By Steve Sailer
03/17/2008
Here’s a link to that NYT article on Obama’s mom, Stanley: "Obama’s mother — an unconventional life: Anthropologist disliked ethnic barriers, sought to aid world’s poor." Funny how they can write thousands of words about a politician’s mom without ever getting around to mentioning the currently most relevant thing about her, her politics.I don’t think anybody on the left will have trouble figuring her ideology out, though. As Mona Charen would say, her politics aren’t articulated, they're presumed. The rest of the electorate, however, doesn’t need to be clued in, now do they? It might just confuse the poor saps.
Mama Obama should be in the Stuff White People Like Hall of Fame (Dangerously Naive Wing).
It took her a long time to figure out that if you are a White People (female variety), you are supposed to act like you've gotten into the Third World, not let Third Worlders get into you.
Having a boyfriend from Africa at the U. of Hawaii in the early 1960s was very fashion forward. Letting the already-married bastard get you pregnant and then wedding him bigamously, and then having him abandon you and your two-year-old because his scholarship offer from the New School of Social Research that would have paid for the three of you to live in Manhattan wasn’t as prestigious as his scholarship offer from Harvard that would pay only for him, well, that’s just kind of tacky and sad.
And then marrying a laid-back nice-guy Indonesian student in Hawaii, and following him back to Indonesia, where, surrounded by your new in-laws he starts acting — what do you know? — more like a traditional Indonesian paterfamilias who won’t take any guff from his feminist wife. I guess majoring in anthropology didn’t prepare you to see that one coming?
One sign that Obama never succeeded in becoming the fully authentic African-American that he spent all those hours in Honolulu watching "Soul Train" to achieve is that his attitude toward his mom for much of his life was straight out of Stuff White People Like: "#17 Hating Their Parents." He ended up apologizing to his late mother in the 2004 Preface for what he had written in his 1995 autobiography. Real black guys do not diss their mamas. (Also, to digress, as one commenter pointed out, a real black guy named "Barack" would not call himself "Barry" or "Barack," he would call himself "Rock." Rock Obama.)As a child, he deeply resented her dumping him twice on her grandparents in Hawaii so she could be in Indonesia working on the 1,067 page Ph.D. dissertation on peasant blacksmithing that she completed in 1992.
So, it’s a mistake to assume that Obama’s leftism is of his mom’s Kumbaya variety. He later imbibed a much more cynical, pragmatic radicalism, which I will describe in my VDARE.com article tonight.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.