This past Sunday I did my presentation for Book-TV at an American Legion Hall in Ocean County, New Jersey. I chose this site because so many refugees from my native Newark and other collapsing New Jersey cities – Camden, Trenton, Patterson, Passaic – found refuge in this county.
For these refugees, Ocean County was not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Most settled far from the sea in the slapdash suburbs being carved out of the Pine Barrens.
If workers had to drive 60 or so miles to their jobs, so be it. They could not afford the established suburbs surrounding a city like Newark and could not remain in neighborhoods whose living conditions had become, in the words of one childhood friend, "untenable," the title of my latest book.
Thanks to the meticulous research of Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert for his film and book "Michelle Obama 2024," we know a good deal about the ways in which Michelle's family dealt with the collapse of inner-city Chicago.
Marian Robinson, the mother of Michelle Obama, decided that her neighborhood had become untenable just before Michelle was ready to start grade school.
Right down the street from Parkway Gardens, the once prestigious co-op in which they lived, was the shiny new John Foster Dulles Elementary School.
The facilities were fine. The students were not. Too many came from the public housing projects nearby. By the time Michelle's older brother, Craig, had finished the first grade, Marian had seen enough.
Using her sister's address in the South Shore section of Chicago, Marian enrolled Craig and Michelle in Bryn Mawr Elementary School. South Shore had only recently been heavily Jewish, which is why Bryn Mawr had such a solid reputation.
Each day Marian or her husband Fraser would take the kids to school, a 15-minute drive away. This was the responsible thing for any parent to do. Unfortunately, it was also a class C misdemeanor. If caught, the Robinsons would have had to reimburse the city for the two years their children attended school out of district.
With their own Parkways Gardens neighborhood in collapse mode, the Robinsons moved to South Shore before Michelle's second grade year.
By the time they settled in, the neighborhood had all but fully transitioned from predominantly Jewish to black. In her bestseller "Becoming," Michelle speaks in detail about the hostile reception she received from neighborhood girls for "talking white."
Reflecting the neighborhood, Bryn Mawr had grown increasingly chaotic. Michelle recalls with horror the punch she took in the face from a male classmate.
Marian came to the rescue once again. She got Michelle a transfer to the "gifted and talented" class, and Michelle survived until graduation.
When it came time for Craig to attend high school, Marian took a job downtown so Craig could attend a Catholic high school. The Robinsons weren't Catholic, but Marian was not going to send Craig to the now virtually all-black South Shore High right down the street.
When Michelle was ready for high school, Marian arranged for her to attend a magnet school downtown, more than an hour away by bus. A precinct captain in the Daley machine, dad Fraser may have greased the skids.
Given her family's own history of flight, one would think Michelle would have had some sympathy for whites who had made similar moves. But to think that is to misunderstand the real Michelle.
At an Obama Foundation forum in 2019, Michelle showed her true colors.
"As families like ours, upstanding families like ours, who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better, as we moved in," said Michelle, "white folks moved out."
Added Michelle, "They were afraid of what our families represented." In truth, almost all the white families had moved out before she moved in. They moved not because of families like Michelle's but because of families whose children were terrorizing families like Michelle's.
During my C-SPAN presentation, I quoted Michelle as saying that the "color of our skin" and "the texture of our hair" were among the factors that triggered white flight.
"I wanna remind white folks that y'all were running from us, and y'all still runnin'," Michelle had scolded her Obama Foundation audience, a quote I chose to repeat for its sheer mean-spirited hypocrisy.
After the C-SPAN event, one female attendee asked why I had to be so hard on Michelle. As she explained nicely, the references to skin color and hair texture by Michelle may have reflected "her truth."
The problem, I explained, is that "her truth" and "the truth" are frequently at odds in ways that inevitably insult white people. If Michelle steps up and runs for president, as many people anticipate, those insults will be increasingly hard to conceal.
Jack Cashill's new book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available in all formats.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
The post The spectacular hypocrisy of Michelle Obama appeared first on WND.
