Michelle Obama's Princeton Thesis Reveals Doubts About Her Own Integration

Michelle Obama did not believe she could ever be fully integrated into white society as a black woman, she wrote in her 1985 Princeton University senior-year thesis, and sometimes felt like a "visitor" at the Ivy League school, rather than an accepted student.

FOXNews.com

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Michelle Obama did not believe she could ever be fully integrated into white society as a black woman, she wrote in her 1985 Princeton University senior-year thesis, and sometimes felt like a "visitor" at the Ivy League school, rather than an accepted student.

The thesis, published by Politico.com, reveals that the wife of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was concerned that black Princeton alumni were inculcated into white culture at the expense of their own. She said despite her own integration there, she could not benefit at Princeton the way white students did.

"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 under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second," Obama wrote.

She also wrote that going to Princeton likely would lead to her "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."

Politico wrote that the school had removed the thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" and written under Obama's maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, from the school library until after the general election. The Obama campaign began distributing it after several outlets had received no assistance from the university.

Click here to read the full report in The Politico, and read Michelle Obama's senior-year thesis.

 

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