Who is Obama?

An interesting article from The Examiner about Democrat Rock Star Barack Obama’s first memoir entitled, “Dreams from My Father”. It is part 2 of a 3 part series on the candidate. There is so little information about Obama which is why he seems so appealing right now. You can draw your own conclusions, but it sure seems like Obama was not so fond of white people even though his own mother was white. Of course “progressive” liberals eat this up since they are filled with self-loathing and like to blame white males for all the evil in the world.

Imagine if Obama had embraced his white heritage instead and revealed his distrust and criticismn of blacks in his youth, his campaign would be finished before it started, but somehow Obama’s transgression will be tolerated, even applauded, understood, justified, and forgiven. It will probably increase his popularity. Why do we condemn racism from certain groups and not from others? Why are certain people allowed to evolve as a person and for others, their past haunts them forever? These sorts of double standards always baffle me. It’s either right or it’s wrong. I don’t dance in the liberal shades of gray. It’s too convenient to move the bar wherever it supports your position.

Go to the article to read the entire thing. Really, I’d like to quote the entire article but that would make my post too large. I will selectively pick and choose the most interesting parts.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama, the only major black candidate in the 2008 presidential race, has spent much of his life anguishing over his mixed-race heritage and self-described “racial obsessions.”
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Indeed, Obama acknowledges feeling tormented for much of his life by “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t, I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.”
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Although Obama was raised by his mother, he identified more closely with the race of his father, who left the family when Obama was 2.

“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” he wrote.
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“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,” he wrote in “Dreams.” “One of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
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Obama wrote that in high school, he and a black friend would sometimes speak disparagingly “about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.”

As a result, he concluded that “certain whites could be excluded from the general category of our distrust.”

Donna Brazile, who managed former Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, said Obama’s feelings of distrust toward most whites and doubts about himself are fairly typical for black Americans.

“He was a young man trying to discover, trying to accept, trying to come to grips with his background,” she explained. “In the process, he had to really make some statements that are hurtful, maybe. But I think they’re more insightful than anything.”

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.
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“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”

He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
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After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss.

“There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”

Harris-Lacewell said such expressions of distrust toward whites will not hurt Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, which are dominated by liberal voters.

“To win the Democratic nomination, he’s got to get a part of the progressive, anti-war, white folks,” she said. “And those white folks tend to be suspicious of any black person who wouldn’t be suspicious of white people.”

Such liberals would have little basis for suspicion after reading some of Obama’s conclusions about the white race, which he once described as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”

“That hate hadn’t gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”
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“I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime,” he wrote in “Audacity.” “I insist that things have gotten better.”

I felt Obama was being treated unfairly when people started comparing his name to Osama bin Laden and questioning the two years he spent in a Muslim school in Indonesia as a child. But after reading this article, I think I liked him better when I knew less about him.

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