Soul Strut

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<blockquote class="Quote"><div><strong class="bc-author">luck</strong> said:</div><div>I'm not sure where Saba was raised, but I live in the city in which Michelle Obama was born and grew up. South Shore Chicago, 1964 is not the sort of environment in which <em>anyone</em> could have grown up without acquiring racial scars. To this day, it is easily one of the most racially divided and divisive cities in the country. Dr. King, as folks will recall, was hit in the head with a brick during a peace march two years after Mrs. Obama was born. After Dr. King's assassination two years following that stain on Chicago, race riots broke out in pockets throughout the city. Only a few months after that, the police riot at the Democratic Convention became the stuff of legend and Al Kooper LP covers. Any of these events may well have been her first memory, and the working-class parents who raised her - her father was a city pump operator that lived and worked with MS - could hardly have escaped the climate, either.<br />
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	To sweep away these hard years and the previous 400 and foist the wholly false equivalent of "if a white woman said this about blacks..." is deplorable, illogical, and does not even pass for a revisionist's view of history. Mrs. Obama is a woman whose not-too-distant ancestors were literally slaves. Her upbringing in a blue-collar household and rise to Princeton and then the White House would and should naturally solidify her as one of the greatest role models in this country's history for African-American women in specific and all women in general. The reality of her status should be obvious to any person of any race.<br />
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	Mrs. Obama is also entitled to the reality that she has experienced. Do you think that the Princeton of the 1980s (much less now) was some sort of utopia for Black people? Do you think that it was fair of her to relate her feelings of isolation at the time through a frankly-written assessment? I hardly see vitriol among what I have read of her thesis - merely the hard perspective of a woman who had seen and felt first-hand by the age of 21 what most privileged kids had not and will not see in a lifetime. It's a little ironic that Mrs. Obama's life story would seem to at justify the eternal GOP "bootstrap" argument, yet she irks the Right because - at the time, from her 21-year-old perspective - she still had her eyes open enough to see injustice. Is it that Mrs. Obama was too uppity, or not uppity enough?<br />
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	To others: with all of the above said, some perspective is needed. Mrs. Obama is no more generally targeted than Hillary Clinton, the last Democratic First Lady. Mrs. Clinton was especially savaged by the Right for her leadership roles and strong stances. Michelle Obama is the FLOTUS in a culture that is so politically divisive that even her unassailable stance on obesity - namely, you know, that it's a bad thing - is assailed by image-hungry media boobs. By comparison, Laura Bush largely escaped the ire of the Left because she failed to register a discernible stance on anything consequential until her husband left office. Then, you know, she was free to expound on her embrace of gay marriage. But since Mrs. Obama has actually raised her voice - however faintly - she has and will see heat. In today's USA, it comes with the role.</div></blockquote>
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	Luck, this was a great post.  A couple of points:<br />
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	Saba seems to think that MO has said things that would bring "universal condemnation" if equivalents were said by whites.  Yet he'd obviously vote for Haley Barbour over Obama in 2012, and Barbour's recent remarks about race in Mississippi in the 60s reveal him to be immensely ignorant or deeply racist or both.  So much for "universal condemnation," since the remarks won't affect his standing among Republicans at all.  The truth is that "it wasn't that bad" is a view that fits comfortably into the Republican mainstream these days when they look at the pre-Civil Rights era.  That's been true for decades.  <br />
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	I went to an Ivy League college at roughly the same time MO did.  A good number of the black students tended to sit together at mealtimes and there was a nickname that was commonly used (by assholes) for that area - "LA."  It stood for "Little Africa."  The early 80s weren't as far removed from the 60s as some people think.  It was the same time Reagan was winning support by telling stories about "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" and "young bucks buying T-bones with foodstamps."<br />
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	I realize Saba thinks MO should have reacted to those times by wrapping herself in the flag and going to work in the Reagan administration, but I'm glad she didn't.

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