Daniel Acker / Bloomberg News
Democratic president-elect Barack Obama waves to supporters following his acceptance speech during an election night rally in Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008. Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, opening a new chapter in the country’s history as the first African-American to hold the world’s most important job.
Half black and half white, the president-elect has had to fight the undertow of race.
Nearly 4 1/2 years ago, Barack Obama introduced himself to America by painting a picture of a country that was united, somehow, in spite of itself. The pundits, he said in the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, like to “slice and dice” the country: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. “But I’ve got news for them too: We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” His task that night in Boston was to ready the crowd for the presidential nominee, John F. Kerry, but in the end his words were most memorable for an argument that challenged the partisan divide and was built on the foundation of his own unique story.
His father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. But it’s more complicated than that.
Abandoned by his father, separated for long periods from his mother, Obama searched for many years to find his identity. He eventually learned to navigate between black and white worlds. He earned a reputation as a pragmatist and a consensus builder, and along the way raised the bridges that would sustain his ambition.
Race has been the steady undertow of his political career — and of his life.
As he paraphrased William Faulkner in March in a landmark speech on race: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
Early years
Interracial relationships in Hawaii are an accepted fact of life. Nevertheless, the parents of Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Hussein Obama didn’t like the idea of their children getting married. She was studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii. He was a graduate student from Kenya, the first African enrolled at the university.
They married in late 1960, and on Aug. 4, 1961, Barack Jr. was born. Two years after that, his father left to study economics at Harvard.
The separation led to divorce. Ann married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student at the university. In 1967, she and her 6-year-old son, whom she called Barry, followed Soetoro to Jakarta, a strange and wonderful place of kite-flying and crocodiles, exotic foods and strange religions.
But the adventure had a darker side. The poverty was inescapable. Ann and Lolo drifted apart. She took a job teaching English at the U.S. Embassy, and it was here in the library, Obama said, that he read about a black man who had tried to peel off his skin.
Although his mother tried to affirm his black heritage — bringing home books about the civil rights movement, speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. — Barry was learning the price people pay for being different.
When he was 10, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend the prestigious Punahou School. On an island where there were few blacks, he watched “I Spy” on television, tried to sing like Marvin Gaye and cursed like Richard Pryor. He stayed out late, shooting hoops, and started to drink and smoke weed, he said, just to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”
On the mainland, the reality of race was more stark.
Full Article Here:
Barack Obama: In search of identity – Los Angeles Times.
