at this moment, all i can think is "heck, i sure is glad i is no wife of a presidential candidate". they would have me applying tons of skin lightener liberally all over my body and bigging up the fact that my parents are from ghana "no slave descendent in sight here" - ohhh lordy.
kudos to michelle for riding this storm. as far as i can tell it is only gonna get worse.
this section in particular made me sooo mad, i reached for the keyboard and starting typing furiously:
Race is the wild card, the great unknown, of this election. Like the golfer Tiger Woods (and to a lesser extent Colin Powell), Obama transcends race. He is the post-racial candidate, not black but African-American in its literal, not politically correct, sense. The son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, he is not descended from slaves, nor was he shaped by the struggle for civil rights.
Indeed, if he, like Woods, had married a white woman, the question of his race might never have arisen. But he didn't. He married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, product of the historically black south side of Chicago, whose father worked in the city's water department, whose ancestors were slaves, whose family roots are in the deep south, in South Carolina.
Her ability took her to Princeton, a venerable white Ivy League university. "No matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong," she wrote in her final- year thesis. "It often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second." No matter that these words were written almost a quarter of a century ago, when she was just 21, the essay has resurfaced in this election year.
Rightly or wrongly, it has cemented an image of a woman who, for all her success in life as a lawyer and hospital administrator, remains prickly and resentful, in a way that her husband is not. In this internet age, one thing has inevitably led to another, including the unsubstantiated allegation that she once railed in a speech at the evils perpetrated by "whitey".
hello!!
lights on and no-one home?
obama transcends race? what are you saying? that no-one notices that obama is black? if he had a white woman hanging off his arm, race would never have entered the discourse? give me a BREAK! (michelle, you know you are just *too* black. obama is this pleasant coffee-colour, no, milky coffee. we like him. he reminds us of the great american dream, but you honey, you are just too dark...). so, really, no one notices tiger woods or colin powell's colour because they have white partners? does that work in reverse too? (hey whoopi, you know when you were dating ted danson everyone forgot about your pesky dark skin!!!)
african-american in its literal not politically correct sense? what the hell does that mean?
michelle remains "prickly and resentful" because of something she wrote when she was 21? i was thinking she simply expressed her opinion - you know - free speech? but maybe, when you are a black woman, you need to think about the future consequences of writing something quite so honest as "i feel i don't really belong" before you open your mouth? i think we are comfortable with hillary clinton talking about glass ceilings though. she has such a nice smile...
and that neat little reminder of the "whitey" comment (it is of course, unsubstantiated, but let's publish an article about michelle obama with the word "whitey" in it anyway, just to continue perpetuating that myth).
the saving grace of the article is the section at the end which gives michelle some advice about how to rebuild her image for the united states:
Inevitably, the rebranding has begun. Last week, Michelle was a guest co-host on a popular TV talk show, recounting how she cooked bacon for breakfast and didn't like wearing tights. Soon she will be visiting servicemen's families, appealing for better care for veterans, dutifully wrapping herself in the Stars and Stripes. Above all, perhaps, she must throttle back – just as Hillary Clinton was obliged to do in 1992, after she had outraged male supremacists by defending her career choices with the remark: "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas." Right now, a little more cookie baking would also suit Michelle Obama fine...
yup - if i am ever blessed with a daughter, i'm gonna ensure that i make good the mistakes that my mother made with me - teaching me to go to university and get a degree, what was she thinking?
sharon junior will bake the meanest chocolate chip cookies you have ever tasted...maybe just maybe, she will be accepted as a nice woman (whose colour we don't notice).
Full article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell/rupert-cornwell-out-of-america-851910.html
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