http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/st ... _0413.html
Actually, this article is not really about Michelle Obama, but how things have changed and not changed in the past 20 (only!) years.
Lots of interesting tidbits about ordinary Southern people in this.
Michelle Obama went on Stephen Colbert's show last night. (I am jealous of her legs!)
[quote]
Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama
By BRIAN FEAGANS
Published on: 04/13/08
Catherine Donnelly shopped at Kmart, settled into her dorm room and soaked up the Gothic stone buildings where, over the next four years, she would grow into her own woman.
But her first day at Princeton held a surprise, too. And Donnelly knew it would mean confronting the past.
She walked into the historic Nassau Inn that evening and delivered the news to her mother, Alice Brown. "I was horrified," recalled Brown, who had driven her daughter up from New Orleans. Brown stormed down to the campus housing office and demanded Donnelly be moved to another room.
The reason: One of her roommates was black.
"I told them we weren't used to living with black people ― Catherine is from the South," Brown said. "They probably thought I was crazy."
Today both Donnelly, an Atlanta attorney, and Brown, a retired schoolteacher living in the North Carolina mountains, look back at that time with regret. Like many Americans, they've built new perceptions of race on top of a foundation cracked by prejudices past ― and present. Yet they rarely speak of the subject.
Barack Obama's run for president changed that. When the Democratic senator from Illinois invited more dialogue on race last month, Donnelly and Brown, both lifetime Republicans, were ready.
But their willingness to talk isn't a response to the candidate born to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. It's more about Obama's wife, Michelle.
She's that roommate from a quarter century ago.
Shock to the stereotype
The acceptance letter from the Ivy Leagues was really the culmination of two peoples' hard work. "My mother was thrilled," Donnelly jokes, that she got into Princeton.
Divorced and living paycheck to paycheck, Brown found a way to get her only child into New Orleans' elite Isidore Newman School: She taught 8th-grade science there. They were a mother-and-daughter team, then with the surname Rodrigue.
Donnelly, now 44, captained the basketball and volleyball teams. She was the homecoming queen. And she racked up science and math awards, often with the help of her mother.
But the "Three R's" weren't the only thing Donnelly learned from an early age. There was a fourth one. Her mother and grandmother filled her head with racist stereotypes, portraying African-Americans as prone to crime, uneducated and, at times, people to be feared.
Brown, 71, explains that she was raised to think that way. She recalls hearing her grandfather, a sheriff in the North Carolina mountains, brag about running black visitors out of the county before nightfall. And Brown's parents held on to the n-word like a family heirloom.
In fact, upon learning that her daughter had a black roommate at Princeton, Brown's first call was to her own mother. Her suggestion: yank Donnelly out of school.
Girl was likable, but black
The fourth-floor room had three beds, three desks and space for little else. The ceiling sloped in concert with the roof, creating a cramped perch atop the upper crust of American education.
Quick-witted and nearly 6 feet tall, Michelle Robinson had no problem filling the room, Donnelly recalls. The future Michelle Obama, from Chicago's Southside, would playfully tease the third roommate, who was white. Obama's long fingers still narrate stories in Donnelly's mind. "From the minute we met," she says, "I liked her."
Donnelly doesn't think Obama ever picked up on her mother's behind-the-scenes maneuvering. She remembers nothing but friendly words. Only now, looking back, does she see the wall between them.
Donnelly was surprised to find something familiar
[分享] Article on Michelle Obama's college roommate
As far as I know, Washington Post has not endorsed Obama or Clinton. I think they will wait until general election to endorse the Democratic nominee.
I don't think Clinton came out worse. The only losers in the debate were Gibson and Stephanolopous. Ironic, isn't it, that all regular media (supposedly neutral or try to be) as well as libral bloggers condemned the ABC idiots G&S, but all the right-wing nutters came out to say, "Hey, the debate was fun. The hosts did a great job."
Poor Hillary Clinton. She stopped by Colbert Report last night but didn't stay and talk. I don't care. I want her!
I don't think Clinton came out worse. The only losers in the debate were Gibson and Stephanolopous. Ironic, isn't it, that all regular media (supposedly neutral or try to be) as well as libral bloggers condemned the ABC idiots G&S, but all the right-wing nutters came out to say, "Hey, the debate was fun. The hosts did a great job."
Poor Hillary Clinton. She stopped by Colbert Report last night but didn't stay and talk. I don't care. I want her!
此喵已死，有事烧纸