Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community

Ah yes, David123, "Also remember, in 1985 there were no personal computers or lap tops and only business offices had Word Processors" - I guess YOU (and most other 20 yr olds or whatever) don't remember; 'course many of us 'older' folk remember the IBM PC introduced in 1981 (with word processor), and by 1985 there WERE 'portable' computers (Compaq) although it's extremely unlike ly Mrs Obama would've had one. Also some would remember Apple (II), Atari (mainly games), etc. from well before the '80s. Most of all these technologies were well into their 2nd, 3rd generations by 1985, expressly for 'personal' use, and many Universities had access to them.

"To dig up Michelles thesis from 1985 and to pick apart every single word and sentence and give it some kind of psychological importance that isnt warranted is scraping the bottom of the barrel." - Hitchens hardly 'picked apart every word'; mostly he found it unreadable (as I did; perhaps "unbearable" more like).

"If anything, to criticize Barak or Michelle based upon this simplistic thesis, is blatant racism." Of course; and then you continue onto the usual, boring, hypocrisy:

"The same people that are criticizing Michelle's spelling, grammar and her thesis in general are the same people that don't have any problems with being saddled with one of the most idiotic and moronic Presidents we have ever had, George W. Bush himself."

mrdbond 2 days ago

225 pages is one long undergrad thesis, even double spaced with long margins. If it were me typing, I'd be lucky to even finish it, let alone perfect the wording at that size. I consider myself hugely lucky that the first word processing facilities arrived on campus just in time for my thesis.

gzuckier 3 days ago

I'm certainly not impressed by the quality of Michelle Obama's writing and grammar. My daughter is a freshman at Princeton, from a public school, and her freshman papers are much better written (and I understand the problems of typing vs word processing).

mamey 4 days ago

I doubt that President Bush, today, could write anything as coherent as Michelle wrote when she was 20 years old. That's the scary thought.
After reading the paper I didn't think is was all that bad. Rather simplistic but not bad really. Also remember, in 1985 there were no personal computers or lap tops and only business offices had Word Processors; so Michelle most probably typed the entire paper on an old Royal typewriter or an IBM Correcting Selectric, if she was lucky. Carbon paper, whiteout, and erasers were used; and no spell checkers or grammar checkers, as today's students have.
She also had no access to the Internet and its vast information and opinions on every subject known to mankind.
Writing a thesis is not easy. She obviously put some thought into it and it meant something important to her.
How pathetic that we are judging her then unknown-to-her, husband, Barak, characteristics and attributes based upon her thesis.
Perhaps we should go back and examine in detail the college wrtings of Laura Bush in order to properly analyze whether or not George is fit to be President.
Michelle, last week gave a one hour campaign speech in Pennsylvania. She used no notes and no teleprompter. She was energized, articulate, well spoken, engaging, forcefull, and persuasive. She had a sense of both sincerity and urgency. Her speech was organized, colorfull and she had a wide vocabulary, yet didnt speak over the heads of her listeners. Neither George, nor Laura, nor John McCain could even come close to delivering a speech of the quality that Michelle delivered.
If Michelle has any faults, one may be that she is new to politics on a national level, and is therefore, too honest.
To dig up Michelles thesis from 1985 and to pick apart every single word and sentence and give it some kind of psychological importance that isnt warranted is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
If anything, to criticize Barak or Michelle based upon this simplistic thesis, is blatant racism.

The same people that are criticizing Michelle's spelling, grammar and her thesis in general are the same people that don't have any problems with being saddled with one of the most idiotic and moronic Presidents we have ever had, George W. Bush himself. Yes, let's extol the virtues of the goofy fool we call our Commander-in-Chief. I doubt that George can do little more than sign his name. If it weren't for his Daddy he'd be no more than a used car salesman or a bus driver.

Thank God for people like Michelle and Barak.

David123 4 days ago

Am olorunfemi olumide from nigeria,is my dream to study in sweeden.i wish to study medicine in sweden.pls make my dream come true

olorunfemi olumide tolu 4 days ago

Mr. Arouet:

The URL for article you refer to ("Untangling Barack Obama's audacious mumbo jumbo) is http://ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=g uest_op&article=73.

A very useful hyperlink annotated PDF version is also posted here at Scribs under Politics. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/2934127/Untangling-Barac k-Obamas-audacious-mumbo-jumbo-

This is all a perfect example of Christopher Hitchens’ indictment that “religion poisons everything.” Enough with these troublesome preachers in the public square. No one can fairly call the Rev. Wright homophobic but, like African American scholar Debra Dickerson ("Some of Obama's Best Friends Are Gay. No, Really," Mother Jones 2007), Mortimer is correct about Obama’s pandering to black homophobic religious hate. If you search Utube you will find the unedited version of Obama’s famous Philadelphia speech before the mass media cleansed it of the not-so-subtle religious message. We saw only American flags on TV but before Obama could mount that public pulpit or walk off camera he had to pass before a double phalanx of preachers all lined up like it was shot gun wedding. The mass media conveniently edited out those lines of preachers that flanked the Obama pulpit. After all, what would people think if they saw all those preachers? Instead of a wall separating church and state we see a road to the White House that is paved with preachers. We were supposed to notice the preachers. They were deliberately there to be noticed.

And now we here witness an impressionable young Michele Robinson Obama apparently extolling the virtues of radical (indeed criminal) separatists and exalting what America should most renounce. But Obama’s preacher problems go deeper and beyond the wrong Rev. Wright and Mrs. Obama. ‘Only connect.’ As Hitchens wrote “.... by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right.” (“Blind Faith”)

Sorry Mr. Hitchens but we are getting more than two for one — preachers come cheaper by the dozen. Obama ‘neglected to vet his minister’? This well-known embarrassment is a surprise? Does anyone remember the homophobic “ex-gay” preacher and gospel singer Donnie McClurkin who Obama refused to disavow? And how many people have noticed Obama's relationship to homophobic preacher James T. Meeks who is known for his racially charged remarks and homophobic ways? Is there a double standard here? Why does the non-homophobic Rev. Wright get publically kicked to the curb while homophobic preachers and gospel singers are tolerated if not pandered to? Res ipsa loquitur?

johnbon 5 days ago

To paraphrase Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot, "The world will never be free until the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last preacher." And to quote the greatest philosophe of all Ecrasez l'infame!!

johnbon 5 days ago

Enough with these people who use religion as a means of separatism and to deny equal, legal, dignity. If this is the kind of rubbish that educated people preach to the ‘underdogs’ in church can anyone really wonder why the color-line so persists in America? Exactly who is poisoning whose well? Who is fomenting separatism and feeding difference?

There is an elephant in the room that stinks to high heaven and only one publisher has had the courage to tell the truth about it. Senator Obama remains the only Democratic candidate who would deny and entire class of persons a ‘fundamental’ civil, secular, right for no other reason than religion. The writer of “Untangling Barack Obama's audacious mumbo jumbo” got it right: “UNLIKE THE REVERED REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, WHO USED RELIGIOUS FAITH TO FIGHT AGAINST DISCRIMINATION AND EXORCIZE IT FROM THE LAW, OBAMA'S APPROACH USES RELIGION AS AN EXCUSE TO DENY CIVIL RIGHTS AND LEGISLATE PREJUDICE INTO LAW.”

This dynamic is a no-brainer that should not escape the scrutiny of a second year law student but nary a journalist has had the courage to begin telling the truth or even ask the right questions. Can we ask this so called civil rights lawyer, on precisely on what LEGAL basis he can justify his promise to violate the First Amendment (Separation of Church and State) as an illicit means to the nefarious end of denying 'due process' and 'equal protection' of the law that are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment? Hello. That’s not one Constitutional violation but two! Can we ask? Yes we can! Yes we can!

If religious tolerance has grown so perverse and repressive that a so called liberal politician and ‘civil rights lawyer’ can actually propose denying a civil right for no other reason than religion and get away with it then, to paraphrase the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 'THE WALL WHICH THE LAW PROFESSES TO ERECT BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE HAS BECOME EVEN MORE WARPED AND TWISTED THAN I EXPECTED.'

Ecrasez l'fame!!

Arouet 7 days ago

Hitchens is the master of low blows, only he would think of attacking a presidential candidate by dissecting his wife's undergraduate university papers.

Fray222 7 days ago

After reading most of the comments here, I see racism is alive and well! For all of you that use the euphemism of "Affirmative Action" whenever you see a Black person, why not explicitly state you feel Blacks are inferior to whites? Why beat around the bush?

quiznos 8 days ago

Say what you will, I have seen ninth graders write better papers and make fewer grammatical errors. Even the most basic of writing skills seem to have eluded Michelle. Sadly enough, I see that her obsession with her perceived racial inequality has been going on for a long time. She is stewing in that cesspool mentality. What a shame. She needs to stop going to church. She is wasting her time. She does not know the God that would set her free from this mental prison she is living in. I don't believe she will find Him either by listening to J Wright. Who is no Reverend.

yazoo13 9 days ago

That she's an intellectual fly-weight, is no disqualification for O'B.

Most women are attracted to men smarter or more cunning than they are...in that respect Hillary is a lot like Michelle.

artsmark 10 days ago

If this rubbish can even partially fulfill the requirements of a B.A. in sociology at Princeton then one can only wonder how dumbed-down the admissions process has become. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, "To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

johnbon 10 days ago

Sadly, Michelle Obama stands to be the first affirmative action first lady in the history of our great nation. I have faculty experience at three universities, and her writings are quite typical, if not better, than most undergraduates from her demographic. This is the big secret of academics, that the best black students, like Michelle, go to the Ivies, while the rest are mostly lower quartile scholarship recipients at their highly regarded second tier institutions. Despite her overt mediocrity, she needs to be cut a little slack, since she was an idealistic (pessimistic?) undergraduate being indoctrinated with the radical horseshit that the leftist faculty spoonfeeds these impressionable students. At Princeton, the average black undergraduate scores 230 points lower than white students on their SATs; 240 points lower than the average admitted Asian student.

Doctor of Many Things

JohnMcKay 10 days ago

Just as most college athletes are going on to do something else with their lives, most arts and sciences undergraduates are not going to be doing what they major in--be it sociology or physics or mathematics or microbiology. Colleges and universities that require all seniors to write a thesis in their majors get stuff like Ms. Obama's thesis. Youngsters, not yet intellectually mature, are trying to think and do things and write like real sociologists or physicists or microbiologists or economists or whatevers. It should be no big surprise that few of them do it very well. Most of these unlikely young scholars go on to productive and useful lives, as Ms. Obama seems to have done.

atyree 10 days ago

I am so so so glad I did not have to write a senior thesis! Now I want to find the theses of my friends who went to better colleges than me. I'm sure to find some good laughs.

Citiwoman53 10 days ago

Although there's plenty of stuff I don't like about Michelle Obama (I support her hubby and think she's a negative rather than an asset to his campaign), I don't understand why anybody would get worked up over *this* particular thesis. If she wrote it now, what w/ the benefit of a law degree and all, I could see calling her a dimwit, but this was written by an *undergrad*.

Don't know what academic la la land most of her critics dwell in, but although not great, this is better than average for an undergrad thesis. Have you folk *seen* the kind of junk that passes for acceptable undergrad forays in writing nowadays? Hell, this is better than plenty of legal briefs I've seen submitted by folk who write for a living, and who had an extra 3 years after undergrad to hone that skill :D

darkhorse08817 10 days ago

The topic is banal and the writing is truly horrid. I am SHOCKED that this is PRINCETON?!? How could this possibly have passed muster?

You would have thought that the advisor, she so graciously thanked in the beginning, would have proof read the damn thing. I am still not sure it is relevant to anything besides the academic integrity of a prestigious school. Hitchens is just stirring the pot.

neoliberal 10 days ago

the worst thing about affirmative action is that it contributes or produces a two-tier system: one for blacks, and the other for non-blacks.

Hitchens is perfectly right to bring up Michelle Obama. It's not like she's been a non-actor in her husband's campaign. She holds strong opinions and expresses them.

denny1700 10 days ago

Now I've read some of the comments. I wrote an undergraduate thesis at around the same time at the University of Chicago. I was incapable of such bad grammar then; my best friend there, a black male, was utterly incapable of writing so badly. It would not have been acceptable, in any event. I was from a white working-class family. The Ivy League is very sad, what with their inbred legacy students and low affirmative action standards.

Chicago1 10 days ago

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