Monday, June 16, 2008
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Michelle Obama and Princeton University
Learning to be Michelle Obama
At Princeton, she came to terms with being a black achiever in a white world
By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff  |  June 15, 2008
As Catherine Donnelly climbed the stairs to her dorm room at Princeton University over a quarter-century ago, the Louisiana freshman felt ready for whatever lay ahead. But then she met Michelle.
Her full name was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She was so tall that her head seemed to brush the sloping ceiling of the cramped fourth-floor room. She was Donnelly's new roommate. And she was black.
Well, this was new.
Growing up in the South, Donnelly had gone to school with a handful of black classmates, but living together was quite another thing. Donnelly quickly warmed to Robinson, with her big sense of humor and riveting stories. But she was worried that her mother, who Donnelly said had grown up in a racist family, would not react well. She was right.
When Donnelly's mother, now 71, learned the race of her daughter's roommate , she was beside herself. She called alumni friends to object. And the next morning she marched into the student housing office.
"I said I need to get my daughter's room changed right away," recalled Alice Brown, a retired schoolteacher, who has since come to regret her reaction. "I called my own mother and she said, 'Take Catherine out of school immediately. Bring her home.' I was very upset about the whole thing."
For 17-year-old Robinson - who is now Michelle Obama and the first African-American woman to face the real prospect of becoming first lady - the incident was a stunning beginning to a formative chapter in her life. It was a time when her views on race and American culture began to coalesce - views that have helped make her a compelling figure but also somewhat of a lightning rod during the campaign. Just last week the Barack Obama campaign took on an apparently baseless rumor that she had once been taped talking of white Americans as "whitey."
Obama says she did not know about Alice Brown's actions until several weeks ago. But she wonders now if the incident might explain in part why she and Brown's daughter did not become better friends.
"We were never close," Obama said in an e-mail. "But sometimes that's the thing you sense, that there's something that's there, but it's often unspoken."
At the time Obama entered Princeton in 1981, the Ivy League campus was largely, if unofficially, segregated socially and Obama found her years there marked by questions about race and loyalty - much the same questions she and her husband often face today. Then, as now, Obama's focus was on overcoming differences rather than igniting them. The lesson she finds in the roommate incident is one of hope - Alice Brown is now considering casting her vote for Barack Obama.
"What it demonstrated was the growth that this parent had," Obama wrote. "What that told me is that, yes, the problems we face in this nation around race are real . . . but we also have to remember that people change and they grow."
Michelle Obama has often been cast as the more adamant half of the Obama household, when it comes to racial matters, and some have traced this thread to her Princeton years. But she was hardly a campus activist. Instead, she pursued quieter means of change characteristic of her practical nature, according to classmates with whom she remains close. In her efforts to understand the lot of black students, this determined young woman with the big hair and trademark strand of pearls attended meetings with school administrators about the African- American Studies department, helped bring black alumni to campus to address students, and worked afternoons in the school's Third World Center. It was, according to several professors and friends close to her, a critical passage in her life.
"Princeton was a real crossroads of identity for Michelle," said Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree, who was her law school adviser and now works with the Obama campaign. "The question was whether I retain my identity given by my African-American parents, or whether the education from an elite university has transformed me into something different than what they made me. By the time she got to Harvard she had answered the question. She could be both brilliant and black."

<snip>
 Obama herself often felt stigmatized on campus. In her thesis, she wrote 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."
Obama and her friends talked about the racial situation on campus a lot. "But Michelle kind of stayed away from the fray," recalled Lisa F. Rawlings, a classmate who is now a program director at Prince George's Community College in Maryland.
Asked if Obama experienced incidents of racism, Lelyveld said in an e-mail that, "So many years down the line, she [Obama] can't say for certain whether there were any specific incidents." Lelyveld initially said that Obama did not remember her freshman roommate.
But several of Obama's African-American classmates say they found the campus was as racially fragmented as it was elitist, and some white students agree. Hilary Beard, a friend of Obama's who is African-American and was a class ahead, recalls, "A lot of white students there had never been around black students. . . . They would want to touch my hair." And Rawlings says, "I cannot tell you the number of times I was called 'Brown Sugar.' "
While many found such incidents disturbing, Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, says that few got up in arms about it.
"We all viewed it as what you needed to do, to do business there," said Robinson. "You had to put up with certain things."

<snip>


In her thesis, Obama observed that Princeton, like other predominantly white universities, was "designed to cater to the needs of the White students."
"Remember, most of us black students had no social safety net," added classmate Beard. "You had an opportunity to change the arc of your life and you were not going to mess it up."
By her last year at Princeton, Obama was looking ahead. As part of her thesis work, she surveyed a group of black alumni to see if their attitudes had changed during their years at Princeton, and in particular if they had become "more or less motivated to benefit the Black Community."
What she found surprised her. As students, she wrote, the alumni were closely identified with the black community. But after graduating, she wrote, "their identification with Whites and the White community increased." The finding seemed to give her some pause.
Going to Princeton had left her striving for the same goals as her white classmates, such as acceptance at a graduate school or successful corporation. Indeed, Obama would go on to Harvard Law School, and would ultimately work as a corporate lawyer and for a major city hospital. But in her final months of college, she seemed to balk at such a path.
Further assimilation into the white social structure, she concluded," will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant," she wrote.
Since graduating, Obama has not returned to the Princeton campus. But after leaving the college behind, she found a way to resolve her dilemma while remaining true to herself.
"Michelle answered the question by going to Harvard," Ogletree said. "And she came with no ambiguity about her race or gender. She would navigate corporate America, but she would never forget her father's values and where she came from."


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