michelle obama thesis

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Princeton Releases Michelle Obama's Senior Thesis

February 26, 2008 / 8:18 PM EST / UWIRE.com

This story was written by Esther Breger, The Daily Princetonian

The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), her husband, received criticism from conservative media and bloggers when the University restricted access to her senior thesis until after the presidential election in November.

"A thesis can be restricted or unrestricted for a variety of reasons, including at the request of alumni," University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said in an e-mail. "It falls within the purview of alumni to discuss their academic work," she said.

Analysis of the thesis' content, in addition to its restricted availability, has featured prominently in blogs over the last few days. Written under Obama's maiden name of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson and titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," the thesis has come under scrutiny as the presidential campaign has advanced for its analysis of race relations.

What's in the thesis?

Obama, who concentrated in sociology and received a certificate in African-American studies, examined how the attitudes of black alumni have changed over the course of their time at the University. "Will they become more or less motivated to benefit the Black community?" Obama wrote in her thesis.

After surveying 89 black graduates, Obama concluded that attending the University as an undergraduate decreased the extent to which black alumni identified with the black community as a whole.

Obama drew on her personal experiences as an example.

"As I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates -- acceptance to a prestigious graduate school or a high-paying position in a successful corporation," she wrote, citing the University's conservative values as a likely cause.

"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," she said, noting the small size of the African-American studies department and that there were only five black tenured professors at the University across all departments.

Obama studied the attitudes of black Princeton alumni to determine what effect their time at Princeton had on their identification with the black community. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote in her introduction. "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."

Emeritus sociology professor Walter Wallace, who served as her thesis adviser, declined to comment for this story.

"It is important to consider the time period in which Michelle Obama wrote her thesis," College Democrats vice president Scott Weingart '09 said in an e-mail. "In 1985, Princeton was still a very conservative school; [Tiger Inn] would not admit women members for another six years. Today, the student body is a lot more progressive and diverse."

Completed theses are kept in Mudd Manuscript Library and are generally available to the public for viewing and scanning. Before today, callers to Mudd requesting information on Obama's thesis were told that the thesis has been made "temporarily unavailable" and were directed to the University Office of Communications. Following the thesis' release by the Obama campaign to politico.com, a political news site, the University lifted the restriction.

The University's actions were met with varying reactions by students.

"The school shoud generally default to freedom of information unless there is some compelling school or personal (e.g. the request of the author) interest at stake," Jason Anton '10, co-director of the Students for Barack Obama Princeton chapter, said in an e-mail.

"There's nothing about a senior thesis that's private in nature -- it's written with the knowledge that it will be kept in Mudd for all to read," Zahava Stadler '11 said.

Many students felt that the contents of the work could become a factor in the election, but they were unsure to what extent it would affect the outcome.

"Unfortunately, the thesis may very well revive the race card as a central theme of the election," Anton said.

"Her thesis seems especially pertinent given the questions that have been raised off and on about the supposed 'tight-rope' of racial identity politics that some claim Senator Obama has to carefully navigate," College Democrats president Rob Weiss '09 said in an e-mail.

Molly Alarcon '10, an Obama supporter, said she thought Michelle Obama's writing in college should not have any bearing on her husband's election, but her view was not shared by all students.

The Controversy Over Michelle Obama's Thesis

What a yawner. Why this was ever put under lock and key, I have no idea. Anyway Politico One%20of%20harder%20things%20to%20accept%20about%20democracy,%20and%20it's%20the%20reason%20why%20up%20until%202006%20I%20had%20never%20voted,%20is%20lying.%20Politicians%20will%20lie,%20and%20there%20is%20basically%20nothing%20you%20can%20do%20about%20it.%20They%20will%20lie%20willfully%20about%20huge%20matters.%20It's%20important%20to%20note,%20while%20a%20lot%20of%20us%20get%20self-righteous%20about%20the%20lies%20of%20Bush,%20the%20same%20man%20that%20brought%20us%20the%20voting%20rights%20act,%20also%20brought%20us%20the%20<a%20href=%22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident#Later_statements_about_the_incident%22>Gulf%20of%20Tonkin</a>.%20</p>">got it --from the Obama campaign, it's worth noting. Among the many racist bombshells to be found amongst 22-year old MIchelle Obama's anti-white, anti-American, anti-Apple Pie diatribe:

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "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 underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

I'm sure the GOP will find some way to twist this. I guess. Though I have no idea how. This sound like every black kid I ever knew who went to an Ivy. Shoulda picked The Mecca , hun.

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Dear Mr. Mudd: What Information Do You Have about Michelle Obama’s Time at Princeton?

By Christa Cleeton with April C. Armstrong *14 and Dan Linke

Dear Mr. Mudd,

Nassau Herald entry of Michelle Robinson

In the database, one can also find a few references to Obama’s role as a member-at-large of the Governance Board of the Third World Center (now the Carl Fields Center ), to which she was elected in 1983 , and to her membership on the Undergraduate Student Government’s Standing Committee on Race Relations.

The University Archives has two photos of Obama located in Princeton’s yearbooks: The Freshman Herald (below) and The Nassau Herald (top of this post).

Last year, student employee Iliyah Coles ’22 found another photo that appears to be of Obama in the May 7, 1984 issue of The Vigil alongside Joey Harris ’85. The Vigil was the newsletter of Princeton University’s Third World Center (now the Carl Fields Center). The caption that accompanied the photograph congratulated Harris on his election as chair of the Center’s Governance Board.

The Vigil is found in the Princeton University Publications Collection (AC364).

There are a few other photos of Obama you may have seen online that she has shared herself, one of her in front of Firestone Library on her Instagram page and another of her near a dorm publicized through various media outlets . These are not held within our collections.

January 6, 2021 update: An additional photograph of Obama from her Freshman Orientation Program has been identified. To view it, please see today’s blog on this topic .

Christa Cleeton

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Chain email

Her senior thesis doesn't say that

A chain e-mail about Michelle Obama purports to be excerpts from a senior thesis she wrote while at Princeton University.

It's true that Obama, then Michelle Robinson, attended Princeton and wrote a thesis titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."

In Obama's thesis, she sought to quantify how the attitudes of black Princeton alumni changed after graduation in regard to race relations and social change. Obama was especially interested in the attitudes of Princeton alumni in regard to improving the lives of lower-income blacks.

To document the change in attitudes, Obama devised an 18-question survey and mailed it to black alumni. Her thesis is a discussion of her methodology and an analysis of the results. It contains a limited amount of personal opinion in the introduction.

But the thesis did not say that the United States was founded on "crime and hatred" and that whites in America are "ineradicably racist." This appears to be a complete fabrication.

Featured Fact-check

The thesis is available on the Internet; the politics news site Politico reported on it in February 2008 and posted a copy it had obtained from Princeton University .

We downloaded a copy, which appears to be complete with no numbered pages missing. We read it, but we did not find the phrases the e-mail describes.

We took the additional step of scanning the document through optical character recognition software so we could search its text electronically. An automated search did not find the words "crime," "hatred," "hate," "ineradicably," or "racist" in the document.

The e-mail goes on to list some accurate quotes from the thesis, but its initial accusations are fiction. The words "crime and hatred" and "ineradicably racist" are inventions of whoever penned the e-mail, not words that appeared in Obama's thesis. Because of that fabrication and the e-mail's intention to defame the Obamas, we rate this claim Pants on Fire!

For more about this chain e-mail, read our story Digging up dirt on Michelle Obama .

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Politico, Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide , Feb. 22, 2008

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First Lady Michelle Obama

Early life and career.

Michelle Robinson Obama was born in DeYoung, Illinois, on January 17, 1964, to parents Frasier Robinson III and Marian Shields. She grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood with her older brother Craig, attending Chicago Public Schools and quickly joining gifted classes in elementary school.

Mrs. Obama graduated in 1981 as class salutatorian from Whitney Young High School, Chicago’s first magnet high school. She followed her brother to Princeton University in New Jersey, graduating cum laude in 1985. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Sociology with a minor in African-American Studies, which informed her senior thesis: “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”

In 1988, Mrs. Obama received her law degree from Harvard Law School. Following graduation, she was hired by the Chicago corporate-law firm of Sidley & Austin, where she specialized in entertainment law, and was ultimately assigned as advisor to summer associate Barack Obama. After leaving Sidley & Austin in 1993, Mrs. Obama worked for the city of Chicago’s Department of Planning and later the national service organization Public Allies.

Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson were married in 1992 at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. They have two daughters, Malia and Natasha “Sasha.”

Mrs. Obama accepted the position of Associate Dean of Students at the University of Chicago in 1996, where she also served as director of the University Community Student Center. In 2002, she became the University of Chicago Hospital’s Director of Community Affairs, and was promoted to Vice President of External Affairs and Community Relations in 2005.

At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Mrs. Obama was introduced by her brother, Craig Robinson, and delivered an address to the convention.

Presidential

During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Obama launched multiple initiatives. Let’s Move! targeted childhood obesity by encouraging kids to participate in physical activity and revamped US school lunches to include more nutritious food options. To illustrate healthy meal planning at home and encourage Americans to learn about where their food comes from, Mrs. Obama planted a vegetable garden on the grounds of the White House in 2009—the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden during World War II. Harvest from the gardens were cooked in the White House kitchen and provided to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local organization serving the homeless community in Washington, DC.

Detailing her efforts in establishing the White House kitchen garden, Mrs. Obama published her first book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America, in 2012.

In 2011, Mrs. Obama collaborated with Mrs. Jill Biden to launch Joining Forces , an initiative rallying American civilians and their organizations to support US service members and veterans and their families. The initiative used a three-prong approach—employment, education, and wellness—for organizing national efforts to provide additional tools to the US military community.

The Reach Higher initiative encouraged all American students to aspire to education beyond high school, through training programs, community college, or university. Expanding her educational goals to the international level, the Let Girls Learn program drew together resources from the US Department of State, US Agency for International Development, Peace Corps, Millennium Challenge Corporation, and US President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to empower young girls across the world to secure a quality education.

Works Published by Michelle Obama

American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America , 2012
Becoming , 2018
The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times , 2022

Media Galleries

First Lady Michelle Obama reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” at the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., December 9, 2010.

Barack Obama's Columbia University Thesis

Did barack obama's thesis for columbia university, entitled 'aristocracy reborn,' note that america's founding fathers 'did not allow for economic freedom', david mikkelson, published oct. 25, 2009.

Claim: Barack Obama's thesis for Columbia University, entitled "Aristocracy Reborn," noted that America's founding fathers "did not allow for economic freedom."

Example: [Collected via e-mail, October 2009]

I saw someone online claim that the following is a quote from Barack Obama's thesis at Columbia contains the following segment:

"... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

Origins: In academia, a thesis is a typical requirement for a graduate degree (although some schools require a thesis for a bachelor's degree as well), an original research project submitted by a student on a topic related to his major. Many universities keep their students' theses on file and make them available to the public as library resources.

In recent years, theses written by U.S. presidential candidates and their spouses have become subjects of great interest, particularly for the possibility that they might provide some insight into the thinking and mindsets of their authors, including the disclosure of once-held viewpoints that might be now be considered controversial and disadvantageous to their current political careers (or those of their spouses). Accordingly, major political figures have become more circumspect about allowing public access to their theses: Former First Lady Hillary Clinton 's 1969 Wellesley College thesis on community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, for example, was not available for examination by the public during the eight years of her husband's presidency, and current First Lady Michelle Obama 's 1985 Princeton University thesis on "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" was the subject of controversy when access to it was initially blocked during her husband's campaign for the presidency. (The Obama campaign made a copy of Michelle's thesis publicly available in February 2008, and Princeton's restriction on access to it was likewise lifted.)

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign (and afterwards), one of the items that was frequently cited as a "missing document" connected with Barack Obama was his own thesis for Columbia University, a school from which he graduated in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in political science (with a specialization in international relations). Politico noted in October 2008 that:

There's not a whole lot of information available about Obama's time at Columbia University in New York, which he attended for three years after attending Occidental College in Los Angeles for one year and from which he graduated in 1983.

His campaign would not release his transcripts, and it says it does not have a copy of his thesis, which dealt with Soviet nuclear disarmament and which has drawn intense interest.

As far as has been determined, Barack Obama did not produce a formal thesis for his degree at Columbia University; the closest match is a paper he wrote during his senior year for an honors seminar in American Foreign Policy. However, Columbia University has said it did not retain a copy of that paper, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt has said that Barack himself does not have a copy, and the professor to whom the paper was submitted has said that he no longer has a copy in his possession either:

In 1983, as a senior at Columbia in New York, Barack Obama enrolled in an intense, eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. But Baron says he never had any inkling that the gangly senior would scale such heights.

[Baron] had saved Obama's senior paper for years, and even hunted for it again [in July 2008] in some boxes. But he said his search was fruitless, and he now thinks he tossed it out [in 2000] during a move.

described [Obama's] paper as a "thesis" or "senior thesis" in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.

"My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States," Baron said in an e-mail. "At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other ... For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A."

Baron said that, even if he could find a copy of the paper, it would likely disappoint Obama's critics. "The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made," he said. "None of the papers in the class were controversial."

So would it provide any political ammunition today? "I don't think it would at all," Baron said. "It wasn't a position paper; it was an analysis of decision-making."

In October 2009, a purported excerpt from Barack Obama's "missing" Columbia thesis began circulating widely on the Internet, one which claimed the paper stated that the Constitution drafted by American's founding fathers "did not allow for economic freedom" and failed to mention "the distribution of wealth" (a play on the common campaign charge that a redistribution of wealth was one of Barack Obama's political goals).

Had someone finally turned up Barack Obama's elusive senior paper? The Pajamas Media web site reported on 21 October 2009 that writer/reporter Joe Klein had been permitted to read the first ten pages of it and had revealed that the paper (supposedly entitled "Aristocracy Reborn") included the excerpt reproduced above.

However, that claim seemed dubious, as a paper on "Aristocracy Reborn," with musings about the Founding Fathers' supposed lack of interest in "economic freedom" and "the distribution of wealth," would have been rather unusual content to find in a senior paper on the topic of Soviet nuclear disarmament, written for a seminar on American foreign policy. In fact, the putative excerpt was fictitious, something lifted from a bit of satire published on the Jumping in Pools blog back on 25 August 2009:

Obama was required to write a 'senior seminar' paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn , this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, "plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government."

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: "I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh."

In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: "There are many who will defend the 'free market.' But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny."

However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: "... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

Pajamas Media issued a notice a few days after its original report acknowledging that the information about Barack Obama's Columbia thesis was a hoax. Joe Klein also affirmed that he had never seen the paper in question.

Last updated: 25 October 2009

Popkin, Jim. "Obama and the Case of the Missing 'Thesis.'" MSNBC.com. 24 July 2008.

Saul, Michael. "Limbaugh Falls for Obama Thesis Hoax." [New York] Daily News. 25 October 2009.

Scott, Janny. "Obama's Account of New York Years Often Differs from What Others Say." The New York Times. 30 October 2007.

Vogel, Kenneth P. "What Are the Candidates Hiding?" Politico.com. 23 October 2008.

By David Mikkelson

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

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Elections Today

Recent projections, delegate tracker, georgia, oregon, idaho and kentucky primaries 2024: live results and analysis, full text: michelle obama's 2016 democratic national convention speech.

The full text from her address to the DNC on July 25, 2016.

 -- Below is the full text of Michelle Obama 's speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25, 2016.

MRS. OBAMA: Thank you all. (Applause.) Thank you so much. You know, it’s hard to believe that it has been eight years since I first came to this convention to talk with you about why I thought my husband should be President. (Applause.) Remember how I told you about his character and conviction, his decency and his grace -– the traits that we’ve seen every day that he’s served our country in the White House.

I also told you about our daughters –- how they are the heart of our hearts, the center of our world. And during our time in the White House, we’ve had the joy of watching them grow from bubbly little girls into poised young women -– a journey that started soon after we arrived in Washington, when they set off for their first day at their new school.

I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just seven and ten years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns. (Laughter.) And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, “What have we done?” (Laughter.) See, because at that moment, I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become, and how well we managed this experience could truly make or break them.

That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight -- how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. (Applause.) How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. (Applause.) How we explain that when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level -– no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high. (Applause.)

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models. And let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as President and First Lady, because we know that our words and actions matter not just to our girls, but to children across this country –- kids who tell us, “I saw you on TV, I wrote a report on you for school.” Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope, and he wondered, “Is my hair like yours?” (Applause.)

And make no mistake about it, this November, when we go to the polls, that is what we’re deciding -– not Democrat or Republican, not left or right. No, this election, and every election, is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives. (Applause.) And I am here tonight because in this election, there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility, only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be President of the United States, and that is our friend, Hillary Clinton . (Applause.)

See, I trust Hillary to lead this country because I’ve seen her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children –- not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection –- (applause) -- but every child who needs a champion: Kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs. Kids who wonder how they’ll ever afford college. Kids whose parents don’t speak a word of English but dream of a better life. Kids who look to us to determine who and what they can be.

You see, Hillary has spent decades doing the relentless, thankless work to actually make a difference in their lives -- (applause) -- advocating for kids with disabilities as a young lawyer. Fighting for children’s health care as First Lady and for quality child care in the Senate. And when she didn’t win the nomination eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned. (Applause.) Hillary did not pack up and go home. Because as a true public servant, Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own desires and disappointments. (Applause.) So she proudly stepped up to serve our country once again as Secretary of State, traveling the globe to keep our kids safe.

And look, there were plenty of moments when Hillary could have decided that this work was too hard, that the price of public service was too high, that she was tired of being picked apart for how she looks or how she talks or even how she laughs. But here’s the thing -- what I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. (Applause.) She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life. (Applause.)

And when I think about the kind of President that I want for my girls and all our children, that’s what I want. I want someone with the proven strength to persevere. Someone who knows this job and takes it seriously. Someone who understands that the issues a President faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters. (Applause.) Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady, and measured, and well-informed. (Applause.)

I want a President with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves, we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed -- (applause) -- and we give back, even when we’re struggling ourselves, because we know that there is always someone worse off, and there but for the grace of God go I. (Applause.)

I want a President who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters –- a President who truly believes in the vision that our founders put forth all those years ago: That we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story. (Applause.) And when crisis hits, we don’t turn against each other -– no, we listen to each other. We lean on each other. Because we are always stronger together. (Applause.)

And I am here tonight because I know that that is the kind of president that Hillary Clinton will be. And that’s why, in this election, I’m with her. (Applause.)

You see, Hillary understands that the President is about one thing and one thing only -– it’s about leaving something better for our kids. That’s how we’ve always moved this country forward –- by all of us coming together on behalf of our children -- folks who volunteer to coach that team, to teach that Sunday school class because they know it takes a village. Heroes of every color and creed who wear the uniform and risk their lives to keep passing down those blessings of liberty.

Police officers and protestors in Dallas who all desperately want to keep our children safe. (Applause.) People who lined up in Orlando to donate blood because it could have been their son, their daughter in that club. (Applause.) Leaders like Tim Kaine -- (applause) -- who show our kids what decency and devotion look like. Leaders like Hillary Clinton, who has the guts and the grace to keep coming back and putting those cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling until she finally breaks through, lifting all of us along with her. (Applause.)

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves -- (applause) -- and I watch my daughters –- two beautiful, intelligent, black young women –- playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. (Applause.) And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters –- and all our sons and daughters -– now take for granted that a woman can be President of the United States. (Applause.)

So don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this, right now, is the greatest country on earth. (Applause.) And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth, a leader who is worthy of my girls’ promise and all our kids’ promise, a leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.

So in this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired, or frustrated, or cynical. No, hear me -- between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago: We need to knock on every door. We need to get out every vote. We need to pour every last ounce of our passion and our strength and our love for this country into electing Hillary Clinton as President of the United States of America.

Let’s get to work. Thank you all, and God bless.

Who Is Michelle Obama? Read Her Princeton Thesis and She'll Tell You

Michelle Obama raged against the risk of her “integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure” in her Princeton University thesis. I reviewed this document, remarkable for its rancor as well as for its orthographical dysfunction, during her husband’s first presidential campaign ten years ago. Now that Mrs. Obama has emerged as a prospective candidate for the 2020 presidential election, her radical rant is worth another look.

Below is my 2008 Asia Times essay.

Sing, O Muse, the Wrath of Michelle By Spengler

The wrath of swift-footed Achilles, of which Homer called his muse to sing, nearly lost the Trojan War for the Greeks. The wrath of swift-tongued Michelle Obama well might lose the White House for her husband. We had a peek into her diary last week when the Obama campaign finally made public her undergraduate thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” The contents of this remarkable document sharpen the profile of Obama’s women that I offered last week (“ Obama’s women reveal his secret” Asia Times Online, February 26.)

Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling

Americans. But his wife’s anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.

Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after “feeling so alone” in her “frustration” and “disappointment” at America.

Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness. By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised.

Michelle’s ambivalence towards Princeton, and by extension towards America, has the makings of a tragedy of the sort found in the novels of Theodore Dreiser or F Scott Fitzgerald, a fatal compromise in pursuit of status. Young Michelle felt she was betraying “lower class Blacks” by assimilating:

… the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton 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. This realization has presently made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.

Nonetheless, she was drawn moth-like to the flame of success:

At the same time, however, it is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League University has instilled within me certain conservative values. For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates – acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before.

Hopelessness, young Michelle sought to demonstrate, afflicts black Princeton students who are torn between loyalties to the black community and the pursuit of success. Her thesis tabulated the results of a questionnaire sent to black students at Princeton on their attitudes towards the black community and themselves. She drew a bright line between “separatist-pluralist” attitudes, that is, rejecting assimilation into white America, and an “integrationist-assimilationist” stance. Clearly her sympathies lay with black separatism.

The idea of separationism and pluralism (both cultural structural and social structural) is also discussed by Billingsley (1968) who believes there is a need for Blacks to build up their own communities, define themselves by new “Black” standards different from the old White standards and exercise power and control over their own institutions and services within the Black community. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s [sic] (1967) developed definitions of separationism in their discussion of Black Power which guided me in the formulation and use of this concept in the study: “The concept of Black Power rests on the fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must close ranks.”

It was black separatists, she concluded, who cared about the black community, whereas integrated blacks turned their backs on it:

… the more respondents became sep[aratist]/plur[alist], during the Pre-to-Prin period [prior to attending Princeton], the more respondents became motivated to benefit the Black community; and the more int[egrated]/assim[imilated] they became, the more unmotivated they became to benefit the Black community.

Universities such as Princeton, moreover, rig the system for the benefit of whites, as she favorably quoted Dr Carolyn Dejoie:

Institutional policies of predominantly White Universities have established practices which favor the preferred groups and have ranked priorities which are meant to facilitate the tasks and improve the conditions of White students while ignoring the needs of the Black students … Fraternities, sororities, homecoming activities and student government maintain the White status-quo [sic]. As in academic areas, the social aspects of university life systemically follow the interests of White students – the majority group.

Although the black separatists are the ones who care about the black community, she continues, their sense of loyalty and concern also inspires a sense of hopelessness. That is an unexpected and highly personal conclusion. Her prose chokes up and her spelling breaks down as she writes of this hopelessness:

[The data] demontate [sic] a strong relationship for [sic] the change in ideologies during the Pre-to-Prin period and the feeling that the situation of the Black lower class is hopeless, such that the more responds became sep[aratist]/plur[alist], the more respondents; and the more respondents became int[egrated]/assim[imilated], the less hopeless they felt. My speculation for this finding is based on the possibility that a separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist [sic]. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist [sic] may better understand the desparation [sic] of their [sic] situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to [sic] their plight.

Michelle did not imagine the contempt with which the white liberal professors of Princeton regarded black students, for the above passage was preserved in the final version of the thesis stored by the university, errors and all.

Black students who reject white society, she concluded, understand the desperation of the black lower class, and therefore feel hopeless, whereas assimilated blacks ignore this desperation and therefore are more cheerful. It is hard not to admire the young black woman whose indignation over the predicament of the black lower class bursts out of the bland style of academic sociology, and who throws the condescension of her white liberal professors back in their faces. But that is not what afflicted the future Michelle Obama.

To the young Michelle’s sense of hopelessness about the prospects for the black lower class, Princeton added something even worse, namely guilt over “striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates – acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation”. Despite her black separatist sympathies, Michelle Vaughn Robinson succumbed to the temptations of which she wrote in her thesis and got a law degree from Harvard, earning around $400,000 a year in salary and corporate director fees by 2005.

Her “hopelessness”, “frustration” and “disappointment” remain, exacerbated by guilt over her own success. That is not speculation, but a precis of her own account. One might speculate that the guilt became all the more poignant to the extent her success was unearned. Michelle Obama’s employer, The University of Chicago Hospitals, paid her $121,910, a reasonable sum for the skill level evident in her thesis, but raised this to $316,952 shortly after her husband was elected US senator.

Unlike her husband, whose focus on his audience is unwavering, Michelle Obama remains at the mercy of the same internal conflict that she reported in her senior thesis. She is too bitter at the hopelessness of lower-class blacks to assimilate, but too attracted to money and privilege to reject white society. She hates the white institutions that made her prosperous, not only because they cannot solve the problems of the black lower class, but even more so because they made her feel guilty about her own success.

These internal conflicts help explain Michelle Obama’s erratic behavior. Despite her own financial success, Michelle Obama continues to preach austerity and self-sacrifice to others. Speaking before a working-class audience in Ohio on February 29, she urged her listeners to eschew corporate law or hedge-fund management, which was odd, because most of them did not have a high-school diploma, let alone a university degree:

We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond … many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management [quoted by Byron York in The National Review Online].

But she did not leave corporate America. She did leave the corporate law firm that hired her out of Harvard Law School, but there is no reason to believe that idealism drove that decision. The major law firms make partners out of a fifth of their new hires, who slave for years for the opportunity. Michelle Obama was not partner material for a top firm. She took more than a year to pass the Illinois Bar Examination, a substandard result, and – as her thesis makes clear – lacked the command of written English required for legal success. Her skills were better suited to the hospital position she eventually filled. Not only did she sell out, but she sold out for mediocre results.

Bitterness over the meager price that the white power structure offered for her soul nags at Michelle Obama. At the Ohio speech cited by NRO’s York, she complained, “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off [student loans], so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids … Barack and I were in that position. The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books … It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.”

But it was not only Senator Obama’s writing income, it was Michelle’s $200,000 salary increase and corporate directorships following his election to the US Senate that made the family prosperous. And it wasn’t just piano lessons and summer camp, but a mansion in the Chicago suburb that represented an adequate price for Michelle’s soul.

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected] David P. Goldman is the columnist “Spengler” for Asia Times Online ; his latest book is How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) . He is the Wax Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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