Princeton won’t let you read the senior thesis written by Mrs. Michelle Obama, a Sociology major / African American Studies minor, until after we’ve made her First Lady:

Robinson, Michelle LaVaughn (1985): Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community [Restricted until November 5, 2008].

But, a Newhouse News reporter apparently wrote it up last year before the curtain came down:

In her 1985 Princeton senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” Michelle LaVaughn Robinson lamented that white professors and classmates always saw her as “Black first and a student second.”

She had surveyed alumni to see whether they sacrificed their commitment to other blacks on the altar of success, and foresaw for herself an uneasy future: “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.”…

As Michelle Obama wrote in her thesis introduction, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. 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.”…

Michelle Obama was guided in her choice of thesis topic by a consuming concern that her success might compromise her black identity. As she wrote in her conclusion:

“I wondered whether or not my education at Princeton would affect my identification with the Black community. I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with Whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that Black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”…

Michelle Obama’s fears of losing touch with her roots without ever being embraced into the mainstream led her to promise, in her thesis introduction, “to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community.”

Okay, it’s schoolgirlish in style, especially compared to her husband’s sonorous mature prose, but she was only 21 when she wrote it. The important thing, though, is that the artlessness of her writing allows the meaning to shine through more obviously than in Dreams From My Father – but it’s the same Story of Race and Inheritance.

That doesn’t mean Mr. and Mrs. Obama still feel the way about race as they did in 1995, when Sen. Obama wrote his autobiography. Maybe they’ve changed their minds over the last 13 years? But shouldn’t somebody ask them about it? I realize a lot of people think it would be an invasion of their privacy, but they are running for the White House.

Senator and Mrs. Obama, clearly, you both had big racial chips on your shoulders when you were younger. Are you still like that? You changed? When? Why? Would you advise other blacks to stop being so resentful?

When I read Obama’s autobiography a year ago and said that Obama is not who you think he is, a lot of people said I was crazy and evil. Well, it’s slowly playing out along the lines I sketched out back then.

• By the way, if Barack serves eight years as President, that would give Michelle eight years to parachute into some random state to be Senator so that she could run for President herself in 2024 at the exact same age Hillary is now.
• My wife says that if Obama gets the nomination and McCain picks Secretary of State Rice as his running mate, either Condi or Michelle is going to have to get a new hair-do or it’s going to be a very confusing fall for television news shows.
• Although Newsweek says Mrs. Obama didn’t graduate at the top of her high school class, keep in mind that she did go to Whitney Young, a big public school that only admits students via entrance exam (like Stuyvesant in NYC). On the other hand, if her teachers told her she didn’t have the grades and test scores to get into the Princeton, they’d know, because Whitney Young has sent lots of grads to the Ivy League. So, she probably needed the double whammy of both affirmative action and being the legacy sister of her much-liked two-year-older brother Craig Robinson, who was a basketball player and is now the coach at Brown. Michelle always saw him as the smart one in the family, so she was already sensitive about her intelligence before she got to Princeton.

In case you didn’t hear about this, there was a mass wedding on the Mexican side of the border on St. Valentine’s Day. Here’s what was reported:

Nearly 600 Mexican couples tied the knot in a mass Valentine’s Day wedding by the U.S. border on Thursday, many of them undocumented migrants who met while working illegally in the United States.

So many of them were Mexicans who didn’t even know each other until they met in the U.S.

As a live band blasted out sugary Mexican love songs in the border city of Tijuana, a short walk from the busy San Ysidro crossing into California, a judge simultaneously married a crowd of couples whose ages ranged from 16 to 65.

This was a civil wedding, the only kind recognized by the Mexican government. (Church weddings are not officially recognized by the Mexican government).
And, get this,

More than three-quarters were migrants returning from, or trying to get into, the United States.

Then the article zeroes in on the couple Inocencia and Angelica (you can see their photo with the article):

Isn’t she gorgeous? I love her!” said Inocencio Felix of his new wife Angelica Perez, 36, dressed in a flouncy white wedding gown. Perez was deported by U.S. immigration officials two weeks ago from the state of Oregon, where the couple met.
Felix, also living in the United States illegally, said he came back to the Mexican border city of Tijuana, across from San Diego, voluntarily for the mass open-air wedding.

Congratulations and best wishes to Inocencia and Angelica. But do they plan to stay in Mexico, establishing their new family in their own country? Of course not :

We’re going to go back to the United States soon, our life is there,” he said, holding a heart-shaped pink balloon.

The article explains that

Thousands of Latin Americans try to cross into California every year from Mexico but the construction of a fence between Tijuana and San Diego, and increased workplace raids and deportations in the United States have swelled Tijuana’s migrant population. Many end up living in the seedy city for good.

This type of wedding is a result of the border situation:

Mexico’s civil registry office began the mass weddings several years ago with migrants in mind, and has seen the number of couples attending surge as deportation rates grow.

And this is interesting:

Many migrants do not have any kind of documents, not even a registered birth certificate, so they cannot get married, but we try to resolve that,” civil registry official Silvia Alvarez told Reuters, her voice drowned out by cheering newlyweds.

It’s great that the Mexican government is providing this service, and it would be interesting to see how many of these couples (1) return to the U.S., (2) stay in Tijuana, or (3) go elsewhere in Mexico.

In an earlier post, I said that the media were unlikely to say if the accused in the slaughterhouse case were immigrants, but a reader poinsts out that the LA Times has actually done so:

Reached at his home Friday, Sanchez, a father of two, said he regretted his actions and that he was only following orders.”I did it because they ordered me to. I obeyed them; if not, I lost my job,” Sanchez said in Spanish. “I knew it was illegal but they obliged me to do it.” Sanchez said he is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and that he worked at Hallmark for six years before he was fired last month. He is not represented by an attorney. [Cruelty charges filed against slaughterhouse boss , By Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2008]

Another example of the corrupting potential of illegal labor.

An article in Monday’s San Jose, CA Mercury-News [Illegal emigres defy the image: Fastest growing source? It's India, by Mike Swift, February 18, 2008] offers some startling numbers regarding illegal aliens from India. For example, the ubiquitous Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Trust estimates that the number of “illegal Indians” in the U.S. is about 400,000.

Of course, Indian immigrants and illegal aliens cluster heavily in technical professions and are among the most abundant holders of H-1B visas. So we’ll leave it to VDARE’s Rob Sanchez (see Rob’s blog entries here) to comment on that aspect of this apparently burgeoning phenomenon.

What leapt off the page at me was a passage near the end of the article describing the dynamics of “illegal Indians” who aren’t on H-1Bs:

Another source is relatives from India who arrive for a visit on a tourist visa and never go home.

“America is a very attractive country; everybody who comes here wants to stay,” said Shah Peerally, a Silicon Valley immigration lawyer. “I can tell you right now, there are nearly 1 billion people in India, of which maybe 800 million want to come here.”

Of course, once 100 million (say) have come, the remaining 700 million may decide things don’t look so attractive over here any more.

Newsweek has a long article on the wonderfulness of Mrs. Obama, but she sounds like she’s got a log-sized chip on her shoulder from lucking into Princeton due to affirmative action. For predictable reasons, being admitted into one of the Big Four super colleges and being given lots of financial aid didn’t instill in her a feeling of gratitude toward the benevolence of white people. Instead, it just fed her adolescent self-consciousness and racial paranoia. The bad news is that she doesn’t seem to have gotten over it yet. (She’s 44).

She did well in school (she skipped second grade), but she was not at the top of her class. She didn’t get the attention of the school’s college counselors, who helped the brightest students find spots at prestigious universities. “Princeton, the Ivy Leagues swoop up kids” like [her brother] Craig, Michelle says. “A black kid from the South Side of Chicago that plays basketball and is smart. He was getting in everywhere. But I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, ‘I can do that too’.” Some of her teachers told her she didn’t have the grades or test scores to make it to the Ivies. But she applied to Princeton and was accepted.

Overwhelmingly white and privileged, Princeton was not an easy place for a young black woman from the inner city. There weren’t formal racial barriers and black students weren’t officially excluded. But many of the white students couldn’t hide that they regarded their African- American classmates as affirmative-action recipients who didn’t really deserve to be there.

Angela Acree, a close friend who attended Princeton with Michelle, says the university didn’t help dispel that idea. Black and Hispanic students were invited to attend special classes a few weeks before the beginning of freshman semester, which the school said were intended to help kids who might need assistance adjusting to Princeton’s campus. Acree couldn’t see why. She had come from an East Coast prep school; Michelle had earned good grades in Chicago. “We weren’t sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, ‘Let’s bring all the black kids together’.”

Obviously, this program wasn’t put together by the Princeton klavern of the Ku Klux Klan, it was planned by the Princeton diversity sensitivity outreach nook. One reason diversicrats want to bring all the black freshmen to campus before everybody else is so they’ll bond to each other, not to random whites and Asians during the regular orientation week. During the first few days of a new phase of life, you are very emotionally open to bonding with the other people who are going through the experience with you. So, the diversicrats can build a constituency by holding special pre-orientations for blacks.

Acree, Michelle and another black student, Suzanne Alele, became inseparable companions.

Exactly as planned.

The three of them talked often about the racial divide on campus—especially how white students they knew from class would pass them on the green and pretend not to see them. “It was, like, here comes a black kid,” says Acree. The black students tended to hang out together at the Third World Center, a social club on campus, while the white party scene revolved around Princeton’s eating clubs.Michelle felt the tension acutely enough that she made it the subject of her senior sociology thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” The paper is now under lock and key, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Michelle wrote that Princeton “made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.” She wrote that she felt like a visitor on the supposedly open-minded campus. “Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton,” she wrote, “it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.” (Today, Michelle says, not quite convincingly, that she can’t remember what was in her thesis.)

If she’d gone to, say, the University of Illinois or wherever she would have gotten in without affirmative action, she wouldn’t have spent four years knowing that she was below the student body average in intelligence; she wouldn’t have spent four years worrying that everybody else was noticing she wasn’t as smart as the average; and she wouldn’t have spend four years, plus the next 22, hating them for noticing it.

In contrast to yesterday’s Muslim fellow in Egypt who can’t afford to start a family, today we take a look at a Muslim fellow in England who quit his job teaching math because he gets paid more to sit at home in Manchester with his wife, who is also his first cousin, and their eleven (soon to be twelve) children. He has so many kids that four [correction: five] of them are named Muhammad. It’s pure comedy gold.

Canadian blogger I, Ectomorph offers an instructive analogy to the rise of Pierre Trudeau to power in 1968:

“If there is anything that can compare to this it would have to be Trudeaumania, which I am not really old enough to remember (I’m now old enough that I look rather fondly on anything I’m not old enough to remember) but which — as I’ve later learned — involved an attractive young politician who by dint of birth bridged the two solitudes of his country but also had a slightly mysterious and more radical past that he seemed willing to shelve away for the sake of winning power — power that, as he campaigned for office, the candidate somewhat vaguely promised to exercise in a way that would be excitingly different than it had ever been exercised before by the old boring men who had occupied the office since time immemorial, and (in particular) in keeping with the youthful idealism of the upcoming generation. What this meant nobody knew, but it made no difference.”

What was Trudeau’s buried past? From the Amazon write-up of Young Trudeau: 1919-1944:

This book shines a light of devastating clarity on French-Canadian society in the 1930s and 1940s, when young elites were raised to be pro-fascist, and democratic and liberal were terms of criticism. The model leaders to be admired were good Catholic dictators like Mussolini, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain, and especially Pétain, collaborator with the Nazis in Vichy France. There were even demonstrations against Jews who were demonstrating against what the Nazis were doing in Germany.

Trudeau, far from being the rebel that other biographers have claimed, embraced this ideology. At his elite school, Brébeuf, he was a model student, the editor of the school magazine, and admired by the staff and his fellow students. But the fascist ideas and the people he admired – even when the war was going on, as late as 1944 – included extremists so terrible that at the war’s end they were shot. And then there’s his manifesto and his plan to stage a revolution against les Anglais.

This is astonishing material – and it’s all demonstrably true – based on personal papers of Trudeau that the authors were allowed to access after his death.What they have found has astounded and distressed them, but they both agree that the truth must be published