Maybe you did make it on your own. The derision comes from the fact that many in the world of Affirmative Action did not.
Michelle Obama’s Inferiority Complex
06/30/2008 6:17:27 AM PDT · by Kaslin · 67 replies · 1,632+ views
Townhall.com ^ | June 30, 2008 | Dinesh D’Souza
It devalues the true merit and hard work of those who achieved on their own and would have achieved in any case regardless of the "free ride".
Friend of mine is an excellent lawyer, tries a case as well as any litigator in Atlanta. But because he's black, everybody assumes that he got his Ivy League diploma, his law degree, and his position in a major Atlanta law firm just because of his skin color.
He hates affirmative action because it makes him look like a fool.
Affirmative action has had a couple of serious consequences as noted by other posters: first, the accomplishments of blacks are suspect because one doesn’t know if they got where they are by AA or by merit; second, AA tends to promote beneficiaries to places they don’t really belong, as noted so well by Thomas Sowell. Where a black college student might excel in one university, at any ivy league university he or she might be seriously struggling and end up mediocre at best. Sowell feels this does the black beneficiary little good.
As to the inferiority complex of Michelle, the problem is she probably knows, as everyone else knows, that Barack is the presidential affirmative action candidate. Anyone else with his resume would not even be considered by the Democratic Party, and he bumped off other candidates who have paid the price through decades of political service, who supported other candidates ahead of them in line, and who carefully cultivated their own track, only to be pushed aside first by the first woman candidate, then the first serious black candidate. Of course the Obamas feel insecure about where they are, knowing they truly did not accomplish it on their own.