Michelle Obama Joins the Princeton Tap Room's Old Boys Club
Friday, February 6, 2009 at 6:55AM Michelle Robinson Obama graduated from Princeton in 1985.
Her portrait now resides on the "Class Photo Wall" in the school's Tap Room of the Nassau Inn, making her the first African American and the second woman, to receive that recognition.
The unveiling of the First Lady's portrait gave sociology professor Howard Taylor, director of the Center for African American Studies during Obama’s Princeton tenure and co-adviser of Obama’s thesis with sociology professor emeritus Walter Wallace, an opportunity to speak publicly again about Michelle's now infamous thesis Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community.
Slate's Christopher Hitchens used Michelle Obama's thesis to underscore her alleged black militancy.
“They selectively quoted her,” Taylor said. “They take one little phrase out, such as the use of ‘The White Oppressors’ at one point. Three words, out of a 70-page thesis. I got really angry with the press to the extent they were doing that.”
“She was ... very, very clever and very much ... a researcher, [a] very disciplined thinker, very quiet but very precise,” Taylor said.
Reading Michelle Robinson Obama's Princeton thesis is high on my personal must-do list.
What I expect to find is an intellectual analysis in alignment with my own personal views on her chosen topic.
To read provocative writers and experience no reaction or influence on our own thinking, means that we have putty for brains. And we all know that our intellectually smart and meticulously thinking First Lady does not have mush upstairs.
In Paris, a condemning critique of Michelle's thesis would be laughable. But then Paris has always been a place for more open-minded, intellectually vibrant people.
Independence and a unique style is preferable for French women, while America has struggled to embrace the these qualities for California-Girl, Doris Day women.
Add African American to your female pedigree and watch controversy-free, intellectual self-expression become a near impossibility. A
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