Michelle, meritocracy and me

[highplainsdem]

http://www.contracostatimes.com/columns/ci_10010662?nclick_check=1

Contra Costa Times

Sunday Perspective: Michelle, meritocracy and me
By Theola Labbe-DeBose commentary
Article Launched: 07/26/2008 11:03:48 PM PDT



I last visited my alma mater, Princeton University, two years ago to speak on an alumni panel about the future of Iraq. Inside stately McCosh Hall, where I'd taken Constitutional Law more than a decade earlier, I spoke to a mostly white crowd about my experiences as a special Iraq correspondent in 2003, sharing the stage with an impressive bunch of alums, including a soldier who had served several tours in the Middle East and a former CIA station chief.

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' society pages or in Town & Country magazine. Instead, these two earnest meritocrats wound up on the cover of the New Yorker recently in a now notorious fist-bumping caricature, complete with a Black Panther-era 'fro for her and traditional Muslim garb for him.

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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who've followed the Ivied trail upward: the moment when acceptance of the Obamas, based on their accomplishments, was revoked.

But this historic campaign allows no time for bitterness or regret over past choices. Next month, I'll return to Princeton. This time I'll be addressing minority high school students taking a summer journalism course. As they look around campus, trying to imagine whether they could ever be accepted at such a place, perhaps they'll see me, hear my remarks and say to themselves, "See, I can be here too."

Labbe-DeBose is a Washington Post Metro reporter