In his book Dreams of My Father, Obama makes reference to a photo he saw at the age of nine in Life magazine. As he recalled it, the photo depicted a black man in dark glasses who has lightened his skin. The process, Obama says, had scarred his hands. The image haunted young Barry, leading to his "racial awakening."
Unfortunately, no such photo ever appeared in Life.
I need not recapitulate the Sherlock Holmesing that solved the mystery. The bottom line is this: What Obama actually saw was a photo used on the cover of a biography of John Howard Griffin.Older readers will recall that Griffin wrote the bestseller Black Like Me in 1961. This non-fiction book (Larry Howard erroneously calls it a novel) details what happened to Griffin when he traveled through the south posing as a black man. He had darkened his skin using ultraviolet lamps and a chemical called Oxsoralen. (The thick glasses were necessitated by poor eyesight; Griffin had been legally blind for years.)
In Obama's mis-recollection, Griffin became a black man posing as a white. In fact, the reverse was true. In my opinon, that reversal says something about young Barry Obama's psychology.
But that's not the end of the matter. For decades, an urban legend (which I recall hearing in my youth) held that the chemical treatment injured Griffin's skin, leading to an early death from skin cancer. This story is not true. The fact that white rumor-mongers felt compelled to invent this cautionary yarn says something ghastly and infuriating about American bigotry.
For some reason, Barack Obama came to the opposite conclusion: He believed that the lightening procedure had injured the man's hands. Why, I wonder, did his memory create that scenario? The hands look fine in the photograph.
In fact, Griffin suffered no ill effects from the chemical treatment. His skin was always uninjured.
But something had gone wrong in the psyche. Obama's psyche. Yours. Mine. Something went wrong in the minds of an entire generation of Americans.
5 comments:
People always told me be careful of what you do
And dont go around breaking young girls hearts
And mother always told me be careful of who you love
And be careful of what you do cause the lie becomes the truth.
Joe,
I ran across this:
"Why'd Obama Join Trinity in the First Place?"
The New Republic 4/29/08
"So, if you buy Wright's account--and it rings pretty true to me--it was his intellectualism and social progressivism that won Obama over. Certainly it's hard to imagine that someone like Obama, who came from a progressive, secular background, would have felt genuinely comfortable in a socially conservative, anti-intellectual church. The problem for Obama is that the flip-side of these virtues was a minister with a radical worldview and a penchant for advertising it loudly."
I just thought you may find it interesting since you were wondering about his psyche.
beeta, as it happens I read that piece last night or this morning.
I believe that Obama is actually a secular kind of fellow. But he was ambitious, and he decided that Christianity was the best image. So he needed to join some sort of church...
I'm not singling Obama out when I express that opinion. I suspect that MOST politicians are agnostics-posing-as-theists.
In Obama's case, he was being groomed for higher office by the Rezko gang -- I use Rezko as a convenient symbol for a wider network; one coul as easily call it the Daley machine. The idea was to expand Chicago-style "Pay to play" corruption to the state and then to the federal government.
I'm wondering how many choies Obama really had when he decided tht the time had come to pretend to find the Lord. He had to choose a pastor in his very liberal district. He had to choose a black church because his constiuents wre black.
It MAY be that Wright was part of the pay-to-play corruption. I've seen no evidence for that -- but frankly, I haven't really looked for it.
I know that Wright is no progressive. He comes from the black nationalist/black separatist tradition. Basic equation: Farrakhan minus Koran equals Wright.
As I've noted on several previous occasions, the black seperatist tradition has NEVER been progressive. Economically, black nationalists have always espoused ultra-Libertarianism.
It is worth noting that Wright allied himself with the New Black Panther party, which (ecnomically speaking) is an utter inversion of the Marxist original. (Here as elsewhere, "radical" simply means "disguised libertarianism.")
Read that article closely and you will see no indicators that Wright favors traditional liberal economic solutions to any problems.
Which may explain why Obama, after joining Wright's church, allied himself with econ guys out of the Milton Friedman school and with dear old Zbig, who is NO liberal. It may also explain why his big "new media" supporters are Moulitsas and Stassinopoulos, who are both Libertarians posing as progs.
Indeed, it may be that the term "Progressive" has no current meaning except as a designator for a certain type of Libertarian infiltration into the Democratic party.
I knwo I have rambled in giving this answer, but my poorly typed comments are sometimes rough drafts of future posts -- so I've allowed myself to speak discursively.
The response to beeta is one of your best posts ever, doubtless because you didn't have time to feel or seethe.
That just goes to show if you just do and say what comes to mind first(I confess that I was getting ready for work as this exchange took place and you have Joe's confession on record), dialogue improves!
WOW! I wasn't trying to defend Obama and Joe wasn't trying to shred him to pieces.
Is that what an honest exchange was used to be about?
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