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Sunday 24 February 2008

Shock horror, Michelle Obama is not the little black girl from Chicago who overcame the odds to change the face of American politics.

I can't say I was surprised to learn that Michelle Obama is not what she seems to be. Her refrain has for some time been "I was raised in a working-class family on the south Side of Chicago. That's how I identify myself, a working-class girl,". It appears that she has been a little disengenuous, The Daily Mail reveals that "When The Mail on Sunday went back to the gritty district of Chicago where Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was raised, we found a rather different picture from the one so single-mindedly promoted by Camp Obama.


Instead of the one-room tenement that now appears in most accounts of her upbringing, we found a well-kept neighbourhood of red-brick Arts and Craft-style houses which have long been home to respectable black families.

"Michelle was from a middle-class family," confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela Acree.


"She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn't a mansion, but it was just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood."


The Robinsons grew up on the upper floor of a house built in the Twenties. Number 7436 South Euclid Avenue - a classical reference to the Greek mathematician which found an appropriate echo in Michelle's subsequent respect for traditional learning - even has a small garden, shaded by a large elm tree, and an ornate stone bench.


The South Side of Chicago has long had its share of gang-infested housing 'projects' but with the University of Chicago hospital close by, there were plenty of white professionals in the area as well as hard-working families in the Robinsons' own image."


Go read the rest...

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