http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112204388.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
Attack on Michelle Obama shows Palin's ignorance of history
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the
nation's capital. I have only vague memories of that trip - the heat, the
expanse of the White House's grounds, the Jefferson Memorial. I do remember we
took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet) and it was there that I saw my
first sign with the word "colored" on it - a rooming house, I think. This was
1952, and the United States was an apartheid nation.
It is Sarah Palin who brings back these memories. In her new book, she
reportedly takes Michelle Obama to task for her supposedly infamous remark from
the 2008 campaign: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my
country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Instantly,
Republicans pounced. Among the first to do so was Cindy McCain, who said, "I
have and always will be proud of my country." It was a cheap shot, but her
husband's selection of Palin for the ticket and plenty of cheap shots from
Palin ("death panels," etc.) were yet to come.
Michelle Obama quickly explained herself. She was proud of the turnout in the
primaries - so many young people, etc. Evan Thomas, writing perceptively in
Newsweek, thought - as I did - that she was saying something else. He dug into
her senior thesis at Princeton - "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black
Community" - to find a young woman who felt, or was made to feel, "more aware
of my 'blackness' than ever before." This was not a statement of racism. This
was a statement of fact.
It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact -
indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint
that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's
case, her ancestors were slaves - Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal
great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were
consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the
South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate
schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the
back of the bus, the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and,
if whites could manage it, heaven itself.
It was the government that oppressed blacks, enforcing the laws that imprisoned
them and hanged them for crimes grave and trivial, whipped them if they bolted
for freedom and, in the Civil War, massacred them if they were captured
fighting for the North. And yet if African Americans hesitate in embracing the
mythical wonderfulness of America, they are accused of racism - of having the
gall to know more about their own experience and history than Palin and others
think they should.
Why do politicians such as Palin and commentators such as Glenn Beck insist
that African Americans go blank on their own history - as blank as apparently
Palin and Beck are themselves? Why must they insist that blacks join them in
embracing a repellent history that once caused America to go to war with
itself? Besides Princeton, Michelle Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
It's hardly possible that she is not knowledgeable about the history of African
Americans - no Ellis Island for them, immigrants in their colorful native dress
waving at the camera. Should she forget it all simply because she went to Ivy
League schools - be thankful for what she had gotten and the hell with the
rest? Why should she be more grateful than Cindy McCain?
Sarah Palin teases that she might run for president. But she is unqualified -
not just in the (let me count the) usual ways, but because she does not know
the country. She could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic
America. She knows more about grizzlies than she does about African Americans -
and she clearly has more interest in the former than the latter. Did she once
just pick up the phone and ask Michelle Obama what she meant by her remark? Did
she ask about her background? What it was like at Princeton? What it was like
for her parents or her grandparents? I can offer a hint. If they were driving
to Washington, they slowed down and stopped where the sign said "colored" - and
the irritated Palins of the time angrily hit the horn and went on their way.
coh...@washpost.com
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