•Wife of Barack Hussein Obama
•Attorney
•Views America as a racist, sexist, homophobic nation
•Declared in 2008, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country...”
Born in Chicago on January 17, 1964, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is an attorney who has been married to Barack Hussein Obama since 1992.
In 1985 Miss Robinson received her B.A. in Sociology from Princeton University, where she minored in African American Studies. According to FrontPageMagazine reporter Jacob Laksin, “In a [February 2008] interview with Newsweek, [Michelle] Obama reveals that she got into Princeton … not on the strength of her grades, which she admits were unexceptional, but thanks to her brother Craig, a star athlete and gifted student who preceded her to the school. As a ‘legacy’ candidate and a beneficiary of affirmative action, Michelle Obama was granted an opportunity that others more accomplished were denied.”
During her years at Princeton, Miss Robinson was a board member with a radical campus group known as the Third World Center (TWC), which was established in 1971 to provide "a social, cultural and political environment that reflects the needs and concerns of students of color at the University”; to remedy the fact that “the University’s cultural and social organizations have largely been shaped by students from families nurtured in the Anglo-American and European traditions”; to acknowledge that “it has not always been easy for students from different backgrounds to enter the mainstream of campus life”; and to teach minority students to “become more sensitive to the consequences of a long history of prejudice and discrimination.”
TWC's constitution and founding documents were steeped in anti-American and anti-white rhetoric. TWC's constitution stated:
"The term ‘Third World’ implies[,] for us, those nations who have fallen victim to the oppression and exploitation of the world economic order. This includes the peoples of color of the United States, as they too have been victims of a brutal and racist economic structure which exploited and still exploits the labor of such groups as Asians, Blacks, and Chicanos, and invaded and still occupies the homelands of such groups as the Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and native Hawaiian people. We therefore find it necessary to reeducate ourselves to the various forms of exploitation and oppression. We must strive to understand more than just the basics of human rights. We must seek to understand the historical roots and contemporary ramifications of racism if Third World people are to liberate themselves from the economic and social chains they find themselves in."
A 1976 TWC document titled “Oppression breeds resistance,” stated: “The history of the peoples of the Third World, who have suffered from U.S. Imperialism, and of the oppressed nationalities within the United States—Afro-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Asians, and Native Americans, has been a history of oppression and resistance.” On one occasion in 1973, TWC brought the Puerto Rican Nationalist and Socialist, Manuel Maldonado-Denis to campus as a guest speaker. “I have come from a colonized country, submitted to cultural assimilation and cultural aggression,” he told the students at TWC. He accused the United States of “dominating,” “fleecing” and “exploiting” Puerto Rico, and said “the only solution” to the problem was “the establishment of national liberation and the establishment of socialism.”
In November 1984, during Michelle Robinson's tenure as a TWC board member, that board maintained that nonwhite students should have the right to bar whites from its meetings on campus and from its meetings with school administrators. Of the 19 elected positions on the organization's board, two were reserved exclusively for each of the five ethnic groups TWC claimed to represent: Asian, Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Native American.
TWC played a key role in bringing to Princeton's campus a host of radical speakers, including such notables as Hassan Rahman, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s deputy observer to the United Nations; David Johnson, affiliated with the terrorist group FMLN; former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, a committed socialist; William Bowen, the architect of Princeton’s racial preference programs; Roberto Vargas, a pro-Sandinista, pro-Che Guevara poet; Miguel Barnet, a pro-Castro writer and ethnographer; Manning Marable, a renowned black Marxist; and a number of ACORN representatives.
At Princeton, Miss Robinson wrote a senior thesis entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” (see complete thesis under the Resources column on the left-hand side of this page). Some excerpts from the thesis include the following:
•“Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
•“[My Princeton experiences] “will likely lead to my 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.”
•“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 under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
•“Earlier in my college career, there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.”
•“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community … I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”
After graduating from Princeton, Miss Robinson went on to attend Harvard Law School, where she was accepted under the aegis of a minority outreach program. As one of her friends would later reflect, Robinson recognized that she had been privileged by affirmative action and was very comfortable with that.
In 1988, during her third and final year at Harvard, Miss Robinson wrote an essay for the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) newsletter, condemning Harvard for its dearth of nonwhite and female law professors, and for not having tried to increase their numbers by hiring new candidates on the basis of skin color and sex rather than their academic credentials:
“The faculty’s decision to distrust and ignore non-traditional qualities in choosing and tenuring law professors merely reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes, which, in turn, serve to legitimize students’ tendencies to distrust certain types of teaching that do not resemble the traditional images.”
Also in the 1988 essay, Miss Robinson derided such books as The Paper Chase and One-L, for promoting the notion that law professors should be “cold, callous, domineering, old, white men who took pleasure in engaging their students in humiliating and often brutal discourse.” She criticized the “traditional model” of law-school instruction, which relied heavily on the Socratic method. She lauded the work of several professors who did not use that method, including such far-leftists as Martha Minow and Charles Ogletree. And she heaped praise upon the concept of critical race theory, which holds that because racism is so deeply ingrained in American institutions, classical liberal ideals such as meritocracy, equal opportunity, and colorblind justice are essentially nothing more than empty slogans.
On May 10, 1988, just a few weeks before Miss Robinson received her Harvard law degree, she and some 50 other BLSA members, carrying signs demanding an “end to racism,” stormed the office of Dean James Vorenberg and occupied it for 24 hours. Specifically, the protesters demanded that Harvard Law School hire (and grant tenure to) 20 female or minority professors over the ensuing four years. They demanded, further, that at least seven of those twenty hires be black — and that at least four of those seven be female. Moreover, they demanded that Harvard grant tenure to Professor Ogletree and a deanship to Professor Derrick Bell, the father of critical race theory.
After law school, Miss Robinson returned to Chicago to work for the law firm Sidley Austin. There she met her future husband, Barack Obama, who was working for the firm as a summer associate. In the summer of 1991 she joined the staff of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
In 1992, as noted earlier, Miss Robinson wed Barack Obama. The marriage ceremony was performed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), where the Obamas were members of the congregation. (They would remain members of TUCC until 2008.)
In 1993 she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of the organization Public Allies, an entity that sought to cultivate future community activist leaders by arranging apprenticeships for young adults with non-profit organizations.
In 2002, Mrs. Obama began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals (UCH), first as Executive Director for Community Affairs and later, beginning in May 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs. In these roles, she was heavily involved in managing UCH’s “business diversity program.” In early 2005, shortly after her husband had been sworn in as a Democratic U.S. Senator representing Illinois, Mrs. Obama’s annual salary at UCH was suddenly raised from $121,910 to $316,962.
Mrs. Obama also served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc., a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007.
Mrs. Obama was honored by Essence magazine in May 2006 as one of the “World's Most Inspiring Women”; by Vanity Fair in July 2007 as one of the “World's Best-Dressed Women”; and by 02138 magazine in September 2007 as #58 in "The Harvard 100" list of that university’s most influential alumni.
In a February 2007 appearance with her husband on 60 Minutes, Mrs. Obama implied that America’s allegedly rampant white racism posed a great physical threat to her husband, who had just announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. Said Mrs. Obama: “As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” (Mrs. Obama’s implication ignored the fact that the vast majority of violence against black Americans is committed by other blacks. According to the U.S. Justice Department, for instance, between 1976 and 2005, fully 94 percent of black murder victims were killed by black attackers.)
In January 2008, Mrs. Obama was a guest speaker at the University of South Carolina, where she challenged students to embrace diversity. “We don’t like being pushed outside of our comfort zones,” she said. “You know it right here on this campus. You know people sitting at different tables -- you all living in different dorms. I was there. You’re not talking to each other, [not] taking advantage [of the fact] that you’re in this diverse community. Because sometimes it’s easier to hold on to your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is are we ready for change?”
On February 1, 2008, Mrs. Obama said, “I don't think there is a person of color in this country that doesn't struggle with what it means to be a part of your race versus what the majority thinks is right.”
While campaigning for her husband on February 18, 2008, Mrs. Obama told an audience in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: "[F]or the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Later that same day, in Madison, she said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."
On another campaign stop that same month, Mrs. Obama told a Zanesville, Ohio audience: “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt. So you’re in your forties, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids. Barack and I were in that position. The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books.… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.”
“We left corporate America,” Mrs. Obama added, “which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
In March 2008 a New Yorker profile quoted Mrs. Obama saying, in a stump speech she had made in South Carolina, that the United States is "just downright mean" as a nation. "We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day," she told churchgoers in that same state. "Folks are just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over my lifetime."
At an April 2008 campaign event in North Carolina, Mrs. Obama said:
"The truth is most Americans don't want much. Folks don't want the whole pie. Most Americans feel blessed to thrive a little bit — but that's out of reach for them. In order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
While campaigning for her husband in May 2008, Mrs. Obama said:
"Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation."
In September 2010, a former advisor to the Obama election campaign and transition team told an interviewer the following about Mrs. Obama:
"She is very much the Chicago ideologue. Nancy Pelosi is the far left of the Democrat Party, right? Well, Michelle Obama might be to the left of Nancy Pelosi. She really doesn’t care for how things work in the country and she wants to see it all changed. I can respect that, though I would guess she is far too liberal even for me – and I consider myself a liberal Democrat."
In prepared remarks that she delivered at a December 13, 2010 news conference announcing the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, Mrs. Obama said: "[M]litary leaders ... tell us that ... more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight. They tell us that childhood obesity isn’t just a public health issue; they tell us that it is not just an economic threat. It is a national security threat as well."
During the week of June 21-27, 2011, Mrs. Obama and a 21-person entourage went on a so-called "good-will mission" to South Africa and Botswana. The trip's transportation expenses alone cost U.S. taxpayers at least $424,142. That figure does not include costs for food, lodging, and ground transportation. According to "White House sources" cited by The Daily Mail in August 2011, Mrs. Obama may have spent as much as $10 million on vacations during the preceding year.
In October 2011, Mrs. Obama, while campaigning for her husband's re-election, said: “Will we be a country that tells folks who’ve done everything right but are struggling to get by, ‘Tough luck, you’re on your own’? Is that who we are?... Will we be a country where opportunity is limited to just the few at the top? Who are we?”
In the spring of 2012, Kristin Hull, a member of the a pro-Castro, pro-Hugo Chavez, pro-Hamas organization Code Pink, presented Mrs. Obama with a petition that urged peacekeeping rather than war with Iran. Among the document's 20,000 signatories were such luminaries as Gloria Steinham, Alice Walker, and Eve Ensler. According to Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, "Ms. Obama thanked Hull for her advocacy and said, 'Keep up the great work.' As Hull was walking away after her photo with the First Lady, Michelle Obama grabbed her hand, squeezed it and said, 'We really need you.'" Another Code Pink co-founder, Jodie Evans, also related this story, via email.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2311
