Michelle Obama’s 2016 speech to the DNC stands in sharp contrast to an essay written in the early 1990s by Glenn Loury titled “Free at Last? A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America.” Loury recounts how, as a young black man growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he lacked the courage to stand up for a friend named Woody, who had “a Negro grandparent on each side of his family but looked like a typical white boy.” Woody never chose to pass as a white person yet, when both young men attended a political rally and Woody stood to speak “[h]e was cut short before finishing his first sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge, who demanded to know how a ‘white’ got the authority to have an opinion about what black people should be doing. That was one of [the] problems, the brother said, we were always letting white people ‘peep our hole card,’ while we were never privy to their deliberations in the same way.” Loury explains that a
silence then fell over the room. The indignant brother asked if anyone could ‘vouch for this white boy.’ More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my moment of truth; Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal disgrace, I refused to speak up for him. He was asked to leave the meeting, and did so without uttering a word in his own defense.
In recalling this painful memory of “betraying someone he had known for a decade,” Loury describes how “…this desire to be regarded as genuinely black… dramatically altered [his] life. It narrowed the range of [his] earliest intellectual pursuits, distorted [his] relationships with other people, censored [his] political thought and expression, informed the way [he] dressed and spoke, and shaped [his] cultural interests. Some of this was inevitable and not all of it was bad, but in his experience the need to be affirmed by one’s racial peers can take on a pathological dimension.”
So what does this have to do with Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama? She and her husband have never evolved from their strident, all-consuming race-consciousness and “addiction to indignation.” As a student, “Miss Robinson wrote a senior thesis entitled ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.'” Some excerpts from the thesis include the following:
“Predominantly white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
“[My Princeton experiences] “will likely lead to my 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.”
“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 under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community… I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”