<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Are We Getting Two for One?Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco? By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 11:24 AM ET So numbed have I become by the endless replay of the fatuous clerical rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that it has taken me this long to remember the significant antecedent. In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam's temple in Chicago on "Savior's Day" in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: "If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" His apparent admission of what had long been suspected?€”that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm's slaying?€”is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be. I invite you to look at the film of Farrakhan's sweating, yelling, paranoid face and to bear in mind that this depraved thug, who boasts of "dealing with" one of black America's moral heroes, is the man praised by Jeremiah Wright and referred to with respect as "Minister Farrakhan" by the senator who hopes to be the next president of the United States. ... I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." 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. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.</div> http://www.slate.com/id/2190589/ Wright is still a clown, and Obama called him out on it. I just thought it was an interesting article. I don't care what she thinks either, Barrack is the one running for president.
Her thesis is actually available as a pdf file here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html It's worth reading before making determinations on Hitchens' article - or anyone else's for that matter.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (AEM @ May 17 2008, 03:39 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Her thesis is actually available as a pdf file here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html It's worth reading before making determinations on Hitchens' article - or anyone else's for that matter.</div> Yes I agree. <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community," the Princeton student wrote, "I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture." Other thesis statements specifically pointed to what was seen by the future Mrs. Obama as racially insensitive practices in a university system populated with mostly Caucasian educators and students: "Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments." To illustrate the latter statement, she pointed out that Princeton (at the time) had only five black tenured professors on its faculty, and its "Afro-American studies" program "is one of the smallest and most understaffed departments in the university." In addition, she said only one major university-recognized group on campus was "designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students." (Her findings also stressed that Princeton was "infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.") Perhaps one of the most germane subjects approached in the thesis is a section in which she conveyed views about political relations between black and white communities. She quotes the work of sociologists James Conyers and Walter Wallace, who discussed "integration of black official(s) into various aspects of politics" and notes "problems which face these black officials who must persuade the white community that they are above issues of race and that they are representing all people and not just black people," as opposed to creating "two separate social structures." To research her thesis, the future Mrs. Obama sent an 18-question survey to a sampling of 400 black Princeton graduates, requesting the respondents define the amount of time and "comfort" level spent interacting with blacks and whites before they attended the school, as well as during and after their University years. Other questions dealt with their individual religious beliefs, living arrangements, careers, role models, economic status, and thoughts about lower class blacks. In addition, those surveyed were asked to choose whether they were more in line with a "separationist and/or pluralist" viewpoint or an "integrationist and/or assimilationist" ideology. Just under 90 alums responded to the questionnaires (for a response rate of approximately 22 percent) and the conclusions were not what she expected. "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."</div>
