How Michelle related to Princeton; how she will relate to the White House

James P. sends this quote from Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton:

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. “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. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

James P. comments:

Oy. I bet there were so many racists at Princeton in 1985. It was a notorious hotbed of anti-black sentiment!

Based on Michelle’s experience of heightened racial consciousness and racial alienation at Princeton, an Ivy League university where she was admitted, despite her disqualifying grades, in order to include blacks in mainstream American life and overcome racial differences, and further based on the fact that at age 45, as the wife of a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, she continues to express the same feelings of alienation and ambivalence toward America as a whole that she expressed toward Princeton (“I don’t think there is a person of color in this country that doesn’t struggle with what it means to be a part of your race versus what the majority thinks is right”), we can predict how she will feel if her husband becomes president of the United States. In 2012, in the middle of her fourth year as First Lady, in an article for Ebony, she will write:

My experiences in the White House and on my official travels in the U.S. and abroad have made me far more aware of my blackness than ever before. I have found that during my time as First Lady, no matter how liberal, open-minded, and, indeed, worshipful the American people have been toward me, I sometimes feel like a stranger in the White House and in the United States as a whole; as if I was wearing European shoes that don’t really fit my African feet. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites as First Lady, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and First Lady second.

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

As I have found out, Michelle Obama minored in Black Studies at Princeton. Well, well. A black person cannot possibly attend those classes and come out feeling proud to be an American. I have read excerpts from some of the books used in the Afro-centric curriculum, and their academic content is a joke. For two years I carpooled with a black guy who was a graduate of a historically black college. One day while in his car we heard a taped show of the conservative talk show host, Russ Hamlin, aka “The Black Avenger,” in which I had called in to bash academic Afrocentrism. An awkward moment, no doubt, but I more than held my ground and refuted my friend’s ridiculous assertion that all of the ancient Middle Easterners were black—to include the Jews. Black students who drink the putrid waters of Afrocentrism are brainwashed and they readily accept the “black-good / white-bad” template foisted on them. Is it any wonder Michelle gravitated towards that hate-whitey church?

James N. writes:

Michelle Obama wrote:

“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…”

Well, at least she got SOMETHING right. She certainly didn’t belong at Princeton.

This quote is interesting on several levels. First, the obvious, superficial one: Does she, even now, understand that she didn’t belong at Princeton, and why? Did she know, on some level, that she didn’t belong there before she went? Was it simply the reality of being there that made her aware? (It wouldn’t have taken me five minutes at Princeton to realize that I got off the bus at the wrong stop).

On a deeper level, the “no matter” part of the quote is very important, because it tells us what we are in for if affirmative action type policies are continued (whether or not the Obamas get the Pennsylvania Avenue address). Her professors “tried” to be “liberal” and “open-minded”, BUT it did not produce the desired effect! Why not?

Because the state of mind of whites toward blacks is not the primary determinant of what blacks are like. In fact, what blacks are like, whether they are saints or sinners, whether they are accomplished or not, what their IQ range is, and whether or not they belong at Princeton, HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE INTELLECTUAL DISPOSITION OF WHITES, including white professors and white Princeton students.

All the liberality and open-mindedness that Michelle Obama encountered at Princeton (and I bet she encountered a lot) could not raise her IQ one point, certainly not into the Princeton range. None of it could improve her associational cortex, so she could follow the discussions or anticipate the next ten steps in the game of intellectual chess that her (quite atypical) white peers excelled at.

I have had this feeling, of swimming in molasses, from time to time when my intellectual reach has exceeded my grasp. I don’t like it, and I get away from it as fast as possible.

Only affirmative action makes it possible for us to tell blacks, “Don’t worry, you are succeeding, what you are doing is great” when they are conspicuously failing.

I bet they hate it, too, and they hate those whose very existence throws their failure into sharp relief every day.

LA replies:

James is making Michelle’s alienation from Princeton a result of her lack of ability to function intellectually at the level of Princeton. He may be right; but I’m not sure. I think it has more to do with the fact of receiving great unearned privileges and perks from whites. There are two dimensions to affirmative action: the privileges are unearned; and the privileges are awarded by whites. As a result, the good that the black recipient of AA is receiving, he cannot affirm as a good. As a clue to this understandable psychology, blacks have never acknowledged what white America went through that has resulted in the advancement of blacks, such as the death of 600,000 white men in the Civil war, and the passage of the Civil Rights bills, because those things have to do with white people. How does it enhance the self-respect of blacks to be told that slavery was ended by a war in which 600,000 white men died fighting each other? Affirmative action makes this problem far worse. Each value the recipient receives—Princeton education, admission to Harvard law, $300,000 salary as “director of community relations” (or whatever) at a hospital—inflates the sense of entitlement, even as it sparks the rage and discontent. AA is the most profound perversion of moral reality. Normally human beings love and seek the good, and appreciate it when they get it. But AA makes black people hate the good, because it’s an unearned gift from the racial Other. AA thus turns people into moral monsters. The more goods the AA-endowed black receives from America, the more the AA-endowed black rises in America, the more he or she is bent out of shape in resentment against America. And when the AA-endowed black reaches the highest pinacle in American life, the White House, he or she attains the summum bonum—or, rather the summum malum.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It’s even worse than you describe in your passage, “Based on Michelle’s experience of heightened racial consciousness and racial alienation at Princeton, an Ivy League university where she was admitted, despite her disqualifying grades, in order to include blacks in mainstream American life and overcome racial differences…” This may seem a trifling point, but in this narrow instance I think it’s significant: Princeton isn’t even the American mainstream; like every other Ivy League school, it’s a path to participation in America’s social, political, and economic elite. The depth of her ingratitude, and her sense of having been shafted by America in spite of having a place in the sun carved out for her (a place where a guy like me, no matter what my color, could only ever dream of), is more than merely puzzling. After all, the racial favors didn’t stop at her admission to Princeton.

In one sense, of course, one would expect Mrs. Obama’s sense of alienation to be profound. I don’t hold that against her as many people seem eager to do. She was the recipient of some very real favoritism that submerged her in an intellectual culture utterly alien to the typical black person’s experience. For that matter, it is unlike most white people’s experience, and there can be little doubt that if I—a poorly educated redneck from South Carolina—were to find myself suddenly immersed in an Ivy League environment, surrounded by diplomats’ sons, competing for the attention of the privileged daughters of America’s upper crust, my feelings of alienation would be similarly deep. For a black person—no matter what his background—I can only imagine that feeling to be much more intense, especially if he is laboring under the certain knowledge that he is has been the beneficiary of a racial spoils system, and is simply not competing on the same scale as the white students whose forebears actually built everything he sees about him.

How else was she to experience such a life, especially as a young woman, to whom social connections and personal intimacy are of such overriding value? How else, given that she has been reared within a culture of racial hatred and resentment, from which practically every black American acquires his sense of place? To expect Michelle Obama to embrace the white majority as legitimate, to feel a national kinship with them, to revere its all-white founding heroes and to extol its all-white national myth-making, to feel more or less at home in a place like Princeton, would be to expect her to be very, very exceptional.

I’m willing to extend her that much empathy. But the lesson is that she and her husband can never truly represent—especially in any mystical, transcendent way, as the Obama campaign’s quasi-fascistic cult of leadership would have it—the white majority culture she so bitterly resents. I do not find her feelings of alienation at Princeton at all remarkable, and I certainly don’t see them as some kind of personal failing. The logic of her position in life practically demanded it—she’s just a human being, after all. However, the conclusion one must reach is that she and her husband are entirely unsuited to embody the wider (much less the historic) America in which by her own admission she feels no pride. If her sense of separateness is entirely understandable, so too is it understandable that white Americans cannot look to her husband as properly suited to the role of our First Elected. I sympathize with her estrangement, but my sympathy does not bridge the chasm that lies between us.

Steven Warshawsky writes:

Now that Michelle Obama’s entire Princeton thesis is available on-line, skeptical and hostile commentators are going to have a field day ripping it apart.

The fun starts on the Dedication page, where she thanks (“thank-you”) her family and friends for “always making me feel good about myself.” The narcissism and self-doubt that are endemic to the affirmative action experience positively scream out from the very first page of her thesis.

Equally telling is the line that comes right before the passage you quoted:

“Earlier in my college career, there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.”

I think it is a fair question to ask Ms. Obama whether she still feels obligated “first and foremost” to the black community, and not to the country as a whole.

So far, I have only read the Introduction to her thesis. It is rather poorly written, at least for a Princeton senior, with erroneous punctuation, misplaced modifiers, and several awkward and ambiguous sentences. What a hoot it is going to be to read the whole thing!

Of course, in fairness to Ms. Obama, I don’t know how well my own Princeton thesis would stand up to scrutiny after nearly two decades. However, the motivation for my thesis was my concern that deeply pluralistic societies, like ours, would not be able to hang together and function effectively unless they were bound together by a meaningful sense of shared identity and mutual obligation. Hardly Ms. Obama’s concern. One wonders whether it is Barack Obama’s concern.

James P. writes:

I can only read this drivel in small doses, but I got a good laugh out of this:

“It is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League University has instilled within me certain conservative values.”

Oh, you don’t have to fear that, Michelle! We can see 20 years later that the “conservative values” of Princeton by no means infected you.

“For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates—acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or high-paying position in a successful corporation.”

Shock, horror! Professional success, anything but that! That’s… that’s… acting White! Selling out! Only Whites aspire to attend graduate school or get good jobs. Black Princeton graduates are supposed to go back to the projects and live in poverty.

Sam H. writes from the Netherlands:

I can tell you one thing: Mrs. Obama doesn’t write at the level one would expect of a Princeton + HLS graduate. It’s almost embarrassing. She’s obviously a beneficiary of the terrible system called affirmative action. A system which hurts blacks as much as anyone else.

Robert in Nashville writes:

I just came across the State of the Black Union on CSPAN. A huge conference in New Orleans. One speaker noted that New Orleans is suffering even now because of eight years of Mr. Bush. It occurred to me that whites could not get away with a State of the White Union, and, indeed, many Americans would think it wrong to identify the interest of whites as different from the interest of the nation or culture as a whole.

I asked myself why? It seems to me that when a white person runs for office, he understands and feels “American,” part of America, and he accordingly would naturally represent all Americans as part of the nation. But as I watch this conference, it is clear that these speakers unambiguously define themselves as the “Other” in a white nation and culture; they feel that they live within the nation, but are not a part of it. And so the answers to their problems lie not within themselves, but with acting together against whites, to compel whites to do more, give blacks more “freedom” more financial, educational assistance, etc, that is being withheld because they are black! The continuing infrastructure, crime etc, problems in New Orleans are considered to be be an example of deliberate white racism by the President—acting in the interest of whites.

I thought: How does Obama consider himself, as an American who happens to be black, or as a black man? I agree with the contributor who does not blame Michelle Obama for feeling Other, but who recognizes that this also disqualifies anyone who views himself like this from high political office, because he is unable to think of himself as American, rather than as the Other.

LA replies:

I think Michelle O. and her husband should be repeatedly asked this question: “The First Lady represents the United States of America. How can a person who says she has never felt proud of America represent America?”

Tim W. writes:

Blacks in post-Civil Rights America are spoiled in the same manner as indulged children. Kids raised by parents who are stern but loving respect their parents far more than kids who were spoiled rotten by parents who indulged them. Show me a kid who had to do chores around the house for his allowance, or had to finish his veggies before getting dessert, or had to bring home good grades before getting that new bike, and I’ll show you a well-rounded adult-in-the-making. Kids who are given everything they want soon learn that a tantrum will get them even more. When they reach adulthood, they think their indulgent parents were stingy for buying them a Corvette instead of a European sports car that costs more.

Many blacks today are like that. They’ve been given anything they want by white governing officials and educational institutions for forty years or more. Someone Michelle Obama’s age has literally never known anything else. She has to watch old newsreels to see a white leader resisting black demands, and even then it’s treated as a heinous crime (e.g., Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door).

Just as a spoiled kid ups the ante every time he asks for something more expensive than before, blacks up the ante after each victory. And just as spoiled brats hold their parents in contempt, blacks hold liberal whites in contempt. They aren’t thankful to them for giving them affirmative action, they’re angry at them because they haven’t yet gotten around to giving them reparations. By the time they get reparations, some new demand will have arisen and they’ll be righteously angry that it hasn’t yet been met.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 22, 2008 08:16 PM | Send