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by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Insitute Trustee
In the past year, numerous writers and commentators have given us an occasional “pearl of wisdom” from Barack Obama’s best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Unfortunately, those snippets of information have not told us much about this naïve and overly ambitious young man who desires to become the president of our country.
As Obama explains, the book was written as a direct result of the notoriety he gained from being elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He tells us that, after some modest newspaper publicity, he received an advance from a publisher and he began to write, believing that the story of his family, and his efforts to understand that story, “might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience…”
Along with giving credit to Harvard Law School’s “peculiar place in the American mythology,” he also begins to give us a hint of who he is when he tells us that his book advance testified also, in part, to “America’s hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front – a morsel of proof that, after all, some progress had been made.”
“Some progress had been made?” He apparently looks back to the days of Jim Crow, Black Codes, and the KKK and sees little or no progress What does he consider the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which outlawed slavery and gave blacks citizenship and the right to vote; the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871; the Civil Rights Act of 1875; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Equal Employment Act of 1972, and so much more?
These were all Republican initiatives, and all were strongly opposed by his own party. So, was he speaking of a “morsel of proof” of progress within the Democratic Party? Being married to Michelle Robinson Obama who has said that, until recent weeks and months, she has never been proud of her own country, how else could he see things?
One does not have to get very deep into Obama’s memoir before it becomes clear that, from a very early age, he was obsessed with the subject of race. He tells us that, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he stopped telling people that his mother was white because of a feeling that, by doing so, he was merely “ingratiating” himself to whites.
With that decision, the decision to stop mentioning his mother’s race, Obama’s “us vs. them” attitude about race and ethnicity became a permanent part of who he is. But that was not the beginning of his obsession with race and his descent into racism.
At the age of ten, after returning from Indonesia with his mother, Obama was enrolled at the Punahou Academy in Honolulu. On his first day in the predominately white private school, he was subjected to an episode of thoughtless cruelty at the hands of his classmates. As his teacher introduced him to the class, she explained that his father was a Kenyan and asked Obama what “tribe” his father was from. His classmates giggled, and when he responded, “Luo,” a boy seated behind him “repeated the word in a loud hoot, like the sound of a monkey.” He recalls how a red-headed girl asked to touch his hair, and a ruddy-faced boy asked if his father “ate people.”
It was a crucial moment in the establishment of Obama’s racial identity. From that moment on he could either develop an unswerving pride in his ethnic heritage and an unquestioning desire to prove that one does not have to be of European extraction to live a successful life… socially, economically, and intellectually… or, he could go through life with a racial chip on his shoulder, never fully coming to terms with his blackness. The preponderance of evidence tells us that he chose the latter path.
Shortly thereafter, Obama visited the public library to learn more about Kenya and its people. He asked the librarian for a book on East Africa, only to find that the Luos merited only a short paragraph. The book explained that, “Nilote (Luo)… described a number of nomadic tribes that had originated in the Sudan along the White Nile… The Luo raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate corn meal and yams and sometimes millet.”
And when he read that, “their traditional costume was a leather thong across the crotch,” he left the book open on the table and stalked out of the library.
He tells of a subsequent visit to Chicago with his mother and sister, a trip which included a visit to the Field Museum. He recalls being fascinated by two shrunken heads in a glass display case. He said, “They appeared to be of European extraction. The man had a small goatee… the female had flowing red hair.” He said, “I stared at them for a long time, feeling – with the morbid glee of a young boy – as if I had stumbled upon some sort of cosmic joke. Not so much the fact that the heads had been shrunk… Rather, the fact that these little European faces were here in a glass case, where strangers, perhaps even descendants, might observe the details of their gruesome fate…”
These are but a few of Obama’s recollections, in his own words, which help us to understand how he could later occupy a pew in the Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty years, absorbing the racist rants of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; how he could associate himself with the former terrorist, William Ayers, without experiencing a sense of revulsion; and how he could share his bed with a woman who thinks that the United States is, in the twenty-first century, “just downright mean” and “guided by fear.”
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