Thesis for life

by Ron Coleman | February 24, 2008 9:48 am

Politico.com reports [1]on Michelle Obama’s Princeton senior thesis:

“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 wrote about my “relationship”[2] with my classmate Ms. Robinson a little while ago, so naturally I love this item. It looks as if she played one intellectual / academic / spiritual note while at school — and, it would seem, since then[3], too.

I also tried to turn my hobby into a senior thesis (we all had to write one, besides the engineers, who actually had to do challenging academic work for the whole four years — not just in the spring of senior year!). The parallel with my earlier piece on Michelle Obama at Princeton is kind of amusing, again, because I juxtaposed her interests and academic performance with my then-obsession with college radio. And, as it turns out, I wrote an awful thesis about commercial college radio stations, which was so bad that now I have determined for sure that I will never run for anything, and neither will my wife, at the risk of someone motoring down to Princeton and digging up that piece of trash.

On the other hand, I pretty much outgrew my obsession when I went to law school. In contrast, Michelle Obama has turned hers — admittedly far more personal, existential and meaningful than making a good segue from the end of “Radio Free Europe” into “A Day in the Life” — into a life.

On the other other hand, if she were actually the one running for President, this particular focus would give me pause. Is the other Obama, the candidate, bigger than this? He seems to be. I sure hope so for his sake, and, if the unthinkable happens and McGovern wins this time, for the country’s. But I’m looking for some comfort here.

Ron Coleman’s journey into self-obsession is usually found at Likelihood of Success[4]. His arguably more scholarly and socially useful material is at his law blog, Likelihood of Confusion[5]

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/uncategorized/thesis-for-life/

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