Mrs. Obama's hostility: a theory

Earlier this week, we pondered Michelle Obama's attitude toward her own country, and just how it was that a person who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law could say that only now that her husband is the front-runner for US president can she say that she is "really proud" of America. How is it that someone so incredibly privileged can have such a sour attitude about this country, as to find nothing that happened here in her adult life worthy of making her feel "really proud"?

Steve Sailer might have put his finger on the answer. Mrs. O's Princeton thesis -- which Princeton has bizarrely now placed under lock and key until after the election -- indicates that she ended her Ivy League undergraduate years sullen, resentful and filled with racial self-consciousness. From a Newhouse News story about her thesis:

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.”…

I'm not quite sure what to think about this, but it is fascinating. Maybe it's just state-university-grad me, but I have very little sympathy for anyone of any race who whines about how desolating their experiences were at an Ivy League university. Just by getting in, you have been granted a place among the most elite class in the richest country in the world. Have the grace not to bitch and moan about how awful it was to endure -- oh, the humanity!) -- Princeton!

The daughter of a blue-collar Chicago family, she used that Ivy League education to go on to become a very successful corporate lawyer who makes over $300,000 a year. That fact, plus her racial resentment at the end of her Princeton career, pubt her careless remark about how now, in the year of Our Lord 2008, for the first time in her adult life she feels "really proud" of America, in a certain perspective.

Then again, I sometimes feel sorry for successful black people, who face psychological and social pressures from their own communities that whites simply do not. A white person who came from a blue-collar background and had ended up at Princeton would almost certainly have endured much of the same class anxiety. But she wouldn't have been burdened by the idea that she had an obligation to identify psychologically with the group from which she came, such that her Ivy League education might cost her her soul. You know? On the one hand, I suppose there's something laudable about feeling a noble obligation to help members of your community rise as you have done. But it also can be psychologically crippling if your success makes you radically doubt yourself, your identity and your self-worth.

These are personal questions that white people by and large don't have to deal with. Individual success is pretty much what it is -- something to be grateful for and enjoyed, not endured as a test of one's authenticity. Then again, white people already belong to the majority culture; Michelle Obama is dealing with the psychological pains of assimilation into it. Still, it shouldn't be forgotten that for quite a lot of people in this country, the personal psychodramatic agonies of an Ivy-educated lawyer making more than $300,000 a year are real cry-me-a-river stuff.

Another thought: Ayaan Hirsi Ali yesterday talked about why so many women in Islamic cultures collaborate to keep girls and other women tied so tightly to the group, even at the expense of those girls and their individuality. She said that it's difficult for Americans, raised in a culture of individualism, to grasp how it is for people raised in a culture that values the group over the individual. I wonder if there's anything like that going on with Michelle Obama? I remember visiting a friend at Cambridge, England, in 1987, when I was in college. There I met A., a white woman who came from a working-class family in eastern England (I think she said her dad was a coal miner). She was completing a Ph.D. in astrophysics. I mentioned to her that her family must be so proud of her success. To the contrary, she told me. She explained that when she'd go home to visit her family, she had to keep quiet about her work at university, and that her father and everyone else in the extended family criticized her all the time for getting above her station in life. As an American, I found that whole thing really difficult to grasp.

Perhaps the chip that appears to sit rather prominently on Mrs. Obama's shoulder comes out of a similar situation. If so, I wonder if it explains the Obamas' choice to attend that racialist Chicago church. As Barack Obama's sister has said, her brother joined Trinity United Church of Christ as a way to embrace the black community. One of the key points of the racialist creed preached by the church's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is of racial solidarity and the rejection of "middleclassness." Steve Sailer touches on this here. Excerpt:

Obama's early relationship with Wright is the main theme of pages 274-295 of Obama's memoirs. Obama recounts his first encounter with Wright's Trinity Church's "Black Value System:"

"A sensible, heartfelt list ... There was one particular passage in Trinity's brochure that stood out, though, a commandment more self-conscious in its tone, requiring greater elaboration. 'A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness,' the heading read. 'While it is permissible to chase 'middleincomeness' will all our might,' the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortunes to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the 'psychological entrapment of Black "middleclassness" that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of "we" and "they" instead of "US."'"

"My thoughts would often return to that declaration in the weeks that followed ..."

When the Ivy Leaguer meets Wright, he interrogates Wright about whether his church isn't secretly too middle class for him:

"'Some people say,' I interrupted, 'that the church is too upwardly mobile.'

"The reverend's smile faded. 'That's a lot of bull,' he said sharply...

"Still, I couldn't help wondering ... Would the interest in maintaining such unity [between the black classes] allow Reverend Wright to take a forceful stand on the latest proposals to reform public housing. And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk genuine conflict, then what chance would there be of holding the larger community intact."

In other words, Obama is wondering, in effect, whether Wright can help him reconcile his black racialism with his vaguely Marxist class-strife ideology. See, the "problem," as Obama saw it in 1987 (and in 1995 when he wrote his autobiography) is that some blacks are getting ahead in the America, which lessens racial solidarity among blacks, and raises contradictions between racialism and socialism, both of which the young Obama wants to believe in. Fortunately, Wright's powerful sermon "The Audacity of Hope" --

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ...

-- overcomes Obama's doubts about covert middleclassness and he is accepted into the bosom of this authentically anti-middleclassness racialist church.

You can see why a church like this would appeal to somebody like Michelle Obama. It would appear to give her a way to reconcile her racial guilt over her privileged status. One can be a rich corporate lawyer with an advanced Ivy League education, but still entertain the psychologically comforting idea that one is a victim of oppression visited upon one by a country that one can't be proud of. Good luck trying to explain all that to voters. No wonder Princeton is trying to keep Mrs. O's undergraduate thesis suppressed.