The Roots of Obama's Rage (14 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

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Two of Obama’s closest friends at Occidental were Pakistani students Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid. “I think that one of the reasons he felt comfortable with us,” Hamid subsequently told a journalist, is that “we didn’t come with a lot of predispositions about race. We weren’t carrying that American baggage. We were brown . . . and we got along with people who were white and black.” In the summer of 1981, Obama visited his mother and half sister Maya in Indonesia, but before that he visited Chandoo and Hamid in Pakistan. Chandoo’s girlfriend at the time, Margot Mifflin, said that Obama returned from Pakistan “amazed at how the peasants bowed to the landowners in respect as they passed.” Hamid added, “We went to rural Sindh . . . where the feudal system is still strong. Barack could see how the owner lives and how the serfs and workers are so subservient.”
19
Surely these dichotomies contributed to Obama’s developing perspective on the world.
That fall, despite his mediocre grades at Occidental, Obama transferred to Columbia University. Oddly, not much is known about Obama at Columbia. Graduates of Columbia from that period say they never encountered Obama either in their classes or socially. The
New York Times
attempted to track down people who knew Obama at Columbia but without success. The
Times
reported that Obama himself “declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript, or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”
20
We do know a couple of people who taught Obama at Columbia; one of them was Edward Said. Before his death in 2003, Said was the leading American champion of the Palestinian cause. As a consequence of his advocacy of armed resistance against Israel, the magazine
Commentary
dubbed him “Professor of Terror.” Said is also the author of influential anti-colonial works such as
Orientalism
and
Culture and Imperialism
. He seems to have had a lasting influence on Obama: some of Obama’s writings are highly resonant with Said’s themes and arguments. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, during his rising years in Chicago politics, Obama attended a Palestinian event in Chicago at which Said was the dinner speaker. Even so, nowhere does Said’s name appear in any of Obama’s writings or speeches. As far as public Obama is concerned, Said does not exist.
At Columbia, Obama wrote an article in a student weekly,
Sundial
, calling for an end to the U.S. military industrial complex. Obama’s article was a response to the so-called nuclear freeze movement that was sweeping American campuses at the time. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth in the early 1980s, I remember well the paranoia of the freeze activists, who seemed convinced that the world was about to end unless their nuclear freeze solution was immediately implemented. Calling as it did for a reciprocal freeze in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, the freeze was a liberal cause, but apparently not liberal enough for Obama. For him the issue came down to the big, bad military industrial complex and its irrational, insatiable desire for more costly weapons. “Generally the narrow focus of the freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.”
21
Obama’s arrival at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1988 followed brief stints of community organizing work in New York and Chicago. Wonder why Obama went to Harvard? Here is a clue: it is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: his father went there. By the time Obama went to Cambridge, he was twenty-seven and older than his peers; this maturity helped Obama win the election for editor of the
Harvard Law Review
. It was a densely packed contest, and Obama was one of many candidates jostling for the position. The story goes that Obama won by convincing the conservatives to vote for him. The conservatives were impressed because here was a black American who did not seem preoccupied with race. They got a glimmer, but probably did not fully appreciate the extent to which Obama’s central concern wasn’t race but power; he was merely playing along with black identity politics in order to fit in and find a constituency for himself.
Still, Obama applied a certain work ethic to the task of being black. He joined the board of directors of the Black Law Students Association. He presented himself to his professors as a champion of the African American cause, earning major brownie points and inspiring one of his teachers, the legal scholar Laurence Tribe, to later proclaim Obama the “best student I ever had.” One of his professors, civil rights advocate Charles Ogletree, said Obama “came well steeped in the history of the civil rights movement and wanted to know even more.”
22
Obama’s eagerness to make common cause with African Americans even moved him to get involved in the bizarre Derrick Bell controversy. Bell threatened to resign from the Harvard law faculty if the university didn’t increase minority hiring; Bell specifically demanded the immediate recruitment of a woman of color. At a time when blacks could do virtually no wrong at Harvard—when the university was doing pirouettes and backward somersaults to please blacks—Bell somehow convinced himself that “racism is an integral, permanent and indestructible component of this society” and that Harvard was a big part of the problem. What was Bell’s evidence for this? Actually, he had none. So instead Bell drew on his imagination. One of his stories, “The Space Traders,” envisioned hordes of whites seeking to round up blacks and subject them to a Holocaust. Some blacks survive, however, and they are chased down to be sold into slavery to aliens from outer space.
23
Crazy stuff. Obama must surely have recognized the fatuousness of Bell’s claims, especially at Harvard. Even so, he spoke in measured tones in defense of Bell. Nobody recalls precisely what he said, but Rosa Parks was mentioned, and everyone present concluded that Obama was a regular soul brother. Harvard went to considerable lengths to placate Bell, but he could not be placated and left Harvard for New York University. Still, Obama saw how Bell’s antics were taken with utmost seriousness by everyone on campus. Obama seems to have recognized that race was now a source of power in American society. Somehow whites had been shamed by the nation’s past into conceding to blacks a kind of unquestioned moral superiority.
The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi makes a similar point in
The Colonizer and the Colonized
. Memmi’s argument is that, over time, colonization wears down the conscience of the oppressor. “He is a privileged being and an illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper. Furthermore, this is so not only in the eyes of the colonized but in his own as well.”
24
Something analogous can be said about racism: it has convinced whites, no less than blacks, that whites have been the beneficiaries of unearned privileges. Thus whites now recognize blacks as America’s de facto racial experts, and anything blacks say, however preposterous, is typically agreed to or at least greeted with deference. Here was a source of power that a clever fellow could later exploit.
Although Obama schmoozed all the liberal professors at Harvard, his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and a German father, Unger is perhaps the leading anti-colonial scholar in the field of legal studies. A few years ago, Unger took a leave of absence from Harvard to serve in the executive office of Brazilian president Lula da Silva. Lula was reputed to be anti-American and also a socialist, but when he turned out to be pro-American and a moderate, Unger called for Lula’s impeachment. Not surprisingly, Lula sent Unger back to Harvard. This was in 2009.
While Obama was at Harvard in the late 1980s, Unger was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement. These scholars were dubbed “Crits.” According to the Crits, law pretends to be fair and neutral, but it is really a sham; it is politics by other means; legal structures are merely a camouflage for keeping entrenched interests in power. What’s needed is to topple these interests and replace them; and law can serve this transformative end as well. There were several Crits at Harvard, though Unger eventually broke with the movement because he considered its approach too limited and ineffective.
Unger’s own vision was much more comprehensive and revolutionary. He calls his perspective “total criticism.” Basically this means using the law to pull down the existing power structures and replace them with alternative power structures more reflective of Third World and minority interests. One of Unger’s proposals, which he advances in the name of “empowering democracy,” is for the government to seize all private capital and place it into a capital fund that would be allocated by teams of workers and citizens.
25
Come to think of it, Unger’s proposal sounds a lot like the 1965 paper of Barack Obama Sr.
Obama took two of Unger’s courses, one on Jurisprudence and another on Reinventing Democracy. Obama’s attraction to Unger’s work is obvious. Obama said he went to Harvard Law because it was the “perfect place to examine how the power structure works.” Unger showed him not only how to examine it, but also how to dismantle it through the instrument of law. So what does Obama say about Unger in his speeches and writings? Nothing. Like Edward Said, Unger has simply disappeared from Obama’s official record, and not because his influence was minor; in fact, quite the opposite. Even after Obama left Harvard, leaving his other admiring liberal professors behind, he continued to communicate with Unger, all the way up to the presidential campaign. One or two enterprising reporters did find out about Unger and attempted to contact him. Unger, however, refused to talk to anyone in the press about his pupil and protégé, giving David Remnick his “simple reason.” Unger confessed, “I am a leftist, and by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary. Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm.”
26
By the early 1990s, Obama was a very different man from the impressionable, “bad assed” kid who had come to the East Coast from the Western shores of Hawaii and California. Still, his background and his memories shaped him. His understanding had been heightened by leading anti-colonial thinkers such as Edward Said and Roberto Unger. But now he had an additional plus: he had found a way to pass as a black American, and to integrate himself into the civil rights experience. This was hardly his experience, but even that worked to Obama’s benefit: his distance gave the impression of intellectual detachment and objectivity, and thus was interpreted by others as “maturity.” As the first black president of the
Harvard Law Review
, Obama even enjoyed a minor celebrity, which brought him his first book contract. Thus having studied the world, Obama was now ready to go out and change it.
CHAPTER 6
 
BECOMING BARACK
 
“
B
ecoming part of the Third World,” writes Shiva Naipaul in
Black and White
, “is to some degree a psychological process, a quasi-religious conversion. It is, at bottom, a mode of being, a state of mind. That state of mind spreads like an infection and begins, after a while, to create its own political, social and personal realities.”
1
And so it is with our man in the White House. Here we examine how Obama went from being Barry to being Barack, in other words, how he formed his adult identity and the core of his ideological convictions.
In a way, we can see the transition in his name itself. At Punahou, he was always Barry. At Occidental, a girl he liked inquired about his given name and he said it was Barack, which meant “blessed” in Arabic. The girl, Regina, thought that sounded cool and asked if she could call him Barack. He agreed, but everyone else still called him Barry. Then Obama met an older student, Eric Moore, who told him he had been to Kenya and worked in a rural clinic near Lake Victoria, not far from where Barack Sr. was born. Excited to find someone who had actually been to his father’s country, Obama asked Moore to tell him everything about Kenya. Later Moore said, “In some ways I knew more about him than he knew about himself at that point.” Moore, who was African American, asked Obama, “What kind of a name is ‘Barry’ for a brother?” Obama told him his real name was Barack. Moore responded, “That’s a very strong name.” Moore made it a point to call him Barack, and so did some of his close friends. Still, it was not until Obama transferred to Columbia University that he made the transition from Barry to Barack. This was around 1982, the year his father died.
2
That name change is symbolic of a deeper change in Obama, but we cannot discover that change by tracking Obama’s career as a community organizer. Obama did move to Chicago to gain political experience as a young activist. He worked for a church-based outfit that used the techniques of the Chicago radical Saul Alinsky. And Obama was able to ride his activist credentials to the state house, getting himself elected state senator when the frontrunner was disqualified on a technicality. But Obama’s early political career is largely inconsequential, because he accomplished very little. As a state senator, he usually showed up, listened to the debates on the various issues, and robotically voted “present.” (He voted “present” more than 100 times.) He made an abortive run for Congress in 2000 and lost badly in the Democratic primary. No one at that point would have predicted Obama’s future. Obama himself was biding his time, going through the motions; the real action of his life was indeed elsewhere.

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