posterior" and bristled at her audacity in taking an official portrait with her arms showing. Trump's femininity will not be adjudicated in such severe terms. Already, she is the beneficiary of white female privilege in the way this conversation is being constructed. For instance, the plagiarism in her speech is absolutely elementary — changing or removing a word every so often — in ways that a professional speechwriter would never do. The plagiarism was brazen and intentional. Still, the current political conversation is about how Donald Trump and the campaign should protect her, and a speechwriter should be identified and fired. Thus Melania Trump emerges as the victim rather than the perpetrator of what is clearly an ethical violation, and she can do so because she is a white woman.

When Michelle Obama spoke the truth about America's past and present history of racial atrocity, she became a threat to her husband's chances. Melania Trump's actions may hurt Donald Trump, but ultimately this will probably have little bearing on whether he wins the presidency.

This is the essence of white privilege — even clear fuckups get explained away and come with little consequence. Meanwhile, if you're black, telling the truth can cost you everything. And after all that, you can be subjected to eight years of disrespect and then have your very words stolen, while the same people who have cast aspersions upon you claim their actions are justified. Moreover, you get to watch people profit from your labor, while telling you that labor is unremarkable and meaningless.

Melania Trump is currently being cast as the damsel in distress who at worst committed a mistake of the "Legally Blonde airhead" variety. Michelle Obama, however, in many respects, had the weight of her husband's campaign riding on her speech. She had to both humanize herself and him, in a way that won American hearts and minds. And she did it. She rose to the occasion, as black women overachievers have to do each and every day.

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