The paper is somewhat pedantic, well-written and rather boring. Which is interesting since Barack's autobiography was also well-written and a little to wordy and pedantic, and dare I say it? ... a little boring.
Most people that I know look back upon their senior thesis with some sort of nostalgia for their naïveté and innocence, or irony for their unsophisticated ideas. Of course, I have no idea how Ms. Obama would feel if she reread her thesis at this point in time. I would hope that she would be able to see the flaws and naïveté implicit in it's simplistic take on race in America. But who knows if some bitterness may have hardened her ideas.
Some of the assumptions Ms. Obama makes in her thesis are moral stances on what people ought to do. She does not present an argument for why skin color should determine who you do or don't help. She starts with the assumption that skin color defines culture, and that people ought to help economically disadvantaged people who have the same skin color as them.
In this picture, there are "Black" people and "White" people and no one in between. And the "White" people are somewhat stereotyped as having "the luxuries typical of the White middle class." As a person of northern European descent, I certainly don't think of myself in the terms, generalizations or stereotypes which Ms. Obama uses in this paper.
But it's not a paper about what happens when you stereotype and generalize people based on race. She was trying to prove her thesis that when "Blacks" went to Princeton, they become inculcated with the desire to have lucrative, successful careers, and they do not have an interest in helping people of the same skin color who are economically disadvantaged. And there is a definite judgment that it is bad not to help disadvantaged people who have the same skin color as you do.
There are some assumptions made that I would say don't hold up to examination. But Ms. Obama is viewing the world through a very distinct prism in this paper.
One would hope and expect that her world view has expanded somewhat over the years. I would have said that as a Christian woman one would expect her to be more tolerant and racially inclusive. But then again, her Church is not a particularly tolerant of racially inclusive Church.
Ms. Obama is an unknown entity. But there is no doubt that someone as intelligent and articulate as she was 23 years ago has grown over time, and has grown able to relate comfortably to people of all races and socio-economic backgrounds.
Perhaps she left south Chicago as a teenager from an environment that was entirely "Black", and arrived at Princeton, and experienced being the minority group for the first time at a time when the university was predominantly "White". Possibly she even went from being on of the most popular and successful people in her community to being an unknown amongst all the other most popular and successful people from their communities.
It can be a shock to get to college and find that is where all the other smart kids went. No one is as special as they think they were when they get to a good school because that's where all the other talented kids have gravitated to. And there is nothing easier than deciding that there is some generic reason why people treat you the way they do. Many a time I have thought that someone got a promotion because he was a guy. Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn't. But it sure was easy to find the major difference and define the situation with that difference.
And to be honest, from what I have learned from my close friend who graduated from Princeton two years before Ms. Obama, there was plenty of institutionalized racism on that campus. Princeton in the 1980s was turning out the future corporate attorneys, stockbrokers and Wall St titans, not the future labor organizers and criminal defense attorneys that Oxy was incubating.
Read the thesis for yourself, and make up your own mind.
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