Peter Baker writes for the New York Times:
CHICAGO — She looked around and saw herself three decades ago, young and uncertain, from a part of town where success is a struggle, not a birthright. She knew what they had been through, what it was like to take the long way home to avoid gangs, what it was like when the family strained to make ends meet.
For Michelle Obama on Tuesday night, addressing a graduating high school class from the South Side near where she grew up summoned memories and offered a chance to draw lessons from her own upbringing: Never be afraid to ask for help, she told them. Instead of being discouraged by hardship, reach higher.
Michelle Obama spoke at graduation at King College Prep High School in Chicago on Tuesday.Michelle Obama Urges Chicago Graduates to Transcend a TragedyJUNE 9, 2015
At a time of roiling debate over the issues of race and opportunity, punctuated by the events of Ferguson, Staten Island and Baltimore, the nation’s first African-American first lady has added her voice. It is not a new message for her, but one that has taken on special resonance and one delivered with bracing candor in recent speeches. Along the way, Mrs. Obama has opened a window into her own life, not just in Chicago but also in the White House.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Standardized testing must be sheer psychological hell for negroes generally and especially for the “talented tenth” among them. Imagine growing up in a community where you are indeed much smarter than everyone around you. Imagine having also the negro’s innate unwarranted self-aggrandizing braggadocio. Everything confirms your enormously inflated self-esteem except those State mandated standardized tests which consistently place you at or below grade level. Surely those white man tests are part of a racist conspiracy to hold you down – how could it be otherwise? So you apply to a premier university and, since you checked the box for “African American” and wrote an unintelligible essay about blackness, you are admitted despite an SAT score more appropriate to a local junior college. Your college career is a mixed bag with great grades in your chosen major, blackness, but poor grades in every other class. You can’t help but notice, in those other classes, that white and Asian students appear to have some mysterious advantage – almost as it they’re given the answers to classroom and test questions.
In the end, your college career instills in you a sense that you can only retain your smug superior self-esteem among other negroes and that among whites and Asians who are either much smarter or cheaters, you feel only rage.
Of course the other possibility is that you realize upon exposure to white and Asian students that negroes really are cognitively deficient and this leads to a whole new worldview. But obviously this is the exception and not the rule. What I wonder is what leads to this path rather than the more common path of rage against whitey. Why do a small number of negroes become Thomas Sowell instead of the usual Barry Obola (I do think Sowell is much much smarter, but assuming they were the same IQ, is there a single point of departure for the diametrically opposite viewpoints)?
* My favorite statement on Michelle Obama was by Christopher Hitchens:
“I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
Apparently, it’s a language known to Sonia Sotomayor. She is equally “fluent” in it.
* I think we need a neologism. Along the lines of “mansplaining, it would be “blacksplaining” and would refer to the fact that so many blacks like to use their time in the spotlight to complain about everything. Most people regard it as undignified and annoying to complain too much, but prominent blacks feel their endlessly repeated grievances are fascinating and of great importance.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2008:
Princeton won’t let you read the senior thesis written by Mrs. Michelle Obama, a Sociology major / African American Studies minor, until after we’ve made her First Lady:
Robinson, Michelle LaVaughn (1985): Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community [Restricted until November 5, 2008].
But, a Newhouse News reporter apparently wrote it up last year before the curtain came down [via Allah Pundit at Hot Air]:
In her 1985 Princeton senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” Michelle LaVaughn Robinson lamented that white professors and classmates always saw her as “Black first and a student second.”
She had surveyed alumni to see whether they sacrificed their commitment to other blacks on the altar of success, and foresaw for herself an uneasy future: “further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”…
As Michelle Obama wrote in her thesis introduction, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”…
Michelle Obama was guided in her choice of thesis topic by a consuming concern that her success might compromise her black identity. As she wrote in her conclusion:
“I wondered whether or not my education at Princeton would affect my identification with the Black community. I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with Whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that Black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”…
Michelle Obama’s fears of losing touch with her roots without ever being embraced into the mainstream led her to promise, in her thesis introduction, “to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community.”
Okay, it’s schoolgirlish in style, especially compared to her husband’s sonorous mature prose, but she was only 21 when she wrote it. The important thing, though, is that the artlessness of her writing allows the meaning to shine through more obviously than in Dreams From My Father — but it’s the same Story of Race and Inheritance.
That doesn’t mean Mr. and Mrs. Obama still feel the way about race as they did in 1995, when Sen. Obama wrote his autobiography. Maybe they’ve changed their minds over the last 13 years? But shouldn’t somebody ask them about it? I realize a lot of people think it would be an invasion of their privacy, but they are running for the White House.
Senator and Mrs. Obama, clearly, you both had big racial chips on your shoulders when you were younger. Are you still like that? You changed? When? Why? Would you advise other blacks to stop being so resentful?
When I read Obama’s autobiography a year ago and said that Obama is not who you think he is, a lot of people said I was crazy and evil. Well, it’s slowly playing out along the lines I sketched out back then.
– By the way, if Barack serves eight years as President, that would give Michelle eight years to parachute into some random state to be Senator so that she could run for President herself in 2024 at the exact same age Hillary is now.
– My wife says that if Obama gets the nomination and McCain picks Secretary of State Rice as his running mate, either Condi or Michelle is going to have to get a new hair-do or it’s going to be a very confusing fall for television news shows. My wife feels Michelle has the elegant bone structure to go with the old Diahann Carrol-look of just pulling her hair straight back tight. (I think Lena Horne did the same thing.) That also gets around all the race minefields about why she is relaxing her hair (which I imagine Michelle has thought a lot about.)
– Although Newsweek says Mrs. Obama didn’t graduate at the top of her high school class, keep in mind that she did go to Whitney Young, a big public school that only admits students via entrance exam (like Stuyvesant in NYC). On the other hand, if her teachers told her she didn’t have the grades and test scores to get into the Princeton, they’d know, because Whitney Young has sent lots of grads to the Ivy League. So, she probably needed the double whammy of both affirmative action and being the legacy sister of her much-liked two-year-older brother Craig Robinson, who was on Princeton’s famously scrappy underdog basketball team and is now the head coach at Brown. Michelle always saw him as the smart one in the family, so she was already sensitive about her intelligence before she got to Princeton.
– Toss in the class difference — Princeton has always been very upper crusty, while she comes from solid but very lower middle class family — and the usual teenage self-consciousness, and it’s hardly surprising that Michelle was perpetually peeved at Princeton. Unfortunately, it sounds like she blamed all her inevitable adolescent angst on whites, a common response aggravated by the side effects of affirmative action, as I pointed out way back in 1991.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2008:
The Obama camp has now released Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton. So far, I’ve read the Dedication and the first couple of pages of the Introduction, and that’s plenty. You’ve got to be impressed with how ruthless Senator Obama is — he’ll humiliate his poor wife by releasing her semi-literate college graduation maunderings just so he can say, “Let’s move on.”
DEDICATION
To Mom, Dad, Craig [her brother], and all of my special friends:
Thank-you for loving me and always making me feel good about myself.
And here’s part of her creatively punctuated Introduction:
“The purpose of this study is to examine various attitudes of Black Princeton alumni in their present state and as they are perceived by the alumni to have changed over time. …
“These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.”
Well, thank-you. You have presently, made my day; never having a better one.
(I originally figured this 1985 thesis was created on a typewriter, which would have made it harder to fix typos, but the columns are justified, so it was done on some sort of word processor. Still, Princeton grads are supposed to know that there is no hyphen in “thank you” …)
So, it looks like Barack has had his vengeance on Michelle for calling him “stinky” and “snore-y.“
Okay, it’s schoolgirlish in style, especially compared to her husband’s sonorous mature prose, but she was only 21 when she wrote it. The important thing, though, is that the artlessness of her writing allows the meaning to shine through more obviously than in Dreams From My Father — but it’s the same Story of Race and Inheritance.
And she sure has some self-esteem issues, doesn’t she? I think that’s part of her appeal to the Oprah audience: her inflated but fragile ego. Oprah’s fans can identify with Mrs. Obama. People were always telling them that they weren’t smart enough either; and, yet, here they are, sitting around watching daytime TV. Who’s laughing now?
For some reason, Mrs. Obama’s psyche always reminds me of Steve Martin’s climactic speech in “Three Amigos:”
“In a way, each of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be *the actual* El Guapo!”
Keep in mind that Mrs. Obama not only got into Princeton, but then got into Harvard Law School, graduated, and even passed the Illinois bar exam. So, maybe, prose just isn’t her strong suit.
A reader comments:
The Illinois Supreme Court website says Michelle Obama was admitted to the bar on May 12, 1989 and voluntarily went inactive in 1993.
Barak Obama was admitted December 17, 1991 and went inactive this year.
A reader who is an attorney in Illinois explains:
The May admission to the bar is for those who took the Winter (March I think) bar exam. Most take the July bar exam, and I think were admitted in October, so I don’t understand Obama’s date of admission. Not everyone who graduates in May takes the July exam, but in Mrs. Obama’s case she was already at Sidley and Austin, so I’d guess her main job would’ve been studying for the bar exam. So, the guess would be she didn’t pass the July exam and did pass the winter exam, what with over half a year of studying for it. Now, many folks who attend schools like Harvard aren’t really taught the things that are on bar exams, if only because many of their profs don’t want to teach it (too boring).
Comments to Steve Sailer in 2008:
* Wow, and this illiterate made it into Harvard Law School? That’s just sick and outrageous.
Hopefully, a lot of people, including the talk radio hacks, will jump on this. But I doubt it. Issues of comparative black intelligence are just too touchy. Maybe they always will be.
Also, our culture is probably not literate enough for many people to care. I frequently notice public figures misusing and mispronouncing words.
Anyway, I could write better than this when I was twelve. She seems to have graduated from Princeton and went on to Harvard Law without having grasped the basics of punctuation. Not only is “Thank-you” a howler, but what about the semicolon before “never becoming” that should be a comma. And the comma after “presently” which makes no sense and shouldn’t be there at all?
* A shrewd move by Obama.
It makes his wife look like a dope for the few who care, but no one will mention this fact in polite public company.
Instead the uncritical MSM Obamanics will just note the fact that the mere lifting of the veil proves there is nothing to see (without actually reading or commenting on the actual paper).
* I thought the comma after “presently” was kind of cute. Read it out loud and pause there for a moment. It’s a drunken English barrister effect.
* Oh, come on, you guys. She seems to have commanded a good vocabulary. Princeton wasn’t going to teach her standard English punctuation (in the mid-1980’s) if she hadn’t learned it in high school (especially because she was black, so her work was exempt from all criticism by TA’s or professors).
As for the unsophisticated quality of her ideas, well, she was a Sociology and [race] Studies major.
Obviously her HLS admission was pure AA, but I don’t think her thesis looks so bad.
* She also misuses a semi-colon, in a place where a comma would have been correct. The desire to shoe-horn semi-colons where they don’t belong is often a sign of intellectual insecurity.
* I read the first 25 pages at politico.com…
My Struggle would be a catchier title for this work. I’m only half-joking.
It reads like an emotional personal diary entry gussied up as “thesis”.
This is a totally race-obsessed individual. She and Obama must have been two peas in a pod back in the day. It is no surprise that they ended up at the African identity church.
* Thank-you Steve; for your kind work. And also for understanding that Michelle. Obama. Is laboring under the oppressive White power structure that gave her a free, ride at Princeton. How horrible.
* Lots of comments on the writing style and its relative lack of sophistication, but why isn’t anyone more explicitly noting the incredibly simplistic nature of the investigation itself? This is nothing but a survey that I’d expect out of a first year community college student. There is absolutely no inferential statistics at all, nor any attempt to test her various hypotheses using them. Didn’t they require Sociology majors to take Stats at Princeton?
* Her writing is terrible. She has considerable reason to be insecure. She didn’t belong at Princeton. She certainly didn’t belong at Harvard Law. I wouldn’t say her intellectual shortcomings should disqualify her from being First Lady, but her hatred of America, that’s a different story.
On an another note, I haven’t seen you ever mention LA mayor Villaraigosa’s education before. He attended literally one of the worst law schools in the entire country, People’s College of Law, which is not accredited by the ABA or the state of California. He failed the bar exam four times before giving up. The future looks bright, doesn’t it?
STEVE SAILER WROTE IN 2008:
Newsweek has a long article on the wonderfulness of Mrs. Obama, but she sounds like she’s got a log-sized chip on her shoulder from lucking into Princeton due to affirmative action. For predictable reasons, being admitted into one of the Big Four super colleges and being given lots of financial aid didn’t instill in her a feeling of gratitude toward the benevolence of white people. Instead, it just fed her adolescent self-consciousness and racial paranoia. The bad news is that she doesn’t seem to have gotten over it yet. (She’s 44).
She did well in school (she skipped second grade), but she was not at the top of her class. She didn’t get the attention of the school’s college counselors, who helped the brightest students find spots at prestigious universities. “Princeton, the Ivy Leagues swoop up kids” like [her brother] Craig, Michelle says. “A black kid from the South Side of Chicago that plays basketball and is smart. He was getting in everywhere. But I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, ‘I can do that too’.” Some of her teachers told her she didn’t have the grades or test scores to make it to the Ivies. But she applied to Princeton and was accepted.
Overwhelmingly white and privileged, Princeton was not an easy place for a young black woman from the inner city. There weren’t formal racial barriers and black students weren’t officially excluded. But many of the white students couldn’t hide that they regarded their African- American classmates as affirmative-action recipients who didn’t really deserve to be there.
Angela Acree, a close friend who attended Princeton with Michelle, says the university didn’t help dispel that idea. Black and Hispanic students were invited to attend special classes a few weeks before the beginning of freshman semester, which the school said were intended to help kids who might need assistance adjusting to Princeton’s campus. Acree couldn’t see why. She had come from an East Coast prep school; Michelle had earned good grades in Chicago. “We weren’t sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, ‘Let’s bring all the black kids together’.”
Obviously, this program wasn’t put together by the Princeton klavern of the Ku Klux Klan, it was planned by the Princeton diversity sensitivity outreach nook. One reason diversicrats want to bring all the black freshmen to campus before everybody else is so they’ll bond to each other, not to random whites and Asians during the regular orientation week. During the first few days of a new phase of life, you are very emotionally open to bonding with the other people who are going through the experience with you. So, the diversicrats can build a constituency by holding special pre-orientations for blacks.
Acree, Michelle and another black student, Suzanne Alele, became inseparable companions.
Exactly as planned.
The three of them talked often about the racial divide on campus—especially how white students they knew from class would pass them on the green and pretend not to see them. “It was, like, here comes a black kid,” says Acree. The black students tended to hang out together at the Third World Center, a social club on campus, while the white party scene revolved around Princeton’s eating clubs.
Michelle felt the tension acutely enough that she made it the subject of her senior sociology thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” The paper is now under lock and key, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Michelle wrote that Princeton “made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.” She wrote that she felt like a visitor on the supposedly open-minded campus. “Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton,” she wrote, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.” (Today, Michelle says, not quite convincingly, that she can’t remember what was in her thesis.)
If she’d gone to, say, the University of Illinois or wherever she would have gotten in without affirmative action, she wouldn’t have spent four years knowing that she was below the student body average in intelligence; she wouldn’t have spent four years worrying that everybody else was noticing she wasn’t as smart as the average; and she wouldn’t have spend four years, plus the next 22, hating them for noticing it.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2008:
For a year now, I`ve been pointing out that, while Sen. Barack Obama`s brain may be in the center, his heart is on the far left. So it might be of some interest to find out more about whether his head or his heart is likely to prevail if he becomes President.
Curiously, the Main Stream Media has shown little appetite for this task.
Obama himself may not know the answer. As he has bragged (or warned, depending upon your point of view): “What I am constantly trying to do … is balance a hard head with a big heart.”
We`re not accustomed to politicians as smart as Obama. White voters would likely find his supple intelligence too elitist in a white candidate. But they are so desperate for a positive role model for blacks that many of them have embraced Obama without knowing much about what he wants to do with all that brainpower.
Two weeks ago, I noted:
“Now, Obama is a smooth operator. But the two people who have had the greatest influence on his adult life—his wife Michelle and his spiritual advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.—are not. They feel a deep racial anger and are not terribly good at hiding it.”
Right on cue, Michelle Obama has now begun attracting skeptical attention for the first time after making hundreds of speeches on her husband`s behalf. In Milwaukee last week, she proclaimed:
“Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
It`s not so much that Michelle has a tin ear for rhetoric as that her husband`s ear could be made out of the same mimetic poly-alloy as the liquid metal shape-shifting cyborg from the future in Terminator 2. Like most human beings, however, Michelle is prone to the occasional gaffe in which she lets us know what`s really on her mind.
For example, in an early February speech she let herself sound like the Khmer Rouge Minister of Propaganda. While this excerpt may resemble an old Dead Kennedys punk rock parody of leftist authoritarianism, such as Holiday in Cambodia or California Uber Alles, she was serious:
“And Barack Obama will require you to work.
He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage.
Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed…”
More people are beginning to notice that the candidate`s superbly crafted image as the postracial uniter doesn`t quite add up. He is supposed to bring us together to overcome our tragic history of racial enmity, etc. Yet his role-model magic doesn`t seem to have worked on his own wife, who continues to vent her anger over the racial indignities she feels she endured more than two decades ago at ultra-liberal Princeton and Harvard Law School. She remains perennially peeved by her relatively poor performance on standardized tests.
Or, perhaps, what he tells her in private isn`t what he tells us in public?
It`s not VDARE.com`s job to endorse political candidates. And I certainly don`t have a dog in what`s left of this fight.
But it is our job to help educate the public on crucial topics where the MainStream Media won`t. I have little to add to the discussion of such shopworn old pols as Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
In contrast, I believe I understand Obama better than most pundits because the mixed-race candidate has been brooding for 35 years about “race and inheritance,” to quote the subtitle of his autobiography.
Mrs. Obama`s attitudes about race are significant for multiple reasons.
First, Mr. Obama says she`s important to him. Newsweek`s gushing 2/25/08 cover story on Michelle, Barack`s Rock by Richard Wolffe, reports:
“Onstage, Obama has introduced Michelle as `my rock`—the person who keeps him focused and grounded. In her words, she is just making sure he is `keeping it real.`”
Second, because Michelle Obama lacks her husband`s remarkable verbal facility, she provides a keyhole into how the stealth candidate actually thinks and feels on those rare occasions when he can be himself. She`s more of a regular person with a normal human desire to be understood.
Third, she`s a classic example of what affirmative action, which her husband promises to give us more of, does both for and to blacks.
She is a hard worker and is of above-average intelligence, but racial preferences have repeatedly lifted her out of her intellectual league, with traumatic psychological consequences. All the breaks she received from white people merely stoked what Ellis Cose of Time calls The Rage of a Privileged Class.
Early in the New Journalism classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson`s “300-pound Samoan attorney,” questions whether Sports Illustrated would actually be so trusting as to provide them with “unlimited credit” for a trip to Sin City, which they will obviously squander in a drug debauch. Thompson answers:
“`You Samoans are all the same,` I told him. `You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man`s culture.`”
Few individuals have enjoyed more palpable and repeated evidence of the essential decency of the white man`s culture than Michelle Obama.
She was educated at the top public high school in Chicago, Whitney Young, which only accepted the highest scoring applicants on the entrance exam—within each race. Time reported in 1975:
“… the $30 million Whitney M. Young Jr. High School will open as a magnet in the fall with—among other things—an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a special center for the performing arts and a separate curriculum for medical studies. Whitney Young also has a strict admissions quota: 40% white, 40% black, 10% Latin, 5% other minorities and 5% at the discretion of the principal.”
Michelle was overshadowed by her smart and athletic older brother Craig Robinson, who is now the head basketball coach at Brown University of the Ivy League. Newsweek`s cover story recounts:
“For Michelle, Craig`s easy success was intimidating. `She was disappointed in herself,` her mother tells NEWSWEEK. `She used to have a little bit of trouble with tests …`”
Her poor performance on tests remains a sore point with Michelle, who brings it up in odd contexts, such as when discussing her husband`s standing in the polls last November:
“You know, [I`ve] always been told by somebody that I`m not ready, that I can`t do something, my scores weren`t high enough.”
Newsweek describes her career at Whitney Young:
“… but she was not at the top of her class. She didn`t get the attention of the school`s college counselors, who helped the brightest students find spots at prestigious universities. … Some of her teachers told her she didn`t have the grades or test scores to make it to the Ivies. But she applied to Princeton and was accepted.”
Not surprisingly, just as Thomas Sowell would have predicted, four years spent in over her head among white liberal elitists who see themselves as better than the rest of America because
(A) they loudly proclaim their belief in equality; and
(B) they have above average IQs
left Michelle`s sizable but fragile self-esteem in tatters. Suffering the self-consciousness common to the young, she felt that everybody was secretly putting her down for her intellectual shortcomings, and focused her anger on whites. Newsweek says:
“There weren`t formal racial barriers and black students weren`t officially excluded. But many of the white students couldn`t hide that they regarded their African- American classmates as affirmative-action recipients who didn`t really deserve to be there.”
Ironically but inevitably, Princeton`s diversity sensitivity programs just exacerbated Michelle`s racial paranoia:
“Angela Acree, a close friend who attended Princeton with Michelle, says the university didn`t help dispel that idea. Black and Hispanic students were invited to attend special classes a few weeks before the beginning of freshman semester, which the school said were intended to help kids who might need assistance adjusting to Princeton`s campus. Acree couldn`t see why. She had come from an East Coast prep school; Michelle had earned good grades in Chicago. “We weren`t sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, `Let`s bring all the black kids together`.”
Princeton racialized Michelle`s consciousness. She majored in Sociology and minored in African-American Studies. Newsweek says:
“Michelle felt the [racial] tension acutely enough that she made it the subject of her senior sociology thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” The paper is now under lock and key … (Today, Michelle says, not quite convincingly, that she can`t remember what was in her thesis.)”
Hilariously, the Princeton website where all her classmates` senior theses are made freely available for the edification of humanity until the end of time listed hers as being “Restricted until November 5, 2008,” which just happens to be the day after the election.
Newsweek went on:
“Michelle wrote that Princeton “made me far more aware of my `blackness` than ever before.” She wrote that she felt like a visitor on the supposedly open-minded campus. “Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton,” she wrote, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.””
On Friday, the Obama campaign released her thesis. Here`s a highlight, in which the potential First Lady explains how much she wants to be, well, “Black first:”
“These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.”
Now, VDARE.com is, for obvious reasons, not in the business of criticizing other people`s punctuation. Nor do we think that anybody`s glorified term paper is all that important.
Yet, because the candidate himself has made sure to leave such a minimal paper trail from the 1980s and 1990s (one immense autobiography and a single op-ed, according to Lexis-Nexis), anything that casts light on the Democratic frontrunner`s personal views on crucial issues is needed.
Predictably, the same feelings of personal and thus racial inadequacy manifested themselves when she got into ultra-competitive Harvard Law School on another quota. The Newsweek reporter explains:
“At Harvard, she felt the same racial divide. … `She recognized that she had been privileged by affirmative action and she was very comfortable with that,` [friend Verna] Williams recalls. Michelle recalls things differently. … Her aides say Michelle earned her way into Harvard on merit by distinguishing herself at Princeton.”
When she graduated from HLS in 1988, she was hired by the high-paying Chicago corporate law firm Sidley Austin (which, perhaps not coincidentally, posts a 2,000-word statement describing their “Commitment to Diversity” on their website).
One problem remained: the Illinois bar exam. It appears that in 1988 she either failed it or was unready even to try it. She eventually passed and was admitted to the bar in May 1989, almost a year after graduation. (In contrast, her husband was admitted only a half year after graduating from Harvard Law School three years later).
There`s nothing shameful about failing the bar exam. Hillary Clinton, for example, failed the Washington D.C. bar exam. According to blogger Half Sigma, 19 percent of applicants failed the July 1988 Illinois test. But, whiffing even once is not the kind of thing that is supposed to happen to Harvard Law School students. (Similarly, Hillary only told her Yale friends that she passed the Arkansas bar exam; she kept covered up until 2003 that she had failed the D.C. exam.)
Being admitted to the bar is public, so word of Michelle`s no-show on the list of new lawyers likely spread among her old Harvard classmates in late 1988, leaving another wound upon her pride. If, however, she`d gone to the kind of law school where graduates frequently take a few tries to pass, she would have felt better about herself and less bitter at the white race.
After a few years at Sidley Austin, she let her law license lapse and began working as go-between for Mayor Daley`s Machine. She enjoyed the kind of vague but well-paid career made possible by affirmative action. The description on the candidate`s website of what exactly she`s been doing for the U. of Chicago Medical Center is eye-glazing but ultimately revealing: she`s in the diversity racket.
“She also managed the business diversity program. Michelle has fostered the University of Chicago`s relationship with the surrounding community and developed the diversity program, making them both integral parts of the Medical Center`s mission.”
With great power comes great rewards. A couple of months after her husband was sworn in as U.S. Senator, Michelle`s salary at the Medical Center was raised from $121,910 to $316,962.
A cynic might say that this rather resembles a $195,000 annual … uh, investment by a large private medical institution in the good will of a U.S. Senator and potential President who may well play the crucial role in deciding whether or not there will continue to be large private medical institutions.
Another way of looking at is that Michelle`s value on the influence market went up $200,000 when her husband moved up, so the Medical Center had to ante up or lose her to somebody else who would pay the going rate for the wife of a political superstar.
Still, to say that would be to suggest that Michelle Obama on her own isn`t worth $316,962, which, like any and all skepticism about the Obamas, would be racist. So, almost nobody in America is saying it.
The Daily Mail of London has taken a more jaundiced view:
“An acquaintance of Obama`s family compares her with another political wife, another lawyer as it happens, with a keen interest in making money. “Michelle is very much like Cherie Blair [wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair]. She is a middle-class girl who has discovered that money is nice and doesn`t see that as a contradiction with having radical beliefs,” he said.
Chicago`s veteran political consultant and pundit Joe Novak agrees, saying: “She [Michelle] is now motivated more by personal gain than by social consciousness. She saw her opportunities, and she took them.” …
I suspect, on no particular evidence, that Michelle`s desire for a stately home pushed the normally ascetic Barack into involving in his 2005 purchase of an expensive mansion the notorious white collar crook and slumlord Tony Rezko, a Levantine Christian immigrant who goes on trial March 3rd.
Obama and Rezko had been doing each other Chicago-style favors for years. Yet, surely by 2005, Obama must have known that it was time to shed his more unseemly associates if he wanted to move to the really big house in Washington.
(By the way, VDARE.com readers will be interested in one of Rezko`s old partners` defenses of the man accused of stealing $50 million: “At 19 years old, he came off an airplane and couldn`t speak English, but over the years he must have brought a hundred Rezkos over from Syria.” [Rezko`s life a story of pizza and politics, By David Jackson and John Chase, Chicago Tribune,October 12, 2006]A hundred more Rezkos! Swell.)
Let me finish by speculating even more irresponsibly on what the cautious Barack might be telling Michelle in private: that he`ll have to play the moderate during his first term. But when he`s home free in his second, then he`ll be keeping it real.
For her.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2013:
The First Lady’s admission to Princeton wasn’t entirely her own doing. Besides the usual affirmative action, she was also a Princeton legacy. In fact, her two-year-older brother Craig Robinson was already the Big Man on Campus, both metaphorically (he’s always been popular, although he appears to be wearing out his welcome as Oregon State basketball’s head coach) and literally (he’s 6’6″). While Michelle Robinson’s application was under consideration in the January to March of 1981, sophomore Craig Robinson was helping Princeton to the Ivy League title. Her big brother was then Ivy League basketball player of the year in her first two years on campus, and led Princeton to the 3rd round of the NCAA tournament in 1983.
And I presume her application wasn’t hurt either by her being close friends with one of Jesse Jackson’s daughters.
This latest speech continues a 35-year-old pattern of Michelle Robinson Obama being peeved that other people noticed that she only got into Whitney Young H.S., Princeton, Harvard Law School, and Sidley Austin because of pull, racial and personal.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2015:
Barack and Michelle Obama have always chosen to live in Chicago within the Double Bubble of police protection provided by both the Chicago PD and the kick-ass U. of Chicago PD. The harassment of poor blacks in the Obamas’ neighborhood wasn’t a bug, it was a feature to them.
Update: From 1993-2005, the Obama’s owned a condo within a … gated community inside the Double Bubble of Police Protection: Triple Secret Protection!