From MSNBC and found on The International Herald Tribune:
The caricatures of Obama as the Angry Black Woman confound her, friends say. Her own family crosses racial boundaries — her mother-in-law and a sister-in-law are white — and she has spent much of her adult life trying to address racial resentment.
Well, I’ll have to admit Michelle Obama’s comments confound me. Her mother-in-law – Barack’s mom, Stanley – is indeed white. She died in 1992. Her sister-in-law – Barack’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng – is half Indonesian and half American.
If Obama, who is half Kenyan and half white American calls himself an African American, how is Maya just “white?”
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I found Michelle LaVaughn Robinson’s Princeton thesis on the internet today. I’ve got some reading to do, but I have a pretty strong notion that paper is where her “Angry Black Woman” image originates – in her own words.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Shawn Matson // Jun 19, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Maybe her brother, former Brown University Basketball Coach (now at Oregon State i think), has a white wife. Maya isn’t half-American, she’s half-white. But I understand the typo.
2 Cindy Kilkenny // Jun 19, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I’ll clarify – she’s half white-American and half Indonesian. She was born in Indonesia of a white-American mother. Maybe she’s Indonesian and not American at all? (But her skin is still lighter in color and therefore “white” to Mrs. Obama.)
3 Shawn Matson // Jun 19, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Not white to Mrs. Obama, white to this article’s author. And again, maybe they aren’t even talking about Maya.
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