Obama suffered racist abuse, says biography

FILE | NATION US President Barack Obama (right) is seen with his step-father Lolo Soetoro (left), his sister Maya Soetoro and his mother Ann Dunham (centre) in an undated family snapshot. A biography detailing the life of President Obama’s mother is to be published soon.

By Kevin J Kelley, New York
Posted  Sunday, April 24 2011 at 20:57

Most narratives about the parents of the president of the United States have been dominated by Barack Obama Snr.

The elder Obama — said to be brilliant, charismatic and self-destructive in roughly equal measures — serves as a fascinating figure for American writers seeking to analyse the president’s unique background and early influences. Obama Snr does stand at the centre of Obama Jnr’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

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.

President Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a far more formative force in his life, even though she too died young — of cancer at age 52 in 1995. And now Ms Dunham’s remarkable life is being examined in detail in a soon-to-be-published biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, by Janny Scott, a reporter for The New York Times.

Excerpts from the book were carried in the Times’ Sunday magazine.

Ms Scott’s account reveals that the future president was apparently a frequent target of racist abuse during his boyhood years in Indonesia.

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.

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 “were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks.”

Ms Bryant recalls offering on that occasion to intervene on Barry’s behalf. But his mother told her: “No, he’s OK. He’s used to it.”

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.

She would occasionally bring her son to work with her. “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the colour of his skin,” Mr Sigit says in the book — “with no evident embarrassment,” Ms Scott writes.

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.

Benji Bennington, a friend of Ms Dunham’s from Hawaii, says in the book “sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’”