Posted on 02/23/2008 6:28:02 AM PST by jdm
Earlier today, I noted the irrelevance of Michelle Obama's 1985 Princeton thesis to the 2008 presidential campaign of her husband Barack. To the extent that Mrs. Obama participates in the campaign, her speeches now are certainly relevant, but her state of mind 23 years ago isn't. Dissenters said that the fact that Princeton had embargoed the paper showed that it likely held some embarrassing assertions or strident rhetoric on race.
Well, I have good news for everyone. The Politico got a copy of Mrs. Obama's work from the Obama campaign and has it available to anyone who wants to read it:
Michelle Obama's senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained exclusively from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain "on the periphery." Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
"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 underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."
The thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" and written under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in 1985, has been the subject of much conjecture on the blogosphere and elsewhere in recent weeks, as it has been "temporarily withdrawn" from Princeton's library until after this year's presidential election in November. Some of the material has been written about previously, however, including a story last year in the Newark Star Ledger.
And now I have bad news for those who hoped to mine some gold in this thesis; it's not there. It's a typical college thesis that has perhaps a slightly more personal nature than most. It's a well-written look at the differences between black alumni's socialization patterns with blacks and whites before and during their Princeton years, and the effect that it had after their graduation.
It found -- surprise! -- that black students who socialized more with whites before and during Princeton were more comfortable with whites later, and those who didn't, weren't. Interestingly, they all more closely identified with the black community during the Princeton years, and that mostly declined when they went out into the world afterwards. There were more subtle variations on ideological trends, and attempts to drill down into "literateness" and other subjective analyses, which made the project rather ambitious if not completely convincing. At the conclusion, she acknowledges that her more hard-line attitudes and assumptions about blacks who did not meet her definition of "identification" were incorrect and naive.
It contains nothing particularly astonishing or shocking. Anyone who attended an African-American studies class (as I did) would recognize the concepts and the authors. She quotes Stokely Carmichael, which is about as controversial as it gets. Mrs. Obama talks about her own feelings of alienation and ascribes them to being part of a relatively small minority on campus; I'd argue that feelings of alienation are normal for everyone at a university, but I can't speak to her experience. At any rate, there's no declaration of black separatism on her behalf. In fact, it's quite the opposite.
Readers can download the paper in four parts at Politico. Put on a pot of coffee.
UPDATE: The Politico got the thesis from the Obama campaign. I was being a bit snarky by writing that they "somehow" got a copy, and thought the blockquote material would make that obvious. Apparently not, so I've adjusted the text for a more straightforward approach.
More racism. the racist have found out they can get about anything and everything if they use their skin color. but will it get them the White House,so they can hold a Muslim summit for the demise of the United States?
Morrissey isn’t very good with English. Look at the second sentence of the thesis, it gets tense wrong and misuses a semicolon. I wouldn’t grade it well at the high school level.
No can do...gotta sort my sock drawer.
The self-absorbed, introspective, navel-gazing in which the young Mrs Obama engaged is not unusual for American minority students. They wind up marginalizing themselves with this focus. Students in math, the sciences, engineering, business, medicine, and so forth are not bothered by such concerns.
HUH?!?
Did he see the same thesis I did? It's pretty poor writing, especially toward a Princeton degree. Only a handful of references across 64 pages of text--even though it's a survey-based thesis, there should be more references than that, and as a result, it reads like an opinion piece.
Earlier thread about this at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1974896/posts
On the other hand, she does have a problem with punctuation, such as in her acknowledgement section...
Thank-you Professor Wallace you have made me a much better student.Of course, this is about the time when the Macintosh came out with the voice emulation package...with no punctuation, it reads sorta like she copied down what a Mac was reading. :-)
I would be very suspicious of this, and if I were Politico, I would not accept what it says at face value WITHOUT actually going to Princeton's campus, pulling the real thing, and then comparing it word for word.
I suspect that Princeton (Sociology) et al. are difficult to get into, but once you are in, you are IN. And you graduate. A friend studied at Harvard; he said he took basket-weaving and easy classes the whole way through and laughed about it being easy. But hard to get into.
Anecdote:
Was listening to a local black-oriented radio station, and they were agreeing with Mrs. Obama. If this was a play to the victimization mentality, I’d say it worked.
Princeton has it under lock and key until Nov 5.
That was true of Yale and Harvard as well. Hard to get in, unless your family could donate a new building. But once in, it was hard to flunk out. The Ivys famously gave out what were called “Gentleman’s C” grades to anyone who actually showed up to class and turned in some sort of papers and blue books.
The fact that Al Gore, who was admitted to Harvard because his father was an influential senator, managed to get a D in Nat Sci, a famous gut course, suggests that he was beyond stupid, or maybe that he didn’t bother to turn in any work for that course.
Osama bin Laden ObamaOsama Obama /stuttering Kennedy mode>
...will just rename it "The Black House".
Cheers!
“”I will always be black first and a student second.””
Isn’t that how they view the run for the presidency? Her husband is not running as an American. AND she is not talking to anyone except the “black community.”
Cornell was famous for not being that way. Harvard was known to be harder to get into, but Cornell was harder to graduate from. I think it must vary by department a lot for Princeton, since I know that can be tough, too.
I don’t think that they would release a false document where Michelle Obama talks about expecting to have a sex change in the future (Introduction, Page 1).
Try replacing every word black with the word white and vice versa and change every reference to Michele Obama to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, then release this paper to the public and wait for the response!
I find it surprising M. Obamas’ thesis passed. Three typos in the first part alone....
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