Obama's mom on his choice of racial identity

There had been a lot of subtle evidence available before about Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro's psychological hurt over her son's choice to identify solely as black, but it's historically valuable to have it now all spelled out in Janny Scott's new biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman. Now, we learn (via Jacob Weisberg's review in Slate) what the President's own mother thought about her son's choice of racial self-identification. From Scott's biography:

"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." She felt he was making what Johnston called 'a professional choice' to strongly identify himself as black."

Scott's revelations are not just important for what they say about the President of the United States of America, but, more essentially, for what they say about modern America.

David Axelrod's version of Barack Obama's Narrative as the racial transcender always had one obvious weakness: the politician himself self-identifies as black and only black (as he chose to do on the 2010 Census). When this inconvenient fact has been brought up, it has usually been explained away by noting that white racism wouldn't allow poor Obama to identify as both black and white. The One Drop Rule, you know.

Yet, the existence of part-black celebrities, such as Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter, who take a less dogmatic view of how to self-identify racially, has seldom been mentioned in the press in relation to Obama's choice. Further, Obama's Hawaiian upbringing in the laid-back 1970s, where he was thought of as "just another mixed kid" at his highly mixed prep school, is also ignored.

Another implicit suggestion of the Axelrodian version of The Narrative is that being half-black made the rise of Barack Obama harder. If he were white, presumably, an amazing talent like Obama would have been President at 37 instead of 47.

The subversive counter-narrative is that Obama figured out fairly early on that his path to power would be much easier in modern America if he self-identified only as black. (He made a mid-course correction in  whom to target his Narrative to after his humiliation by Bobby Rush in the 2000 House primary taught him that black voters, who are more savvy about matters of black identity, would not recognize him as "black enough" relative to other black candidates, but that clueless white people would.)

When Obama was elected head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he banged the paternal race gong hard in the ensuing PR, to his mother's bemusement. You can read this important account from Scott's book on Google Books.

"A longer article a week later in The Boston Globe went into greater detail. "What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification what what he calls 'the typical black experience,' paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice," the Globe reported. It described "his unusual path, from childhood in Indonesia, where he grew up, he says, 'as a street kid [with several servants looking after him],' to adolescence in Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents." The article dwelt at some length on the influence of Obama's father, who, it said, was born in Kenya, "studied at Harvard and Oxford [?] and became a senior [?] economist for the Kenyan government." In high school, the article said, Obama began a regular correspondence with his father, "whose heritage was to be a major influence on his life, ideals and priorities." One of Obama's most valued possessions, the article said, was the passbook that his grandfather, a cook for the British before Kenyan independence, was required to carry. "He said that even though his heritage is one-half white, and although has had a mixture of influences in his life, 'my identification with the -- quote -- typical black experience in America was very strong and very natural [?] and wasn't something forced and difficult," the article said. Of Ann, it said little more than "His mother, who is white, is a Kansas-born anthropologist who now works as a developmental consultant in Indonesia." 

In an even longer article in the Los Angeles Times a month later, Ann was described simply as "an American anthropologist" and "a white American from Wichita, Kan." 

The marginal role to which Ann was consigned in those accounts did not go unnoticed. She had raised Obama, with the help of her parents, after his father had left for Harvard when Obama was ten months old. She had been his primary parent for the first ten years of his life. 

She had returned to Hawaii to live with him when he was in middle school. She had moved back to Hawaii from Indonesia for several months during his senior year. Yet in those accounts, Obama had been "a street kid" in Indonesia, then sent back to Hawaii to be "raised by his grandparents." Yang Suwan, Ann's Indonesian anthropologist friend, recalled Ann returning to Jakarta around the time of the Harvard Law Review election. As always, she was extraordinarily proud of her son. But on another level, she seemed crushed. 

"'His mother is an anthropologist,' Ann told Yang, quoting an article she had seen. "I was mentioned in one sentence." ... 

When Ann told Made Suarjana that Obama was graduating from Harvard Law School, he said, "So, he's going to be a billionaire." Ann corrected him: No, she said, he wants to return to Chicago and do pro bono work. Because Suarjana knew that Obama was interested in politics, and because he felt he knew something about American public life, he said, knowingly, "Okay, so he wants to be president." 

To his surprise, Ann began to weep. ... 

"No, not this time," she answered, according to Suarjana. "He's going to be a senator first."

Had they already talked about it, Suarjana wondered later. ... 

"She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity," recalled Don Johnston, Ann's colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, "had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up." Ann felt he was making what Johnston called "a professional choice" to strongly identify himself as black." It would be too strong to say that she felt rejection," he said. But she felt, in that way, "that he was distancing himself from her.""

This may offer clues for some of the missing pieces in the puzzle of Obama's life, such as why he wound up at Occidental College, a fine liberal arts college but not exactly the Ivy League. And he came from an academically ambitious family: his father had gone to Harvard, his mother was working on her Ph.D., his grandmother's sister was a statistics professor at (I believe) the University of North Carolina, and his grandmother's brother was an executive in the U. of Chicago libraries. 

Similarly, Obama seems like a smart guy, but not only didn't his PSAT score at his prep school allow him to make National Merit Semifinalist (a very high bar, one that few recent Presidential candidates would have cleared), but he didn't even make the much lower bar of National Achievement Scholar, the affirmative action version of National Merit Scholar for blacks. 

Then, after two years at Oxy devoted largely, in his own account, to smoking weed and and hanging out with rich Pakistani Marxists, he suddenly transferred to the Ivy League.

What happened? 

Well, one thing we know happened at Oxy was that he changed the first name he went by from Barry to Barack. Perhaps, he also changed his racial identity as well?

Maybe on the PSAT and on his college applications he didn't check the "Black" box? If he didn't, college admissions officers would have looked at an application from some kid named Obama in Honolulu and figured he maybe was another Japanese kid, and they already had lots of applications from affluent East Asians with better grades than this Obama character.

His mother, who had lived with him in the fall of his senior year in high school when he would have been thinking about his college applications, recalled, "That [black] identity, she felt, 'had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.'"

Maybe his idealistic mother suggested it wouldn't be fair for a privileged preppie like him to claim affirmative action benefits? Who knows?

Granted, this would sharply contradict Obama's own race-obsessed version of his teenage years. Accounts by his high school friends vary. Most of his friends remember him as a mellow pothead. His half-Japanese half-black friend Keith Kakugawa (whom Obama fictionalized as the all-black and bitterly anti-white "Ray" in Dreams from My Father) recalls Obama as being far more paranoid about white prejudice than he was. (Another character fictionalized in Dreams also told the LA Times that the anti-white views his character expressed in the book sound more like Obama's literary self-projections). But Kakugawa also said that the main emotional turmoil in Obama's life was caused not by race but by his feelings of abandonment by his parents.

Of course, Kakugawa is an ex-con, so who are you going to believe? The jailbird or the President? The guy who couldn't talk his way out of prison or the guy who talked his way into the White House?

Quite possibly, Obama's own view of his racial identity was subject to the usual teenage emotional flux.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer