{"id":395647,"date":"2011-04-25T05:30:50","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T05:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/04\/25\/obama-suffered-racist-abuse-says-biography\/"},"modified":"2011-04-25T05:30:50","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T05:30:50","slug":"obama-suffered-racist-abuse-says-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/04\/25\/obama-suffered-racist-abuse-says-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Suffered Racist Abuse, Says Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"66.9176919813\">\n<hr class=\"thin clear\" \/>\n<hr class=\"thin clear\" \/>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nation.co.ke\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/450a559cnation180.jpg.jpg\" alt=\"The Nation (Nairobi)\" title=\"Visit The Nation (Nairobi)\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kevin J Kelley<\/p>\n<p>25 April 2011<\/p>\n<hr class=\"thin clear\" \/>\n<p>New York \u2014 Most narratives about the parents of the president of the United States have been dominated by Barack Obama Snr.<\/p>\n<p>The elder Obama \u2014 said to be brilliant, charismatic and self-destructive in roughly equal measures \u2014 serves as a fascinating figure for American writers seeking to analyse the president\u2019s unique background and early influences. Obama Snr does stand at the centre of Obama Jnr\u2019s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.<\/p>\n<p>But Barack Obama Jnr barely knew his father, who left the family when his son was two years old and who died in a drunk-driving accident in Nairobi in 1982 at age 46.<\/p>\n<p>President Obama\u2019s mother, Ann Dunham, was a far more formative force in his life, even though she too died young \u2014 of cancer at age 52 in 1995. And now Ms Dunham\u2019s remarkable life is being examined in detail in a soon-to-be-published biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama\u2019s Mother, by Janny Scott, a reporter for The New York Times.<\/p>\n<p>Excerpts from the book were carried in the Times\u2019 Sunday magazine.<\/p>\n<p>Ms Scott\u2019s account reveals that the future president was apparently a frequent target of racist abuse during his boyhood years in Indonesia.<\/p>\n<p>He had moved there at age six with his white mother following her divorce from Obama Snr in the mid-1960s and her remarriage to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian she had met while studying at the University of Hawaii.<\/p>\n<p>In one incident recounted by Ms Scott, the young Obama, then known as Barry, dodges rocks thrown at him by Indonesian children who also hurl racist insults at the boy. The book quotes Elizabeth Bryant, an American who knew Ms Dunham and her son in Indonesia, as saying recently that expatriate Westerners \u201cwere floored that she\u2019d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ms Bryant recalls offering on that occasion to intervene on Barry\u2019s behalf. But his mother told her: \u201cNo, he\u2019s OK. He\u2019s used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The apparently relentless anti-black racism Barry experienced is further demonstrated in comments made to Ms Scott by Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who was working at the US embassy when Ms Dunham was teaching English there.<\/p>\n<p>She would occasionally bring her son to work with her. \u201cOur staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different \u2014 the colour of his skin,\u201d Mr Sigit says in the book \u2014 \u201cwith no evident embarrassment,\u201d Ms Scott writes.<\/p>\n<p>Ms Dunham, who defied the strictures placed on women in the years before the 1970s US feminist movement, was sure her son would grow up to attain greatness.<\/p>\n<p>Benji Bennington, a friend of Ms Dunham\u2019s from Hawaii, says in the book \u201csometimes when she talked about Barack, she\u2019d say, \u2018Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<fieldset>\n<legend align=\"center\"><strong>More News on allAfrica.com<\/strong><\/legend>\n<\/fieldset>\n<p>AllAfrica &#8211; All the Time<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>Continued here:<br \/>\n<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/allafrica.com\/stories\/201104250247.html\" title=\"Obama Suffered Racist Abuse, Says Biography\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Obama Suffered Racist Abuse, Says Biography<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> Kevin J Kelley 25 April 2011 New York \u2014 Most narratives about the parents of the president of the United States have been dominated by Barack Obama Snr. The elder Obama \u2014 said to be brilliant, charismatic and self-destructive in roughly equal measures \u2014 serves as a fascinating figure for American writers seeking to analyse the president\u2019s unique background and early influences. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Obama Suffered Racist Abuse, Says Biography - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/04\/25\/obama-suffered-racist-abuse-says-biography\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Obama Suffered Racist Abuse, Says Biography - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Kevin J Kelley 25 April 2011 New York \u2014 Most narratives about the parents of the president of the United States have been dominated by Barack Obama Snr. 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