Mrs. Barack Obama (Michelle) is a Very Impressive Woman
Now that Barack Obama is in the presidential race, the newspapers and blogs are even more interesting for me to read on a daily basis. For example, although American media and government resources are usually focused on black arrests and detentions, news articles about Senator Obama's high-powered professional wife show me that his candidacy is going to be good for America's appreciation of Black people overall, introducing a real-life "Cosby Family" to an America where real examples of such families have been mostly invisible to the media. Now, Obama family details presented in today's Chicago Sun Times show Michelle Barack to be a real-life "Claire Huxtable" figure.
Mrs. Barack Obama (Michelle) and other members of her family are quite outstanding and impressive, whether compared to Black stereotypes or more general standards of American success.
As the Chicago Sun Times reports,
Barack Obama's credentials have become familiar to millions: first African American president of the Harvard Law Review; University of Chicago law professor; two-term Illinois state senator; third African American U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
Michelle's resume may be less well known, but it is impressive.
She is a 1985 cum laude graduate of Princeton University; a 1988 graduate of Harvard Law School; a former associate dean at the University of Chicago, and currently a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
Michelle, who declined an interview request, sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
"She's smart, she's successful and she's well liked and popular,'' said LaVelle, Mayor Daley's former press secretary.
"Long before there was a Barack Obama, there was a Michelle Robinson who was a star in her own right.''
And although Obama is an adopted Chicagoan -- born in Hawaii to a Kenyan economist father and a Kansas-bred cultural anthropologist mother -- his wife is pure Chicago.
Michelle's late father, Frasier Robinson, was a city pump operator and a Democratic precinct captain. Her mother, Marian, is a former Spiegel's secretary.
Michelle was raised in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a classic Chicago brick bungalow, now surrounded by a chain link fence, in South Shore. Her mother still lives there, behind burglar-proof wrought iron doors and secured windows, poised above a hedge of clipped yews.
Gifted classes
From that outpost, early on, there were signs Michelle was a standout.
"As far back as any of us can remember, she was very bright,'' said her brother, Craig Robinson, who preceded his sister at Princeton to become its fourth highest-scoring basketball player.
Both Michelle and Craig, now head basketball coach at Brown University, learned to read at home by the age of 4. "The woman behind Obama"
If the Senator continues to acquit himself as he has thus far, I suspect Senator Obama's candidacy will make unforeseen and historic contributions to America in the 2008 election cycle.