"Where are all the white people at?"

During the prepartion for a Barack Obama speech at Carnegie Mellon University, Michelle Obama was heard to complain that there were not enough white people sitting directly behind her husband's podium (and thus in the camera's view).

If we need someone in the White House to help this country get over race..it's not these two !!

Only the Carnegie Mellon Student newspaper, The Tartan, originally picked up the story. Drudge later linked to it.

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.” “I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

Note: The title of the blog entry was a quote reference from the movie Blazing Saddles - not that that makes it right :-)

Submitted by D. B. Jackson