A little something for Buzzcut and his love of Michelle Obama. (I kid because I love.) Basically, Michelle’s roommate at Princeton was raised as a racist southern cracker, but got over it. . . and became a lesbian.
Masson's Blog
A little something for Buzzcut and his love of Michelle Obama. (I kid because I love.) Basically, Michelle’s roommate at Princeton was raised as a racist southern cracker, but got over it. . . and became a lesbian.
That was a pretty stunning article. In 1980, at an Ivy League school, a student and her mother raised hell about the student’s placement with a black roommate. How dare Michelle Obama not be infused with unconditional, flag-waving, America-f-yeah!-ism.
Hey, thanks!
Now if I could just get a couple more people to write my blog for me…
Just wondering how many of you folks had African American roomies? Or any non-Cracker roomie, for that matter. I’m guessing none.
Michelle Obama has become my obsession. She is just fascinating. Why, just yesterday, she was STILL bitching about her student loans! She said that Barack will be the first President still paying off his loans!
Keep in mind that they made $1.5M last year, and live in a $1.6M home.
I just wish that Tony Rezko had paid off Barack’s loans instead of buying their house for them.
What I took away from that article is that the racist southern crackers not only have changed their views on African Americans, but are deeply sorry that they held their previous racist southern cracker views. It seems like Mom especially was mortified about what she had done.
THAT is what Michelle Obama needs to be proud of.
How unlike Jerimiah Wright, who was and is a racist, and is proud of it.
People make mistakes. People change. And when people ADMIT that they made mistakes and ask for forgiveness, it is a little… uncouth? to keep throwing their mistakes back in their face.
My intent wasn’t to throw mistakes in the face of Ms. Obama’s former roommate, if that’s what it looked like. (I don’t think “mistake” is the right word, exactly; the roommate was taught something wrong by her parents and, through experience, learned that her parents were wrong to teach her such things.)
But, I do think we need to hammer home the fact that such things were and are wrong in an effort not to make analogous mistakes in the future — say, by passing discriminatory legislation against gays. (Though, the mother apparently is uncomfortable with “miscegenation;” so maybe restricting gay marriage is equivalent.)
Doug, I was actually referring to the mother. Clearly, her views have changed, and the way I read it, she was sorry for those racist views.
Funny how Mom has trouble with inter-racial marriage, but her daughter is a lesbian with children. How’d that happen? Presumably the daughter has a partner to whom she is married in all but name?
Reading the article again, I give Michelle credit for putting up with the daughter, who “chopped off her hair and started partying with a lesbian crowd”. I’m actually curious what she thought about that! That would shock me more than an African American roomate.
Many older people still generally don’t equate anti-gay prejudice and restriction as wrong and many maintain they’re just being common sense ‘moral’. I did notice a shift among high school students back in the 80’s,which at the time, I attributed to MTV and I think there’s probably ‘a gay demaracation line’ thinking shift of those who are now in their 30s from those older. Even those politically conservative,who are 30 and under, have lost their strident anti-gay posture that was so common in earlier generations.
This is all very unscientific and my own personal observations,but there were many social upheavels in my teaching career from early 60s to 90s. The early 1960s student and the 90s student were quite different in their social assessments. I will not be around,but I predict that when those who are now in the 30s reach 70,gay marriage will be legal and flourishing,and no one will give it a second thought.
Racial views have been liberalizing faster than sexual orientation.
I had two Indian roommates (south Asian, not Native American). My junior year of college, I lived with an Hoosier-born son of Indian immigrants and in my first year of law school I lived with an international student. The former was a friend before we lived together, the latter was randomly assigned. I’m not sure why it matters, but you asked. I realize this conflicts with your thesis, Buzzcut, that the only non-racists in the world are conservative southern whites. Sorry.
I’m not sure why it matters,
Because talk is cheap, and it is too easy to condemn someone for doing something that we didn’t have to do ourselves. We never had to make that choice. Who are we to judge?
It’s a lot like calling Southerners racists when, at the same time, we live in the most segregated state in the nation.
Talk is cheap.
So if you roomed with Indians, I trust that you are a cricket addict now.
That’s a relativist argument, buzzcut. Is racism objectively wrong? Do moral arguments stop at state lines? Your position seems to be that because I live in a state with an imperfect past and present re: race relations, I am not allowed to take a position on any wrongs that have occurred in other states. Why?
Your position seems to be that because I live in a state with an imperfect past and present re: race relations, I am not allowed to take a position on any wrongs that have occurred in other states. Why?
Because we’re all sinners.
And you CAN and should take a position against wrongs, especially racism. But what you can’t do is judge others on the basis of guilt by association in terms of what their ancestors did, or what you perceive them to have done (in the case of most whites, most of whose ancestors were not even in America at the time of the Civil War, much less living in the South).
And finally, when someone admits that they did something wrong (Michelle Obama’s freshman roomate and her mother) and asks for forgiveness, you can’t keep coming back to that and throwing it in their face, which is what people are doing when they use that AJC story to explain why Michelle Obama still hates America.