It’s a rather dense, in a good sense thesis about being a black person without acknowledging the existence of differences between the races. It like discussing only part of an issue without identifying the issue. Michelle admittedly felt more “black” at Princeton than she did pre-Princeton yet she never examines her attitude as a black person or her attitude towards white people. Those are glaring errors in ideology that negate a lot of her conclusions about the attitudes of white people towards black people which is why she conducted her study but she isn’t that candid. Her study and her conclusions are couched in “acceptable” race based dialog but the basis, her basis, her manifold reasons for doing the study in the first place are left to the imagination of the reader to identify.
Part three is the meaty part of her thesis but it’s either less than honest; purposely dishonest or uninformed. One cannot study one race in isolation then draw conclusions about the actions of other races It’s like studying an effect without studying the cause.
When people of different races interact or refuse to interact, there are causes. The causes are responsible for the actions. Michelle knows there are attitude differences between the races but she confines her thesis to the responsibility of the white race to accommodate the emotions of black people when the pregnant question is what are those causes, not what are the narrow effects of her hypothesis which is: the way she felt at Princeton.
Being the First Lady of the United States didn’t change her race but at the very least it should have changed her ideas about white people as she seemed to want to promote in her thesis but she’s given no evidence of change.
Feelings are emotions which are the result of a persons sense of life, specifically their sense of everything and unfortunately for Michelle she doesn’t seem at all comfortable with herself. A sense of life involves a complex psycho-epistemological set of attributes.
Ayn Rand explains it thus: “A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.
“Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.
Visits: 4
