There is a little ugly-but-true hit piece (the best kind) on Michelle Obama from Dinesh D’Souza at Townhall.
Consider the case of Michelle Obama. She was raised in a two-parent, middle-class family. She applied to one of America’s top universities, Princeton, and was admitted. Of this experience, Michelle says on the stump, “All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me. Every step of the way, there has been people telling me what I couldn’t do. When I applied to Princeton, they said: you can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.”
Which is all very moving, except that her test scores weren’t high enough. Michelle Obama is part of the affirmative action generation of above-average but far-from-stellar performers who were granted preferential admission to America’s most elite institutions.
Michelle notes that she graduated with honors in her major. Again, the problem is that her undergraduate thesis is on the web. You might expect that she wrote about Shakespeare’s sonnets or the political evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois. Well, no. Essentially Michelle Obama wrote about the problems of being a black woman at an Ivy League university.
In this post, Michelle Obama: Blacks Who Assimilate Into “White Culture” Are Uncle Toms, Michelle vents and whines about how unfair everything is. From her thesis.
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 [sic] I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.
~~~These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to the 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.
Oh, and isn’t it a little ironic that the same “White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society” finds her a hair’s breadth from becoming First Lady?
D’Sousa digs a bit deeper and takes her back to high school grammar class.
Here is a typical passage: “By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.”
Alas, the grammar is all wrong here. More than once, the tenses are garbled. People are ignorant “of” the plight of the lower class, not ignorant “to” their plight. And “desparation” should be spelled “desperation.” To wreak so much havoc on the English language in one sentence, without conveying anything of substance, is perhaps deserving of a prize. Is this what her professors were thinking when they granted her honors? Whatever the Obamorons say, let’s remember that that these are not mere typos; they reflect an estranged relationship to the English language. Moreover they appear not in an off-the-cuff transcript but in a thesis that is supposed to reflect the culmination of one’s college career.
Opponents of Affimative Action will knowingly nod their heads at Mrs. Obama’s conundrum. When you achieve a goal on any grounds other than your own merits, the pride is that much less earned, the reward that much less satisfactory. The “beneficiaries” of such programs will always have that little nagging doubt about whether they could have reached the goal on their own. Those that did reach the same goal on the merits will always think their achievement is just that much more valid and valuable than those who got the “helping hand.”
Her anger may be justified, but it should be directed at the system of official cheating that got her there, not those that oppose it.
H/T Ace
Also find Bill Dupray at The Patriot Room.