"I was struck by how similar her story is to the president’s and first lady’s," said Crystal Nix Hines, a classmate of Michelle Obama who was the first black editor of Princeton’s student newspaper
and is now a lawyer and writer in Los Angeles. "Like Judge Sotomayor, Michelle Obama had to find her comfort zone in a community of extraordinarily intelligent and privileged individuals at Princeton, most of whom had little knowledge of the circumstances from which she had risen."
Though Obama and Sotomayor never crossed paths at Princeton, elements of their experience are almost eerily parallel.
The school was "an alien land for me," Sotomayor recalled two decades later, describing how Puerto Rican activism and the hub of minority politics, The Third World Center, "provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world."
Later, Michelle Obama also came to the Third World Center, eventually serving on its governing board. In her thesis, the future first lady described a similar alienation.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23074.html#ixzz0H3Vr3RNq&A
Michelle Obama Thesis of Hate:
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=42FC5818-3048-5C12-005E33B3C0F4E64B
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."
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