Brian Charlton of the AP documents something I surmised last weekend about the Presidential candidate who is largely running on his ethnic identity, as asserted in his autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. As I said then: "Obama's feelings of racial oppression as a youth were more adolescent alienation fantasies than his daily reality."
Obama had multiethnic existence in Hawaii
Sections of potential 2008 candidate's life drawing greater scrutiny
HONOLULU - He was known as Barry Obama, and with his dark complexion and mini-Afro, he was one of the few blacks at the privileged Hawaiian school overlooking the Pacific.
Yet that hardly made him stand out.
Diversity was the norm at the Punahou School, one of the state's top private schools. The 3,600 students came from a wide variety of backgrounds, with a blend of Polynesian, Asian, European and other cultures. Everybody in Hawaii is a minority.
At Punahou, Barack Obama was known primarily for his appealing personality, his honesty and his aggressive play on the basketball court.
"It was a good melting pot. There were people from all different races," said Eric Smith, a friend and classmate of Obama's in the 1970s. "Everyone seemed to meld together." [More]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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16 comments:
"Everybody was a minority."
Hmmm. Is that like,
"All our children are above average" (Keillor, "Lake Wobegone")
or
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" (Orwell, _1984_) ?
I suppose the ONE white guy in school would have a hard time - he's part of the hated "majority."
Barack Obama comes off as a nice guy. Would people rather have him be a former gangsta teen?
obama appears better than other potential presidential candidates, and certainly better than the current incumbent
"Barack Obama comes off as a nice guy. Would people rather have him be a former gangsta teen?"
I guess some people have a problem with him trying to invent a "gansta teen" story out of thin air. He wants to claim that he had a tough time being black, but as you can see from the article, he did not. In fact, he had a pretty privleged life.
This story has all sorts of implications for understanding race. Nobody ever had a chance to be more "post-racial" than Obama, yet he relentlessly committed himself to being black.
"Nobody ever had a chance to be more "post-racial" than Obama, yet he relentlessly committed himself to being black."
Are you willing to consider the possibility that you are overstating that case?
I watch a lot of Obama clips and I've yet to hear him emphasize his African-American heritage or anything really similar. Some accuse him of not emphasizing his blackness enough and pandering to the white people -- regardless of the fact that while writing policy he has focused on issues affecting minorities (earned income tax credit in Illinois, required taping of interrogations, required registering of race in arrests, ect).
Could you show some evidence besides his book Dreams of My Father? That book was published long before Obama even considered running for President. We have no reason to believe that he was anything but sincere -- he grew up with no real father, and he felt bad about it, and experimented with drugs. I felt bad about things and experimented with plenty of drugs despite being, on the surface, popular and normal.
Note that I have my reservations about Barack Obama, mostly centering on his understanding of economics, but he is certainly better than any other candidate -- with the exception, perhaps, of Wesley Clark.
Better than any of which other candidates? I hope you mean just better than Hillary or maybe Edwards too.
Could you show some evidence besides his book Dreams of My Father? That book was published long before Obama even considered running for President. We have no reason to believe that he was anything but sincere
So you are saying that it doesn't count, since, although he was sincere at that time, he didn't know that he would be running for president, and if he had known, he wouldn't have been as sincere?
Steve Sailer wrote:
"Nobody ever had a chance to be more "post-racial" than Obama, yet he relentlessly committed himself to being black."
Yeah it says something alright. It says something sad. I dont think "we" will ever get past "race". Brazilians are supposed to be very acutely aware of the small amounts of this and that in their genetic backgrounds.
If you take "race" away from someone, you take away their history. If my name is Antonelli, Im going to be interested in the Roman Empire and the Etruscans and what "they did and built". If its MacDougal, Im going to want to find out about Hadrian's wall and the monumental megalithic stone monuments in Scotland. Its something to be "proud of" and tells one "where we came from".
If you take all of that "away" and we are all generic, light brown colored human beings, with dubious racial features like some "middling mixed race", we all look at each other and hearken back to our long genetic past................namely apes. Nobody wants to contemplate the ancestors he had that swung in trees or foraged on the side of a mountain like a gorilla. That may be one more reason that people cling to "race". It keeps them from thinking about humanities dreary past as lower forms of life that what we have become.
Or pehaps Obama clings to being "black" purely for political purposes because he understands how advantageous it could be....................or more saddingly, he clings to being black because deep down he doesn't feel he will ever be truly accepted by upper class whites, but will be accepted by upper class blacks in the most personal ways.
It's still the custom to use "one-drop" definitions of who is black in the US. For that, Obama can't be blamed. He doesn't cling to blackness more than others of similar background.
Obama is one of the three most famous racially mixed people in America. The other two handle their racial backgrounds in strikingly different ways: Tiger Woods emphasizes his multiracial heritage, but it's a wasted effort because everyone considers him as just black, while Halle Berry never misses an opportunity to proclaim how authentically black she is.
Obama clearly follows the Tiger Woods approach. What's important, however, is that it makes no difference, as one way or another everyone considers him black.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
There was a funny clip on the Daily Show of the Democratic presidential contenders competing to see who had the most humble childhood.
In case anyone's wondering, Vilsack won - abandoned then adopted by an alcoholic mother.
It's a bit of a silly game. I guess the point of Steve's blog is that Obama's "opressed minority" shtick is a bit of a farce?
A British comedian once joked about not being exactly a Jew, more Jew-ish. Perhaps your man is blackish? Perhaps Biden was right: the key thing is that he's "clean". Cleaner by far, I'd have guessed, than any Kennedy, for instance.
"It's a bit of a silly game. I guess the point of Steve's blog is that Obama's "opressed minority" shtick is a bit of a farce?"
And the point I'm making, which seems to be going over most your heads, is that Sailer hasn't produced the evidence that Obama does play the "oppressed minority" card. He doesn't. He may have remarked on feeling different in high-school, but currently you don't see him talking about himself being oppressed - he realizes that he's not. Strangely, you don't see him talking much about the oppression of the black race as a whole -- even though it certainly exists, and to a large degree. (Check out the statistics of the War on Drugs -- essentially a war on the poor minorities.)
To say that he does play himself off as an oppressed minority is patently false -- unless you would like to produce the evidence?
The question I have: why does Steve Sailer continue to try to force a point like this without evidence?
I only see salient thing about any presidential contender: Immigration.
Where does Obama stand?
Recall the line from South Park that has been immortalized in radio show drop-ins all across this great land of ours:"He's a black guy--isnt he!!" :)
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