The Roots of Obama's Rage (12 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

BOOK: The Roots of Obama's Rage
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We know Soetoro shared with Obama his sufferings at the hands of the Dutch, because Obama writes about it. Soetoro also taught Obama that one should be tough in the world and not whine about one’s situation. Obama was a bit of a whiner. Contrary to the lean, trim Obama that we now see, Obama as a young boy was rather round and overweight, and he was often teased in school not so much for being dark-skinned (many Indonesians are just as dark-skinned), but mostly for being fat. Obama was sensitive to being overweight, and when the kids brought that to his attention, he would yell back, “Curang! Curang!” The word in Indonesian means “cheater,” and what Obama was saying, in effect, was, “No fair!” Obama has subsequently portrayed himself as fluent in Indonesian, but his friends at the time recall that he could barely speak the language; one of the few words that he knew was “Curang.”
23
Obama’s stepfather Lolo knew how tough it was to grow up in Indonesia, and he informed Obama about the importance of learning the arts of combat and survival, how to make one’s way in a cruel world. For Soetoro this meant learning how to throw a punch and also how to make compromises and cut deals when one had to.
Paradoxically, Soetoro’s anti-colonial experience took him in a very different direction than that of Barack Obama Sr. Over time, Soetoro became more pro-American and anti-Communist. When the left-leaning Sukarno was overthrown in a coup by the right-wing General Suharto, Soetoro joined the military in its campaign against Communist rebels in the countryside. Then Soetoro took a job in the oil business, and he relocated the family to a nicer neighborhood. Dutch colonists used to live there, and many Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in the Second World War. When the Soetoros moved in, the area was full of diplomats, Indonesian businessmen, and white Europeans and Americans living abroad. Soetoro began to hang out with these white expats.
All of this alienated Soetoro’s bohemian wife, Obama’s mother. She admired Sukarno for his decision to nationalize the major industries and hated Suharto for his pro-Western and pro-American inclinations. Ann was particularly offended at the way the rich foreigners of Soetoro’s acquaintance talked about their servants and showed no interest in the indigenous cultural traditions of Indonesia. As Obama writes, “She taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.” In time she began to view her second husband as a kind of sellout, somehow lacking the authenticity that she continued to admire in Obama’s father. Basically she fell in love with the old anti-colonial Lolo and came to detest the new pro-American Lolo.
Is this speculation? I’ll let Obama tell the story.
She had expected it to be difficult, this new life of hers. Before leaving Hawaii, she had tried to learn all she could about Indonesia... the history of colonialism, first the Dutch for over three centuries, then the Japanese during the war, seeking control over vast stores of oil, metal and timber; the fight for independence after the war and the emergence of a freedom fighter named Sukarno as the country’s first president.... A poor country, underdeveloped, utterly foreign—this much she had known. She was prepared for the dysentery and fevers, the cold water baths and having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee, the electricity going out every few weeks, the heat and endless mosquitoes. Nothing more than inconveniences, really... and anyway, that was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left, the promise of something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place beyond her parents’ reach.... Still, something had happened between her and Lolo. In Hawaii he had been so full of life, so eager with his plans. At night when they were alone, he would tell her about growing up as a boy during the war, watching his father and eldest brother leave to join the revolutionary army, hearing the news that both had been killed and everything lost, the Dutch army setting their house aflame, their flights into the countryside, his mother’s selling her gold jewelry a piece at a time in exchange for food. Things would be changing now that the Dutch had been driven out, Lolo had told her; he would return to teach at the university, be a part of that change.
24
 
The problem, Obama writes, is that “he didn’t talk that way anymore.” He had sold out to power. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse.” She became convinced that “power had taken Lolo” and that “power was taking her son.” Obama tells us that she sent him back to Hawaii because she wanted the time and the freedom to finish her dissertation. Also there were greater opportunities for her son in America. But Obama’s own account gives us a different reason. After all, she was quite willing to deprive her son of opportunities by bringing him to Indonesia. The main reason she sent him back to America was to prevent him from being corrupted by Lolo. She considered Lolo a sellout to the power structure, and she wanted to prevent her son from making the same compromise. In fact, she wanted her son to be influenced not by her second husband but by her first. Now we see how Obama’s biological father, even in absentia, had so much influence: his influence was in large part transmitted by the mother. She was Obama Sr.’s first convert.
More speculation? Not according to Obama Jr. He describes fights between his mother and Lolo, with her accusing him of being a sellout and Lolo pleading that there was nothing wrong with hanging out with the white people because “these were her own people.” Obama writes that “my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout: They are
not
my people.” And at that point, Obama tells us, Ann began to run down Lolo to her son. Incredibly she started comparing Lolo unfavorably with Barack Sr. I say “incredibly” because Barack Sr. was the one who abandoned his son who was being raised without complaint by Lolo.
Obama writes that when his mother’s frustration mounted with Lolo, “She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my father. Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would follow his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes.”
25
Not surprisingly, Ann soon divorced Lolo, who eventually married an Indonesian woman. Lolo died in Jakarta in 1987.
Barack Obama was ten when he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. It was here that Barack Obama Sr. made his one and only visit to see his son and dazzle him and his classmates. Both Obama’s African father and his Indonesian stepfather were products of the great anti-colonial struggles of their day. But they went in different directions, and Obama’s mother made sure that for her son she chose the direction of his biological father. And her preference sunk in. Obama writes, “I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.”
26
It is obvious that these youthful experiences made an intense and vivid impression, because the memories were just as powerful many years later when Obama wrote about them. It seems obvious that they still continue to stir his heart and guide his actions. We are, even now, living with the consequences.
CHAPTER 5
 
AFRICAN IN AMERICA
 
T
his chapter traces the process by which Barack Obama became black. We know that Obama wants to be known as African American; he said so himself by checking the box on the 2010 U.S. Census form marked “Black, African American or Negro.”
1
How, then, did Obama become black? Surely not by appearance; the man is lighter skinned than I am, and I’m not black. Nor did Obama become black through skin treatments, whether discovered through imaginary issues of
Life
magazine or elsewhere. Writing in the
Washington Post
, Marie Arana informs us that Obama “is not our first black president. He’s our first biracial, bicultural president.” The same point was made by political maverick Christopher Hitchens on the BBC program
Newsnight
.
2
In an Associated Press article, “Many Insisting that Obama is Not Black,” the position articulated by Arana and Hitchens is rebutted by an appeal to the “one drop rule.” This is the infamous rule according to which a single drop of black blood makes a person officially black. But the one drop rule is an American phenomenon that doesn’t really apply to Obama. On the liberal website
Salon
, Debra Dickerson noted that “black in our political and social vocabulary means those descended from West African slaves.” That’s not Obama, as African American columnist Stanley Crouch points out. “Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan.” Crouch’s article was titled “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me.”
3
In American history, the one-drop rule traces back not to slavery but to segregation; it was a way for Southerners to enforce segregation laws and prevent mixed-race persons from “passing” as white. (In the antebellum period, slave status passed through the mother and had nothing to do with whether one looked light or dark.) But of course Obama has no roots in American slavery and neither did he grow up in the South. His childhood experience, as we have seen, is scarcely comparable to that of most blacks in the United States. So we’re back to the question of how Obama became black.
Certainly Obama recognized from early adolescence that he needed to be black. There were psychological reasons for this: Obama knew that he was different, and during his teens and early twenties, blackness was a way to understand and express that difference. The choice of blackness made sense because he wanted to identify with his African father. His father wasn’t around, however, and the surrogates whom he found happened to be black Americans. Another reason is political. As a young man who aspired to politics, Obama knew that he would have to count on a group that he could call his own, one that he could rally and that would rally behind him. “Kenyans in America” is not a large constituency, so Obama wisely chose African Americans as his home team.
Obama’s strategy for becoming black was both simple and ingenious. Through laborious effort, he familiarized himself with the literature and rhetoric of the American black experience, and then he found a way to fit that black experience into the anti-colonial experience. In other words, he came to see the situation facing African Americans as analogous to the one facing native peoples around the world in their struggles with Western domination. Here is a sample of how Obama routinely makes the connection. “I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder . . . is inadequate to the task.”
4
In this way, the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white woman from Kansas is successfully able to “pass” as a black American.
We know the strategy has worked because Obama has always gotten away with it, and it helped to carry him to the White House. When Obama worked as a community activist in Chicago, his boss gave him a copy of Taylor Branch’s
Parting the Waters
, a history of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Obama said, “This is my story.”
5
In reality, this wasn’t his story, but he made it his story. When Obama spoke during the presidential campaign in the church in Selma, he shared the stage with his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. She was married to the man whom novelist Toni Morrison dubbed the first black president. Obama had to beat out Hillary and claim that title for himself, winning the endorsement of John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, and the other civil rights leaders in the audience. And he did: they embraced him as one of them.
Historically, Obama’s strategy of passing into blackness via a Third World route is not such a strange move. Many black leaders have attempted to draw parallels between the American black experience and that of the peoples of Africa and the Third World. In 1957, Martin Luther King was invited to Ghana to witness the transfer of power from the British to the new president Kwame Nkrumah. The transfer took place on midnight of March 5, and King was deeply moved by it. King saw that Nkrumah didn’t come dressed as a ruler or prince, but rather wearing the prison cap assigned to him when he was jailed by his colonialist captors. “Before I knew it,” King said, “I started weeping. I was crying for joy.”
In a private reception with Nkrumah, King said, “I want you to come to visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom Ghana is celebrating.” King subsequently said, “There is no basic difference between colonialism and racial segregation,” and “this event, the birth of this new nation, will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world—not only in Asia and Africa, but also in America.” King preached a sermon on that topic the following month at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He rallied American blacks to resistance, saying that oppressors never give in without a fight. Then he promised that victory would come for blacks in America as it had come for the subject people of Ghana. “An old order of colonialism, of segregation, of discrimination is passing away, and a new order of justice . . . is being born.”
6

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