Ha!

You have to look at this picture of Michelle’s childhood home. Scroll down to see it:

…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.

No one could pretend they were rich and it is true that her father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago’s Department of Water Management.

However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.

Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle’s father was a volunteer organiser for the city’s Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago’s water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 – 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.

INC on March 4, 2008 at 8:30 PM