Obama and Race

Hubby and I just watched Obama's speech on race. It was beautiful, poignant, and historical. I find it very interesting that as a black man, he was able to be able to give such a informed analysis about race relations. He isn't mired in his black experience; he transcends it and is thus able to strike a chord in every American, not just the left-wing, granola eating, NPR listening nuts.

Why is this? Well lets take a look at his background.

Here he is as a baby with his mother. Obama's parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., met and married in Honolulu — a white woman from the mainland and a black man from Kenya.

He went to school in Hawaii at a private school, but you have to remember, that many ethnicities have been successful here, and his school was a multiethnic melting pot.

After that marriage failed, Obama, at age 6, left Hawaii to live for four years in Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. In 1971, she sent Obama, then 10, back to Hawaii to be with his maternal grandparents mostly because she wanted him to receive his education at Punahou, which boasts a rigorous high school curriculum.



In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama recalls experiencing some discrimination growing up in the islands, such as when other kids laughed at his name. In my opinion kids, are kids. Teasing doesn't have to be racially motivated. I was teased about my name. But I am not black, but was it less hurtful? This comment seems to be a "reach" to create a common experience with the African American population of the United States.

"I tried to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant," he wrote.

But Obama acknowledges he wasn't growing up in the Jim Crow South or the housing projects of Harlem — he was in Hawaii, where his peers mostly treated him the same as others. I can guarantee that the Filipinos and the Portagees got it worst than he did.

Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, a bank vice president, and grandfather, Stanley Dunham, a salesman, lived in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Honolulu and helped raise their grandson along with his mother until he graduated from high school.