He was too dark in Indonesia. A hapa child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “Invisible Man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago.
This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published June 19. These excerpts trace the young Obama’s arc toward black identity, through his words and experiences, and through the eyes of those who knew him best.
How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?
Everything about Barry seemed different to his classmates and first-grade teacher, Israela Pareira, at S.D. Katolik Santo Fransiskus in Jakarta, Indonesia. He came in wearing shoes and socks, with long pants, a black belt and a white shirt neatly tucked in. The other boys wore short pants above the knee, and they often left their flip-flops or sandals outside the classroom and studied in bare feet. Barry was the only one who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia that first year. Ms. Pareira was the only one who understood his English. He was a fast learner, but in the meantime some boys communicated with him in a sign language they jokingly called “Bahasa tarzan.”
When [his mother] Ann accompanied him to school the first day, Ms. Pareira was confused. He looked like he was from Ambon, one of the thousands of islands comprising Indonesia. It was nearly 1,500 miles east of Jakarta, and the people there were known for having darker skin. In itself, this was no big deal; the classroom was heterogeneous: Javanese, Betawanese, Bataknese, Padangnese, Ambonese, Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist. But he did not look like his mother.
“She introduced herself as a foreigner, coming from Hawaii, and she pointed at Barry — ‘This is my son.’ We — me and the students who saw them for the first time — only asked ourselves, ‘How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?’ It was a big question for us. But watching her drop him off at school [day after day], we became used to the idea that Barry is her son.”
To the other students, Barry’s young mother was even more exotic than he was, with her pale skin and long hair and sharp dresses.
“Whether you’re a Tamura or a Ching or an Obama, we share the same world.”
In Jakarta, many local kids looked at all Westerners as members of the wealthy class. But in Honolulu, many native Hawaiian boys displayed a prove-yourself-or-else hostility toward people with roots on the mainland. Where did this leave a hapa boy who lived with white relatives but had just returned from Indonesia and was half-African in a place where there were precious few blacks? His grandfather had told strangers that the boy was a descendent of native Hawaiian royalty. Some classmates remembered it differently, that Obama claimed his father was an Indonesian prince.
In retrospect, he would say that his name alone separated him, starting with the first day of fifth grade when his teacher introduced him fully — first, middle and last, Barack Hussein Obama. But in polyglot Hawaii, even his prep school was more than a collection of Johns and Susans and Binghams and Cookes. From a list of contemporaries, Barack mingled with the first names Nunu, Kaui, Sigfried, Malia, Lutz, Manu, Linnea, Saichi, Wada, Kalele and Nini. And for last names, Obama was there with Oba, Ochoa, Ogata, Ohama, Oishi, Okada, Oshiro, Osuna and Ota.
A few years later, Barry’s seventh-grade teacher, Miss Kang, posed eight members of her class for a yearbook photo in front of a blackboard that had the white-chalk message “MIXED RACES OF AMERICA” and a caption that read: “Whether you’re a Tamura or a Ching or an Obama, we share the same world.” Barry, looking pudgy-faced, sporting a paisley shirt and the beginnings of an afro, flashed the peace sign.
“I go by Barry so I don’t have to explain myself to the world.”
Obama’s friends and acquaintances at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he spent his first two years of college, sometimes heard him say that his father was from Kenya. On occasion he would lament that he did not know the old man, that he was gone from the family when Barry was a baby. Once in a rare while, the bitterness came out, or expressions of regret. Sometimes that part of the story was left unsaid, and the emphasis was placed on his family connection to the continent. To have an African father could be seen as a badge of distinction in the jockeying for place among the blacks at Oxy.
But the blood tie was all that Obama had then, along with a few letters from his father, the memory of that lone visit to Honolulu when Barry was in fifth grade and the stories he had heard from his mother and grandfather. He had never been to Kenya, never walked the earth around Lake Victoria, and Eric Moore had.
Barry and Eric had much in common. They were tall, athletic, smooth, outwardly confident. Moore had grown up in Boulder, Colo., attended predominantly white schools, and like Obama had survived and thrived in an environment where there were few people who looked like him. He came to Los Angeles looking for “a more urban African American experience” where he, like Obama, could sort out his identity.
Together they listened to music and spent hours in the dorms dissecting the lyrics to Bob Marley’s 1979 album, “Survival.” It was among Marley’s most overtly political albums — a haunting, pounding expression of the black condition. The jacket featured the flags of 47 African nations, with Kenya in the top left corner. The song titles evoked the struggle of Africa and people in the New World with African blood: “So Much Trouble in the World,” “Africa Unite,” “One Drop,” “Ride Natty Ride,” “Ambush in the Night,” “Survival.” Obama, Moore and a few other friends broke down the songs and debated what they meant.
Barry Obama could take or leave much of the music that he heard most often in the freshman dormitory at Oxy, from new wave to punk, but it was the musical language of Bob Marley — and Stevie Wonder — that stirred him. “Obama’s consciousness, much like mine, was influenced by music, influenced by a recognition, an understanding, of the world through music,” Moore said. “Obama’s sense of social justice ultimately comes from Bob, or comes from Stevie Wonder. You can’t learn all that from a book.”
It was through their connection to music and Africa that Moore started calling Obama the name by which the world would come to know him. One day, as Moore recalled the scene, he and Obama were “sitting around, discussing the world ... and I said, ‘Barry Obama? What is that derivative of?’ And he told me the story of how his mom had met his father. And I had been to Kenya.... It was a bit of serendipity in our lives. We were just kind of chatting. I was heckling a bit. ... ‘Barry Obama, what kind of name is that for a brother?’ And he said, ‘Well, my real name is Buh-ROCK. Barack Obama.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s a strong name. Rock, Buh-ROCK.’ And we laughed about it...
# Source: The Washington Post, By: David Maraniss
