The Roots of Obama's Rage (3 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
But I found that this theory is also wrong—or at least seriously inadequate. A couple of things tipped me off. The first is the chorus of complaint by black activists and scholars that Obama doesn’t care about their agenda. Obama’s indifference to black issues was the central theme of a 2010 summit organized by the African American TV host Tavis Smiley. Smiley echoed the sentiments of many of the speakers when he said, “The time has come for . . . the president to be more aggressive about an African American agenda.” The black literary scholar Michael Eric Dyson put the point even more bluntly in an MSNBC television interview: “This president runs from race like a black man runs from a cop.”
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At first I thought that this approach represented a tactical decision by Obama to eschew race-specific issues. After all, the man does have to convince the country that he represents the national interest, not just the black interest. But as the political philosopher Cornel West—an adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign—recently pointed out, this does not require Obama to avoid black issues altogether. West noted that Obama certainly pays attention to environmentalists’ concerns about oil spills, and union concerns about contracts. “But when it comes to black people . . . we don’t have an agenda? He must be losing his mind.... We’ve got a black president who needs to be saved from himself.” Saved from himself! I pondered the arresting phrase as well as why, in West’s view, Obama steadfastly refuses to attend to the African American agenda, focused as it is on affirmative action and inner-city poverty programs. Then a startling thought hit me. Maybe Obama pays no attention to race because he doesn’t care about race. Maybe race is not what drives this guy after all.
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This got me to my second reason for doubting my race theory: it does not jibe with Obama’s actual life story. I realized I had been placing Obama the whole time in the civil rights movement, thinking of him as African American, when in reality he has a very different history. Obama is not the descendant of slaves as African Americans typically are. Obama never sat at a segregated lunch counter, and neither did any of his ancestors. Obama’s father was an immigrant from Africa who studied at Harvard and returned to Africa. His mother was white. Moreover, Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and lived a life of relative privilege, attending private school before enrolling at Columbia and then Harvard. So what did Obama have in common with black America? Virtually nothing.
Of course, Obama went through a phase growing up in which he thought of himself as an American black. And it is a political necessity for him to identify as an African American. This is not only because such identification brings near-universal black support and white support from many quarters, but also because it guarantees Obama’s place in history. Obama isn’t going down in history as the first child of an immigrant to become president, but rather as the first black president. So Obama has carefully cultivated a racial identity for himself, one that seeks to bind him to black America. But a little scrutiny shows that Obama’s effort is contrived. This isn’t so hard to figure out: all you need to do is read Obama’s writings and speeches with some good knowledge of black history and the civil rights tradition. The reason we haven’t figured out Obama’s tenuous relationship to black America is because so many people—especially in the press—are so eager to see an African American president who looks and sounds like Obama that they have suspended their critical faculties.
My critical antennae were alerted when I came across a passage in Obama’s self-revealing autobiography
Dreams from My Father
. While waiting for his mother in the lobby of the American embassy in Indonesia, Obama recalls picking up a copy of
Life
magazine. Thumbing through the articles, he came across a story about a black man who underwent chemical treatments to lighten his skin. Obama notes that the man looked sickly, like “a radiation victim or an albino.” His reaction was one of horror. “I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page . . . I had the desperate urge to jump out of my seat... to demand some explanation or assurance.” Then his white mother entered the room and, with heroic effort, Obama suppressed his anger. The incident is a dramatic revelation to Obama that blackness stands condemned in America to such a degree that black people have to attempt to make themselves white.
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Dreams from My Father
. While waiting for his mother in the lobby of the American embassy in Indonesia, Obama recalls picking up a copy of
Life
magazine. Thumbing through the articles, he came across a story about a black man who underwent chemical treatments to lighten his skin. Obama notes that the man looked sickly, like “a radiation victim or an albino.” His reaction was one of horror. “I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page . . . I had the desperate urge to jump out of my seat... to demand some explanation or assurance.” Then his white mother entered the room and, with heroic effort, Obama suppressed his anger. The incident is a dramatic revelation to Obama that blackness stands condemned in America to such a degree that black people have to attempt to make themselves white.
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Obama’s story was reported in
Newsweek
and many other places before journalists at the
Chicago Tribune
decided to locate the original story and, well, it turns out there wasn’t one.
Life
never published such an article. When Obama was asked about this, he suggested that maybe
Ebony
or some other magazine carried this particular article. Actually, no. The search for the article has been sufficiently thorough that we can say with confidence that it does not exist. Now a book published in the early 1960s,
Black Like Me
, does describe a fellow who took skin treatments to change his color. But the author, John Howard Griffin, was a white guy from Dallas who was trying to make himself look black. Griffin’s purpose was to masquerade as a black man so he could personally experience and then expose racism in the South. It seems doubtful that Griffin was Obama’s source, but if he was, then Obama not only distorted but completely inverted the facts. In any event Obama’s intense emotional response now seems bogus and contrived. Obama’s defenders have suggested that “Obama was after an emotional truth here.”
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Quite obviously he was searching for a morality tale to dramatize the impact that American racism had on him in his formative years. Still, he could easily have found some other true incident to make the same point. Instead, he seems to have engaged in some very creative writing. Yet if the whole episode was fantasy, why this particular fantasy?
Newsweek
and many other places before journalists at the
Chicago Tribune
decided to locate the original story and, well, it turns out there wasn’t one.
Life
never published such an article. When Obama was asked about this, he suggested that maybe
Ebony
or some other magazine carried this particular article. Actually, no. The search for the article has been sufficiently thorough that we can say with confidence that it does not exist. Now a book published in the early 1960s,
Black Like Me
, does describe a fellow who took skin treatments to change his color. But the author, John Howard Griffin, was a white guy from Dallas who was trying to make himself look black. Griffin’s purpose was to masquerade as a black man so he could personally experience and then expose racism in the South. It seems doubtful that Griffin was Obama’s source, but if he was, then Obama not only distorted but completely inverted the facts. In any event Obama’s intense emotional response now seems bogus and contrived. Obama’s defenders have suggested that “Obama was after an emotional truth here.”
8
Quite obviously he was searching for a morality tale to dramatize the impact that American racism had on him in his formative years. Still, he could easily have found some other true incident to make the same point. Instead, he seems to have engaged in some very creative writing. Yet if the whole episode was fantasy, why this particular fantasy?
I was about to despair in my attempt to figure out Obama when I heard Obama make his now-famous remark about whether America is an exceptional country. The notion that in many respects America is unique in the world is called American “exceptionalism.” Now in one sense I knew that obviously Obama believed in American exceptionalism. In his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention Obama said, “I stand here knowing that . . . in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” a refrain he repeated many times during the campaign.
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Obama was acknowledging that no other country allows outsiders like him (or me, for that matter) full entry and full acceptance in society. But here in America, foreigners of all races can “become American” and rise to the very top of the political and social ladder.
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Obama was acknowledging that no other country allows outsiders like him (or me, for that matter) full entry and full acceptance in society. But here in America, foreigners of all races can “become American” and rise to the very top of the political and social ladder.
Yet when Obama was asked at a 2009 press conference in Europe whether he believed in American exceptionalism, he replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.”
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What did Obama mean by this? In a banal sense, every country is unique, with its own distinctive history, mores, and cuisine. We all know that Americans eat hot dogs, Greeks eat souvlaki, and the British eat horrible British food. But this is not what exceptionalism means. It refers to the claim that the rest of the world does things in one way and we do things in a different way. Our ideals distinguish us from those of other cultures or, as I put it in one of my earlier books, America offers a new and original way to be human. If this is true, then it’s wrong to say that American exceptionalism is no different from British or Greek exceptionalism. Obama seems to be insisting, in effect, that there is nothing especially unique about America. Why would Obama, of all people, make such a remarkable statement? Something seemed terribly wrong here, not with Obama, but with my understanding of Obama.
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What did Obama mean by this? In a banal sense, every country is unique, with its own distinctive history, mores, and cuisine. We all know that Americans eat hot dogs, Greeks eat souvlaki, and the British eat horrible British food. But this is not what exceptionalism means. It refers to the claim that the rest of the world does things in one way and we do things in a different way. Our ideals distinguish us from those of other cultures or, as I put it in one of my earlier books, America offers a new and original way to be human. If this is true, then it’s wrong to say that American exceptionalism is no different from British or Greek exceptionalism. Obama seems to be insisting, in effect, that there is nothing especially unique about America. Why would Obama, of all people, make such a remarkable statement? Something seemed terribly wrong here, not with Obama, but with my understanding of Obama.
So I went back and re-read Obama’s two books,
Dreams from My Father
and
The Audacity of Hope
. Both are autobiographical, but the first tells us far more about Obama because it is not couched in political language. It was written in 1995, shortly before Obama was a state senator and a decade before he was a U.S. senator. Earlier I had read these books to discover Obama’s positions on various issues. This time I read them to find Obama. In the process, I found myself plunged into Obama’s world, a world not of segregated lunch counters or separate water fountains, but rather a world much like the one that I grew up in: the Third World. As I read about Obama in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Africa, I remembered growing up as a boy in the suburbs of Mumbai, surrounded by the helter-skelter of poverty and chaos, naked children running around, rickshaws and beggars, cows crossing the road. Sometimes I wondered how I made the long journey from the world of my childhood, growing up without television or telephone or even hot showers in the bathroom, to the world I live in now. How, I ask myself, did I go from the periphery of the modern world to its epicenter? Others, like the novelist V. S. Naipaul, who grew up in Trinidad and moved to London, have written about this.
Dreams from My Father
and
The Audacity of Hope
. Both are autobiographical, but the first tells us far more about Obama because it is not couched in political language. It was written in 1995, shortly before Obama was a state senator and a decade before he was a U.S. senator. Earlier I had read these books to discover Obama’s positions on various issues. This time I read them to find Obama. In the process, I found myself plunged into Obama’s world, a world not of segregated lunch counters or separate water fountains, but rather a world much like the one that I grew up in: the Third World. As I read about Obama in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Africa, I remembered growing up as a boy in the suburbs of Mumbai, surrounded by the helter-skelter of poverty and chaos, naked children running around, rickshaws and beggars, cows crossing the road. Sometimes I wondered how I made the long journey from the world of my childhood, growing up without television or telephone or even hot showers in the bathroom, to the world I live in now. How, I ask myself, did I go from the periphery of the modern world to its epicenter? Others, like the novelist V. S. Naipaul, who grew up in Trinidad and moved to London, have written about this.
This is Obama’s story, a story of a little boy who emerged from the hinterlands and somehow was elected to the highest office in the land. Obama’s formative history, I realized, was crucial to understanding who Obama is now. And suddenly it hit me that all along I had been looking for Obama in the wrong place. I had been trying to fit Obama into some version of American history, and in the process I had ignored Obama’s own history. How absurd of me, since Obama’s history in important respects resembled my own. What made this discovery especially fascinating is that Obama interpreted this history in a way radically different from how I see it.
Obama’s story is both enthralling and incredibly revealing of his current motivation and outlook, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Let me just say here that Obama’s books are about three dreams. The first one is the American dream, and this refers to what the American founders termed the “novus ordo seclorum,” the new order for the ages. The founders sought to build a society never before seen in Europe or anywhere else in the world. They were, in this sense, the original champions of American exceptionalism. The American dream has been very good for Obama, making his success possible. But it is not what he cares most about; as we have seen, he explicitly rejects the idea that America is somehow unique. Perhaps for him the American dream is not very different from the British dream or the Greek dream.
Second, there is Martin Luther King’s dream. Less obviously, this is also not Obama’s dream. Again, he depends on it. He campaigned as a non-racial candidate, and he counted on whites to vote for him or against him, not on the basis of his skin color, but on who he was as a politician and as a man. Without a realization of King’s dream within the soul of the body politic, Obama would not be president today. Even so, Obama is not fundamentally guided by Martin Luther King’s dream. The best evidence of this is that he rarely talks about that dream, and he does not seem to be moved or motivated by it. When is the last time you heard Obama speak with conviction about the importance of a color-blind society? If you go back and read Obama’s speeches, including his famous Philadelphia address on race, King’s dream gets short shrift. In this area, Obama’s actions are equally important. As president, Obama has done nothing to alter race-conscious policies or even urge that Americans get beyond race. Even as he benefits from King’s dream, he treats it with benign neglect.
Finally, there is Obama’s dream, and if you want to know what that is, all you have to do is look at the title of Obama’s book:
Dreams from My Father
. So there it is: according to Obama himself, his dream comes from his father. And who was his father and what were the ideals and values that moved him? I withhold the answer to these questions until the next chapter, but let’s just say that Obama’s dream, as derived from Barack Obama Sr., is very different from the one espoused by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. It is just as distant from the dream of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. In fact, to discover Obama’s dream we have to leave the American mainland and join Obama on his lifelong quest to discover his father and, through that experience, himself.
Dreams from My Father
. So there it is: according to Obama himself, his dream comes from his father. And who was his father and what were the ideals and values that moved him? I withhold the answer to these questions until the next chapter, but let’s just say that Obama’s dream, as derived from Barack Obama Sr., is very different from the one espoused by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. It is just as distant from the dream of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. In fact, to discover Obama’s dream we have to leave the American mainland and join Obama on his lifelong quest to discover his father and, through that experience, himself.
When we go abroad, leaving behind familiar shores and signposts, we encounter a rich mélange of political and intellectual figures from all over the globe. We discover names like Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga, Kwame Nkrumah, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Edward Said, Amilcar Cabral, Wole Soyinka, and Aimé Césaire. Many of these names appear in Obama’s books, although—for reasons that will become clear—some of them are deliberately omitted. Fortunately for me, this is intellectual terrain that I know well. Steeped as I am in the politics and history of the Third World, these are figures whom I have studied. This is also the world of Barack Obama Sr., and it is in this mental and moral universe that his son found his ideals and his place. Obama’s policies are incomprehensible without this intellectual landscape.
This book will clearly establish the relevance of this body of ideas to Obama’s worldview—and a little detail here will set us on the right track. In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama writes about being influenced by Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique, Fanon became a psychiatrist who joined the Algerian liberation movement, the Front de Liberation Nationale, or FLN. I’d like to quote an interesting passage from Fanon’s book
Black Skin, White Masks
, a book first published in 1952 in French, and then widely reprinted in translation in America. “For some years now, certain laboratories have been researching for a ‘denegrification’ serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched black man could whiten himself and thus rid himself of the burden of his bodily curse.”
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Fanon is writing about the North African Negro who is desperately eager to alter his skin color and become white like the French rulers of his country. Here, I believe, is where Obama got his skin treatment story. He found it in Fanon and altered the setting and the facts to invent a personal experience instructive about American racism.
Dreams from My Father
, Obama writes about being influenced by Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique, Fanon became a psychiatrist who joined the Algerian liberation movement, the Front de Liberation Nationale, or FLN. I’d like to quote an interesting passage from Fanon’s book
Black Skin, White Masks
, a book first published in 1952 in French, and then widely reprinted in translation in America. “For some years now, certain laboratories have been researching for a ‘denegrification’ serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched black man could whiten himself and thus rid himself of the burden of his bodily curse.”
11
Fanon is writing about the North African Negro who is desperately eager to alter his skin color and become white like the French rulers of his country. Here, I believe, is where Obama got his skin treatment story. He found it in Fanon and altered the setting and the facts to invent a personal experience instructive about American racism.
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