As I wrote last Friday, I found Obama's 1995 biography, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," (Amazon link) quite compelling. I shared a couple anecdotes from the first chapter there, and here I pick up near where I left off, a story about children throwing rocks at and taunting Obama's at-that-time eleven or twelve year old future mom who was sharing a book with a similarly aged black girl under a tree in Texas.
It was only when Toot [grandmother] opened the gate that she realized the black girl was shaking and my mother's eyes shone with tears. The girls remained motionless, paralyzed in their fear, until Toot finally leaned down and put her hands on both their heads.
"If you two are going to play," she said, "then for goodness sake, go on inside. Come on. Both of you." She picked up my mother and reached for the other girl's hand, but before she could say anything more, the girl was in a full sprint, her long legs like a whippet's as she vanished down the street.
Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind. And from every adult that he spoke to, he received the same response:
"You best talk to your daughter, Mr. Dunham. White girls don't play with coloreds in this town."
It's hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes, what permanent allegiances were made or broken, or whether they stand out only in the light of subsequent events. Whenever he spoke to me about it, Gramps would insist that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with such racism. Toot would be more circumspect; once, when we were alone, she told me that they had moved from Texas only because Gramps wasn't doing particularly well on his job, and because a friend in Seattle had promised him something better. According to her, the word racism wasn't even in their vocabulary back then. "Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That's all."
I can't copy the whole book here, although I'd like to because Obama writes beautifully. Suffice here to say that Gramps is revealed in his complexity. Gramps' father had been absent with a hint of scandal. Gramps looked like a "wop." And although Gramps had times of "instability" and "often-violent" temper, he had "instincts that ran counter to the mob."
Here, Obama muses about stories he's heard about his father.
In the end, I suppose that's what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents' racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy's election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.
There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn't tell me why he had left. They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else's narrative. An attractive prop -- the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl -- but a prop nonetheless.
I don't really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him -- indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding -- a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn't experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that "Caucasians" in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. [snip]
Chapter Two
This chapter begins with a description of Obama as a nine year old and his mother in Indonesia, at the embassy where his mother worked. Obama, in the embassy library happens upon a magazine, which he begins to browse. In the magazine, eventually he stumbles across the story of a black man trying to lighten his skin.
But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic folders....
In Barack's memory, he was nine at the time. Last March, a firestorm emerged for a day that implied that Obama was lying in his memoir, implying that he did so to burnish his reputation.
"Barack Obama, with his fairy tale [emphasis added] family, has personal charisma to spare," ABC’s Claire Shipman enthused in January." The Chicago Tribune found "several discrepancies in his autobiographical accounts."
Most notable among these discrepancies, the Chicago Tribune authors couldn't find the Life magazine to which Obama had made reference! No matter that there was no disputing Obama's experience of racial awakening upon realizing that black men were trying to pass themselves off as white men. No matter that there were such advertisements for skin whitening prominent in magazines of the day, and analogous articles others have found in Esquire, Time and Look magazines. No matter that in the book's introduction Obama wrote,
Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one's experiences hold for others, selective lapses of memory. Such hazards are only magnified when the writer lacks the wisdom of age; the distance that can cure one of certain vanities. I can't say that I've avoided all, or any of these hazards successfully....
Here's the experience to which we should be able to relate.
He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino -- I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss -- why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or reassurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.
From my perspective, an experience like that shouldn't be understated, let alone denigrated. It's not like our society doesn't yet have a long way to improve. Check out this moving video clip: http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/....
Thank you, Obama, for inviting of us to tap into those instincts of ours that "run counter to the mob."