Michelle, Meritocracy and Me: "Does that promise of uplift and integration only go so far?"

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Michelle, Meritocracy and Me
By Theola Labbé-DeBose
Sunday, July 20, 2008; B04

I last visited my alma mater, Princeton University, two years ago to speak on an alumni panel about the future of Iraq....At the end, one of my fellow panelists turned to me and complimented me on my remarks. "What school did you go to?" he asked.

I was wearing a black shirt and orange linen pants, a dutiful nod to our school colors. It was an alumni panel, I thought. What school did he think I attended?

I've been thinking a lot about this sort of failure to be truly accepted as I've watched Michelle and Barack Obama recently. After all, a white couple with their accomplishments would be another one of those gilded couples that appear on the New York Times's society pages or in Town & Country magazine. Instead, these two earnest meritocrats wound up on the cover of the New Yorker last week in a now notorious fist-bumping caricature, complete with a Black Panther-era 'fro for her and traditional Muslim garb for him.

Seeing that cover made me wince -- and not because I can't take a joke. Like the Obamas and millions of other African Americans who have relied on the promise of American meritocracy, I've made a bet that hard work, study and persistence should be able to vault me past mockery and wariness. But episodes such as that cover make me worry that no amount of pedigree and personal polish will let us entirely escape suspicion, mistrust and jealousy. And I'm hardly alone in this: A New York Times/CBS News poll last week reported that 64 percent of blacks think that whites have a better chance of getting ahead in today's America. It's a painful lesson, especially for us blacks who chose majority-white universities as the means to achieving professional success.

I've given a lot of thought to the intersection of race, education and meritocracy, based on both my personal experience and my job covering schools for The Post. Here are some of the questions I ask myself in private (and I suspect I'm not alone): How can the Obamas list the same schools and the same jobs on their résumés as their white counterparts and still be seen as something to be feared? Isn't education America's Great Equalizer, one of the few ways we have of creating a society based on brains and talent rather than family background or skin color? Or does that promise of uplift and integration only go so far?...

***

Barack Obama's quest for the presidency is a classic "See, I can be here too" moment. The only problem with that thinking is that it presupposes, on some level, that you're not really supposed to be there -- that at any moment, you will be revealed as the interloper you truly are, then kicked out with your expired visitor's pass. That's what the New Yorker cover signaled to me and, I suspect, to plenty of other blacks who've followed the Ivied trail upward: the moment when acceptance of the Obamas, based on their accomplishments, was revoked....

(Theola Labbé-DeBose is a Post Metro reporter.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802560_pf.html

[Number23]

1. Thanks for this, DMM

This is a lovely article, and I would dare to say that very few ambitious, successful black women would be unable to relate to what the author's saying.

Though there are those on DU who are STILL trying their damndest to justify, explain ("You're just not getting it!1!") or excuse that NYorker cover, there really was no excuse for it. And there have been countless blacks, myself included, who have tried to explain why it was so idiotic and potentially harmful. I think the author does a great job of adding in her .02 cents.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Thanks for your post, Number23. And I agree -- running that cover, for any reason...

was just plain wrong.