Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: the lasting legacy of insecurity
In a recent post, I wrote of affirmative action:
We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.
This is one of the most insidious effects of affirmative action, and Michelle Obama—despite all her achievements and her current position as First Lady—may herself still suffer from it. In a recent commencement speech she gave to the graduating class of Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter School, she had the following to say about Sonia Sontomayor and herself (unfortunately, embedding is disabled for the You Tube video; you’ll have to go here to view it) [emphasis mine]:
…And [Sotomayor] went to Princeton, and in the story she said that when she arrived (and this was nine years before I would even think about going) she said when she stepped on that campus she said that she flet like a visitor landing in an alien country. She said that she never raised her hand that first year because…she was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions…So despite all her success at Princeton—and then she went on to Yale Law School where she was at the top of her cass…and despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sontomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up. And when I read her story I understood exactly how she feels.
Note that Michelle Obama does not say “how she felt.” She uses the present tense: “how she feels.”
Now, perhaps it’s not really affirmative action that’s at fault. I know that imposter syndrome (which is exactly what Ms. Obama is describing) is more likely to be felt by women (even, or perhaps especially, high-achieving ones) than by men. But it seems odd that these particular women might feel it so sharply even at this late date that they find it necessary to talk about it.
In addition, if you watch the video, you may notice that Michelle Obama speaks with a bitterness that appears to haunt her even today. I find it very sad; she seems to have not been able to put the insecurities of her past behind her no matter what heights she has scaled since.
I think you’re right about being still haunted by Affirmative Action.
First of all, I would extend the concept to HBO. He strikes me as an AA baby. Never wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review (mighty suspicious by itself). Going directly into politics (inner city variety) is another suspicious sign.
I do remember a remark made in the Harvard Graduate Commons by a friend who was a residential tutor (I forget the exact title) at a student house. And I quote…
“He’s black, you know. And Affirmative Action. When he walks into class, the rest of the class think: ‘Here comes the F’.”
What a way to go through life…
I would say that this is because deep inside they know that they do not really deserve their positions. They have in fact not “Scaled” anything, they have diminished things.
AA leads to a world were symbols are everything and substance is nothing. Where achievement is not truly measured there cannot be real achievement.
The Left never imagine that a “position” is anything other that a holding place for a “class”. Never do they imagine that those positions actually have meaning beyond that.
The world is messed up because of “old, rich white men”. It does not occur to them that what parts of the world that are NOT messed up are more than likely the creation of “old, rich white men”. Time will tell if these people can actually add to this great accomplishment, but so far it appears that they are destroyers, not builders–or even caretakers.
AA brats like these two have never actually had to morally or intellectually defend their “ideas” much less their “rights to the positions that they hold.
A civilizaton can not long survive under these conditions.
Wow! Imposter Syndrome. I had it and never knew what it was called.
I used to be a computer consultant working for a manufacturing software house. I worked on minis with small businesses (feel (fill in tirade here) like she’s BS. She IS BS. How else could she get a 200k + raise (for a job that was so nothing they dropped it when she left) and then give a speech about how she and hubby had abandoned the pursuit of wealth for a life of service?
She’s just bitter. She’s mad because she’s black. Because she’s not Elle McPherson. Because she don’t get not respect. Because she can’t pat her head and rub her tummy. Whatever.
Another county: I would suppose that anybody who wakes up in the White House has to do a lot of pinching even after being there quite a while.
That does it. Until I learn to cut, paste, and then copyread I’m finished with comments.
Feelings of inferiority, impostor syndrome, and victimhood are something that almost every balanced human being experiences at some point in their lives. Everyone compensates for those feelings, and most get over them to compete with a sense of accomplishment.
Being given an undue advantage only increases the stigma and shame that reinforces low self-esteem and related demotivation, or “handicap entitlement”. We recognize that children loath being ostracized in this manner, why would we continue to undermine our society with AA? Why can’t the proponents recognize the harm, are they just too damaged and rationalizing their feelings of inferiority?
These people SHOULD feel insecure. That’s the price they paid for their AA deal.
I used to work for a company that had AA hires. Every single one of them was a poor worker who was over his/her head. Some of them also had attitudes that made them difficult to work with. A sad situation all around.
AA is one of the worst things to ever happen to black people. (And now “Latinos.”)
“Latinos” are the last people to “need” AA. I routinely work with second-generation people whose Spanish-speaking parents immigrated to the U.S., and they do great without special help. They are hard working, charming, and don’t have attitude. Why should they be kept down, any more than Italian-Americans were kept down in earlier days?
Sorry, AA just has to go.
Obama is unquestionably an AA. His gift is the gift of gab and charisma. Too bad he was directed into using that gift into ways that would help people, not hurt them.
“wasn’t directed into”
I have been friends since second grade with the offspring of a Tuskegee Airman, heretofore identified as OTA. (BTW, I didn’t find out about the father’s historical significance until I was an adult. Like many of his generation, he did not toot his own horn.)
The OTA has full confidence in own intellectual abilities. This is perhaps so because the OTA went to state schools for undergrad and law, and passed the law exam the first time (pass to high pass, IIRC. Definitely not by the skin of one’s teeth), There was no AA at all in OTA getting into undergrad. Regarding law school, I don’t know/remember if AA played a part, but if so, it accounted for not a big part, as OTA had a lot on the ball. I do know that OTA was considering getting a Ph.D. in English- liked Chaucer. A faculty member advised OTA at the time that English professors tended to be racist, and it would be better to find another career. I guess they weren’t as politically correct back then.
Offspring of OTA, grandchild of Tuskegee airman, went to private boarding school and to elite university: boarding school was at initiative of grandchild. Grandchild was in fine public school system, but didn’t want to end up at the state school: rather ambitious and far-thinking for an 8th grader. I asked if the grandchild ever got any condescension at elite university along the line “you just got in because of AA.” The reply came back that any such condescension lasted no more than fifteen minutes into knowing the grandchild of the Tuskegee airman.
The OTA has performed well at high pressure jobs that would eat most people alive: has the grace under pressure that the airman father had.(As did the OTA’ s mother.) OTA said to me that at the beginning of career, OTA had encountered a number of professional colleagues that were surprised that a black was competent. This in the oh-so-liberal-and-oh-so-enlightened Northeast. This was not a reaction to AA but a manifestation of the long held racist belief that blacks did not have the intellectual capacity for certain jobs, a belief that has been a long time in dying out.
When we consider the effects of AA, we also need to take into consideration the old racist belief that minorities do not have the capabilities. AA is an attempt to combat that belief, but it may also perpetuate it by placing people at a level their skills do not merit. Thomas Sowell made the point re AA and the California university system: if your scores and grades do not merit Berkeley, then go to Hayward State. You will be more comfortable there
Drop “syndrome” and keep the remainder.
I think its more than just a feeling.
Michelle considers herself an imposter? Then she does have some grasp of reality.
And that unpublished editor of the law review stuff? He was clearly chosen as the class mascot. If they’d had a prom, he’d have been prom king, guaranteed.
Michelle can also add having a powerful husband to the list of reasons for self doubt. Her career (judged by salary) didn’t take off until he was elected to office.
What surprises me about Sotomayor’s comment and MO’s quotation is that either of them should think that the feeling that Princeton is alien and intimidating is somehow unique to women and/or people of color. Princeton is *supposed* to feel alien, to everybody: it’s built to look like a monastery! The traditionally designed university campus, whether gothic in style or not, represents a spiritual/intellectual domain separate from ordinary life, where one can’t really *belong* until one has been initiated into membership, i.e. transformed. That’s what a liberal arts education, and the degree of the liberal arts graduate, used to represent. I mean in the days when “finishing college” was considered a personal intellectual achievement and not merely a vocational hurdle as it usually is now.
Like Sonia Sotomayor I too grew up in a NYC housing project, and I should say I was more alienated by Princeton than she was, because I was too alienated even to apply. I did apply to Columbia. I was admitted (graduate of Columbia College 1972), and I can say that it was a very long time–after my graduation!–before the inchoate question “Do I really belong here?” vanished from the last corner of my mind. That is because the institution insistently raised it, as a matter of pedagogy. Many factors–the difficult and unyielding required curriculum, the publicly famous professors, the Ivy League brouhaha about selectivity, and the accomplishments of famous alumni, all sent students a message that made us feel–not like a privileged elite, but like Cinderella-Men (all men in those days) who had been handed a baseball and told we were about to pitch in the World Series. It was intimidating, and it was supposed to be. It was like a boot camp for brainy boys. (And I think many Barnard women of that time would tell you that Barnard was similar for girls.) But, for the most part, the students would rise to the challenge, and in subsequent years many became quite successful at whatever they chose to do.
Assuming that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is confirmed (though there’s good reason it shouldn’t be), I sure hope that when she joins the Court she is very intimidated, by the intellect of her colleagues and predecessors, and by the gravity of her responsibilities. To do the job of a Supreme Court justice well she’ll need to call upon parts of herself she hasn’t yet had to exercise. I hope she rises to the occasion.
I’m not encouraged by either of the Princeton alumnae currently in the news. What do they have to whine about?
The Post Liberal
“Assuming that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is confirmed (though there’s good reason it shouldn’t be), I sure hope that when she joins the Court she is very intimidated, by the intellect of her colleagues and predecessors, and by the gravity of her responsibilities.”
Yeah, well, we hoped that about Obama too.
She didn’t seem particularly bitter or angry to me.
I missed the point though. Was Sonia uncomfortable because she was the only Hispanic woman there and that made her feel as if she didn’t belong?
I think Mrs. Obama, whose University major was Black Studies SHOULD be intimidated by graduates of Mathematics Science Technology school. Let alone college graduates who studies real sciences.
“because their achievements have forever after been tainted . . .”
To which I honestly say “So fricking what!”
At least AA gave them the chance to get those achievements – something AA took away from me!
Are some now going to say that I have to be nice to those who got the slice of American pie that I didn’t because they “feel” bad? I can tell you that’s not going to happen.
I studied Judge Sotomayor’s 2001 Berkeley speech, as well as her 1994 speech upon which her 2001 speech was based. Judge Sotomayor is focused on bigotry in America, and on rigid, misguided principles which result from white male dominance of our society and legal system. Judge Sotomayor sees affirmative action as the remedy for our society’s problems. I have analyzed her thinking here: Sonia Sotomayor’s 2001 Berkeley speech interpreted
A part of me can understand some of what has left its mark on the psyche of Michelle Obama. I lived for almost two years in Chicago at Loyola (which is towards the North Side), and did some of the volunteer work which Jesuit seminarians are required to perform on the South Side of Chicago. Now, there are different neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side, so it’s not all to be painted with the same brush. However, for much of the place I can say with all and complete honesty that I have never been to a more bleak place on this earth. Even the favelas of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have a life and vitality to their human cultures that you will not find on the South Side. It is a hard, mean, gritty place. The people are hard and cold. Not in all cases, but it was tragic to see it in the eyes of the kids. I understand that Michelle grew up in more of a lower-middle class neighborhood – not in the slums. Her father had a decent paying job, but certainly not a job that availed to his family luxuries. Still, she came from a place where black people are angry. I read her as a person who is shot through with anger. It oozes out of her pores. And I think she took that anger with her to Princeton and she projected a lot of stuff on to many of her white classmates.
I was in college a few years before she was. Late Seventies into the early Eighties. There were not many black students at the University of New Hampshire at Durham in those days, but those kids were not subjected to any bad behavior, ridicule, or racism. However, the fact that there were so few black people there must have been a different experience for the kids who may have come from communities were there are few white people.
And I believe that Michelle Obama probably felt out of place at Princeton because Chicago’s grim, gritty, and mean human culture distorted her sense of humanity. And for all we know she perhaps got into Princeton on mostly her own merits. If she was maybe on the bubble, perhaps affirmative action helped give her an assist. No matter. What is most important is what she did with that opportunity, and from all accounts she appears to have done well with it.
But I believe she already came with an attitude to Princeton. I don’t think Princeton made her angry. She chose to major in sociology, which everyone knows is a cover for Marxist analysis. She was mad at society. She got that in Chicago. And her sense of inferiority can be explained by THAT, not affirmative action. She did well enough to get into an Ivy League law school, which is no small accomplishment. I believe Michelle Obama has a formidable brain and did well with whatever breaks she got.
One more way I view affirmative action. There are white kids who did not get into an Ivy League school and I am convinced that they would have done well at those schools. In fact, given what we now know about the grade inflation at the Ivies, a hard-working, diligent kid who goes to a state university could probably do very well at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. It’s all about what you do with your opportunities.
So, I guess I’m saying that I don’t think affirmative action necessarily would lead to a black student feeling inferior. I think the scars are there well before college, and go to the human culture and environment they come out of. Family also matters. Which is why I wonder about Michelle’s parents and upbringing that she would have so much anger.
On Sotomayor, same thing. She appears to have been radical before she arrived at Princeton, as she was in the forefront of radical organizing by her sophomore year. Again, that waft of the presence of cultural Marxism with an edge to it. I did not grow up in the projects of the Bronx, so I don’t know what the political atmosphere was like there in the late Sixties, early Seventies. I’m sure it was not a happy place.
Angry people are not happy people. Most Leftists I know are not happy people. I’m not exaggerating. Every one of them I’ve known has had spiritual problems, relationship problems, problems with work, problems … in just relating to the world as it is. And as a former Leftist myself I did in fact, through spiritual direction and a period of psychoanalysis, discover some of my own anger. And was very lucky to experience most of it being healed. It never completely goes away. But if you name it, and you’ve had enough love in your life at the right times, and an understanding therapist, you can recover yourself, own your life, and go forward to be a better and happier human being.
In my estimation, neither Michelle Obama nor Sonia Sotomayor have been graced with that kind of experience and blessing. So, their lives will continue to be littered with the wreckage that their anger can cause.
Michelle’s old neighborhood was not so bad. I grew up two blocks from where she lived. Admittedly, it had gone downhill due to white flight in the late 1960s, but it had great housing stock, terrific access to decent schools. and all the wonderful cultural amenities that Chicago offered–for free or very cheaply–in those “good old days.”
So, FredHjr, you may be right. It’s probably her parents’ fault that she grew up so angry. The black kids of her generation in that neighborhood were not deprived. However, many of them probably got into drugs and wasted their potentials.
One of the most useful books I ever read on the problem of blacks in the 1960s was “Manchild in the Promised Land.” It clearly showed the devastation that drugs wrought in the black communities of NYC. The same was probably true in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago.
“Whitey” didn’t deprive Michelle of anything, and her parents should have set her straight. Next time neocon readers visit Chicago, take a tour of the South Shore neighborhood (between Stony Island and the Lake and from 67th or 71st Street to 79th or 83rd). Michelle grew up on the 7400 block of Euclid.
I’ve been reading more about Sonia Sotomayor’s background. Did you know that she was her high school graduating class valedictorian (1972)? So, her being at Princeton was NOT affirmative action. Nor was her acceptance into Yale Law School. Now, given the fact that the Ivies try to hire the top people in their fields, should they lay that mission aside in order to go out and hire more Latino/Hispanic scholars just to please little sophomore Sonia? I mean, get real. And as the poster “the Post Liberal” above wrote about the experience of the Ivies, you are supposed to feel out of your element.
Once again, I sense the presence of cultural Marxism implanted in young Sonia very early. Maybe in high school. Perhaps in her freshman year. I was a junior in high school in the Spring of 1972 at a Catholic boarding school. We had no exposure to Marxism there. I cannot imagine Sonia having exposure to Marxism at Bishop Spellman High School in the Bronx.
We’ll never find out from her what was the agent of her radicalization that early in life. She might not even know what it was or, more likely, she does and she won’t talk about it.
Fred, several comments. First, in the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxism was practically the default way of looking at the world in the elite universities, and that viewpoint trickled down to many high schools. So Sotomayor’s being a Marxist at the time is practically an “American as apple pie” position- virtually mainstream at those places.
Certainly nothing unusual at all at the time. Most likely she picked it up at university, in the sense of casting off her previous “parochial” viewpoints. Go to university and become enlightened, don’t you know?
An anecdote from that era follows. I heard an SDS elder at my school, not Ivy League but in top 50, say that Lenin should be studied in the university — in the sense that one should study chemistry or Plato. My hearing that was probably what dissuaded me from going the Weatherman route, as I had taken a Politics course my freshman year in high school that had given very good groundings in exposing the moral and material bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism. The SDS elder is now a state legislator, and appears to be a vanilla liberal Democrat these days. In reading the statements of this state legislator, once an SDS elder, I do not get the revulsion that I get from reading Billy Ayers.
An anecdote about Ivy League admissions. Certainly a valedictorian can be admitted to an Ivy League school without need of any AA. Sotomayor got in on her merits. Recall that Judge Thomas was ranked around 9th at Holy Cross, which you, as a Catholic from NE, know is no mean achievement, yet some claimed that AA was why he got admitted to Yale Law School.
At the same time, the Ivy League schools could probably staff their freshman classes several times over with valedictorians. The valedictorian of the high school class a year ahead of me was also a Merit Finalist. She had a part-time job and participated in a number of activities. She had taken all the Advanced Placement courses she was eligible for. She was also fairly good looking. By all criteria, a top-level candidate. None of the Seven Sisters admitted her. She went to the state university her parents had attended and upon getting her degree went on to medical school.
The point here is that there is arbitrariness about the college admission process that cannot be eliminated. The quality of the applicant pool for the Ivy League is so high that admissions committees could probably not do any worse by throwing darts or dice. I would estimate that 70-80% or more of those turned down for admissions at Ivy League schools could do well at those schools if they were admitted.
Years and years ago when I was living in Denver I saw one of those little five minute bridges between programs. This one was a black professor who taught at (what was then) and open enrollment university in Denver. He said he believed that until reparations were paid to blacks the race problem could never be solved in this country. I thought o myself, “What is this arrogant a****le doing to young black children? They will have a chip on their shoulders their whole lives and most will never live up tot heir potential because they will use his words as an excuse and those that do succeed will never be sure it was on their own merit.” I have not changed my mind.
I felt the same way in college and I never grew out of it during my years there. Even though I’m supposed to be a member of the ‘model’ minority I wasn’t an engineer or a CS major. The inferiority complex can prey on you as it obviously does with the ‘Mossiah’ and wife.
What strikes me about Michelle is her lack of empathy. I don’t see any evidence that she is able to walk in the shoes of anyone outside her chosen victim groups. Does anyone think she would understand Prince Harry’s delight at being just one of the guys during his time in Afghanistan? Could she even begin to understand what it is like to grow up without the anonymity that allows you to be young and foolish and discover the world on your own terms? Could she understand the pressure on the bright but not brilliant student who feels pressured to live up to the standards of an exceptional parent? If she cannot begin to understand others from different backgrounds, then it is only natural that those others would not warm to her. I wouldn’t seek a friendship with someone incapable of understanding my problems.
I don’t think Michelle really understands the difference between material poverty and spiritual poverty. The latter is not a necessary result of the former. I have personally seen plenty of poor people, including welfare moms, who were inspirations to me because of their spirit. The victimology cult kills that spirit. It sets goals that are too high for most people. Does one really need to get that Harvard or Yale law degree to have a meaningful life? The Obamas and Sotomayor seem to think so. Perhaps they judge their own worth on these terms. That would explain why they can’t go beyond superficialities and status symbols in assessing others. Remember Michelle’s statement that “they” keep raising the bar. An adult should have learned to set his or her own bar and to respect the bars or goals others set for themselves.
BTW, affirmative action was not the only thing Michelle had going for her. Her father was heavily involved in ward politics. She babysat for Jesse Jackson, Jr. She had plenty of Chicago political connections to smooth her path. And she had the coattails of her brother.
Sotomayor joined elite secretive, women-only group…
dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=ADC37F27-18FE-70B2-A8F7E8C6D16DFC33
and of course this group promotes the agenda of women all over, and not the agenda of a few women with an idea of removing the middle class (which is what most want).
“The way you become a member is people recommend friends to join and we have an advisory board (that makes the final determination),” said Pearl, who is a member of that board. “You have to have achieved something, but you have to have a really good personality, too. You could be the richest person in the world with a resume that goes on for 50 pages, but if you don’t have a sense of humor, then people won’t want you to be a member.”
in other words, no capitalists…
only socialists… etc..
only those with the “right thinking”…
Great comments.
To follow up on expat’s point re spiritual vs. material poverty, extensive travel in the Third World shows people who are dirt-poor by American standards, but seem happy. An extra chicken, and they’re thrilled. At the same time, people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because they can’t keep up the payments on their Porsche. Expectations matter.
There’s also the matter of inward- vs. outward directedness. Many academics and other high achievers think that something external will finally make them happy. As soon as they get into grad school, or get their Ph.D., or get their postdoc, or get a faculty position, or get tenure, or get in the National Academy, or get the Nobel Prize …then they’ll be happy. I’ve seen people traverse that entire path, and remain equally miserable throughout. The problem, of course, is that they’re scratching where it doesn’t itch.
Like the song says thenb”i am going to itch me where i scratches”