"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."
 William Feather
We have seen the demise of many other multiracial advocates. AMEA is gone, and MAVIN was not really an advocacy group, but it is not doing anything now.  Loving Day is one day, and too many advocates have just stopped being advocates. Academics, authors, and talk show hosts are not necessarily advocates. As I have said many times, "It's not just you or your child, it's also about the generations to come. "New groups" have come and gone, mostly gone. Project RACE not only hangs on--22 years now--but expands, influences, and remains the key national advocacy organization for multiracial children, teens, adults and our families. -Susan Graham

Multiracial Advocacy Response

Response from the Multiracial Advocacy

United States Census Bureau Director Groves blogged yesterday about "big data" changes for the Census Bureau and how it will make it cheaper, faster, and potentially better for users to get statistical information. Here is my response, which now appears on the bureau blog:

One Response to And Now, for Something a Little Different . . .

Susan Graham says:

June 27, 2012 at 8:07 pm

It doesn’t matter if you call it “big data” or “little data.” It’s not getting to the stakeholders. I am the CEO of a stakeholders’ group and I have been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get data. I have contacted the person responsible for the data numerous times. Director Groves stated, “Finally, it allows us to more nimbly meet the needs of our stakeholders for timely, relevant and reliable data.” I would certainly like to see how that works because it’s not working currently.

Reply

Multiracial Identity: The Multiracial Advocacy Blog

"I wish my identity weren't so wrapped up with who I am." 

Source: The New Yorker - 2012

The Multiracial Advocacy Blog: What's in a NAME?

The Multiracial Advocacy Blog: What’s in a Name?

Today was Gay Pride Day in California, well at least in San Francisco where a Gay Pride Parade was held, as it is every year. I was listening to the radio after I read my Sunday San Francisco Chronicle and I was surprised at the two different take-away points each had from the same event.

The Chronicle gave me information. I learned that over 15,000 gay people were targeted during the Holocaust and made to wear pink triangles on their shirts. I had no idea. Many of them met the same fate as Jewish people during that terrible time. I learned that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has worked for gay rights. The Chronicle coverage was unbiased, informational, educational, and positive.

The KGO radio show host tried to be unbiased by repeatedly referring to gay pride like black pride and, of course, multiracial pride. I’m not sure that’s helpful to anyone and my feelings were echoed by several callers.  

I’m tired of people comparing the gay movement with the multiracial movement. The reason they are so often compared because both seek legitimacy and equality. They are two definitely different movements. But why are they so often compared?

I remember when I was at my son’s elementary school in the early 1990’s and was standing in the hallway waiting for school to get out for the day. His class happened to walk by and we waved at each other. A woman standing next to me said, “Is that your child?!” I said, “Yes,” and her reply was, “It must be so hard to be the mother of a son who likes other boys.” Huh?! Ohhhhhhhhh, I finally got it. She had confused “biracial” and “bisexual.” Oh boy.

But I keep hearing it and it makes me downright mad every time. I’m hardly homophobic, but I’m also not seeing the connection. Is it that both groups have been opposed? Are biracial and bisexual closer in language than in reality? Am I supposed to ask biracial kids if they are also bisexual? Of course not, and yet the comparison continues.

I am Jewish. The connection between being Jewish and the history of the Holocaust is obvious—in your face—obvious. But I had never heard the gay/Holocaust history before. I doubt many people have. They are intrinsically different, but still let’s never forget either one.

I also hear multicultural interchanged with multiracial. Nope. Culture and race are different things: multicultural is more about “how we do things around here” while multiracial is “the DNA I was born with.”

It’s all very different and should not be all that confusing if only we could all just get along.

Susan Graham

Multiracial Advocacy Blog Rules and Regulations

The Multiracial Advocacy Blog is written primarily by Susan Graham, Executive Director of Project RACE. Its postings reflect the statements of Susan Graham and other members of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally), Project RACE Teens, Project RACE Kids, and Project RACE Grandparents. Posts to the blog also reflect the day-to-day stories of the multiracial and monoracial communities as they relate to multiracial advocacy. 

Rules and Regulations for readers and posters PROHIBIT the following:

1. Contributions, comments, pictures or videos that are likely to offend, provoke, or attack an individual or group of individuals.
2. Foul or profane language.
3. Sexually explicit or pornographic content.
4. Contributions that advertise other blogs, products, or services.
5. Contributions in any language other than English.
6. Contributions that invite or instigate any unlawful activity.
7. Any personal information, including phone numbers and addresses.
8. Any comments of a defamatory or libelous nature.  

Any comments that violate the Rules and Regulations will be rejected.

Multiracial Jews

Home > Multiracial Jews Moving Beyond Isolation

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Multiracial Jews Moving Beyond Isolation

Julie Wiener

Associate Editor 

 

When Rabbi/Cantor Angela Buchdahl was growing up — the daughter of a white Jewish father and a Korean-American mother — she and her sister “always felt like the ‘only ones’” that were non-white in Jewish settings.

Today, her three children attend the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, and each is in a class with at least one other mixed-race Asian. “And there are other races as well,” she noted.
Meanwhile at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, where Buchdahl is a member of the clergy, there are at least 20 families with Jews of color, not counting Sephardic or Mizrachi Jews.
“Things have changed quite a bit,” she said in an interview conducted by e-mail. (She was resting her vocal cords for an upcoming solo at the installation ceremony last weekend of Rabbi Rick Jacobs as the Union for Reform Judaism’s new president.)

Rabbi/Cantor Buchdahl’s observations are reflected in the comprehensive UJA-Federation of New York population study released this week. The first Jewish population study to ask about race, it finds that approximately 12 percent — or 87,000 — of New York Jewish households are “multiracial or nonwhite.”

This category includes households in which survey respondents were both Jewish and black, Hispanic, Asian or biracial, or in which white Jewish respondents reported that their household is bi- or multiracial. “As a group they are divided almost equally among four groups: Hispanic respondents, Black respondents, white respondents with biracial households, and biracial respondents, with small numbers of others (for example, Asian-American respondents),” the study reports.

In short, the category encompasses a wide range of profiles — among them interracial couples and their children, adult children of interracial couples, white couples with non-white adopted children and non-whites who were either born Jewish or converted to Judaism. And it is not clear how many families fit each profile.

“There are a lot of sub-categories that need to be teased out,” said Steven M. Cohen, the director of research for the study.

For decades, Sammy Davis Jr. was the only Jew of color who was a household name. Now a quick scan of headlines from the past few months reveals that the legendary black Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali attended the bar mitzvah of his Jewish grandson (the child of a white Jewish father and black Muslim mom), black Orthodox Jewish rapper Y-Love (who converted to Judaism) came out as gay and black Jewish hip-hop artist Drake (white Jewish mother, black gentile dad), a Jewish day school grad, released a controversial “bar mitzvah” video.
But there is no typical multiracial Jewish family: the category represents a mix of races and ethnicities, as well as a wide range of family and national backgrounds everywhere on the spectrum of Jewish observance.

“To call everyone ‘Jews of color’ is really a disservice because there’s so much variation,” said Diane Tobin, director of Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based group that conducts research and offers various programs throughout the United States, including an overnight summer camp for multiracial Jewish children. “Between intermarriage, conversion and adoption, there’s so many different paths and ways people are identifying as being Jews.”

Noting that the 2010 U.S. Census found that the number of multiracial children in general had increased by over 50 percent since 2000, and that recent surveys show historically high rates of acceptance of interracial marriage, Tobin applauded the UJA-Federation study for asking about race, and said it’s important to learn more about this growing population.

What multiracial Jewish households share, say advocates, is a sense of isolation and a desire to connect with other Jews of color.

April Baskin, the president of the Jewish Multiracial Network, whose annual retreat last weekend at a Jewish retreat center in Pennsylvania attracted 100 people, said, “We have people who are strongly identified as atheists and others who are ultra-Orthodox. But we all share this need to begin to shift the consciousness of the Jewish community.”

Baskin, who is 28, was raised in a Reform congregation in Sacramento; she is the daughter of a white Jewish mother and an agnostic African American and American Indian father who, she recently learned, had some Jewish ancestors.

“Other than being a Jew of color, I had a pretty normative Jewish experience” growing up, said Baskin, noting that she was active in the Reform youth group NFTY as a teen and in Hillel as a college student at Tufts University.

It was in college that she first felt singled out for being multiracial. Like many other non-white Jews, she at times feels frustrated by always having to explain her background and answer questions from Jews who are curious why she looks different. “I moderated a panel at the retreat about what kind of questions do you get asked, and one guy on the panel said, ‘I just print out 30 copies of my bio and hand it to people” as soon as they start asking questions, Baskin said, laughing.

For her college thesis, Baskin conducted a national online survey of Jews of color. In response to an open-ended question asking, “‘Is there anything else you’d like to share?” almost every single person said, ‘I want to meet other Jews of color and/or hear their stories,’” Baskin recalled. “I realized there was a need to create a forum for that.”

With its retreats, an online community of almost 1,800 people and various other programs, the Jewish Multiracial Network is one such forum. Founded 15 years ago by a small group of white parents with non-white adoptive children, the volunteer-run network has become more diverse, with most of its board members now Jews of color or white Jews in interracial marriages, Baskin said.

San Francisco’s Be’chol Lashon — created in 2000 — offers another forum and resource, sponsoring research, organizing social programs and promoting awareness about global Jewish history and culture.

The New York chapter of Be’chol Lashon holds monthly discussion groups at the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services.

Be’chol Lashon grew out of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research’s studies on multiracial and non-white Jews, after discovering that participants gathered for focus groups “overwhelmingly wanted to get together again.”

“People felt a sense of isolation, they didn’t know other people like themselves,” said the organization’s director Tobin, who is white, but has an adopted African-American son.
One common denominator among non-white Jews, according to the UJA-Federation study, is relatively low rates of Jewish engagement.

The study reports that respondents in nonwhite households “tend to eschew any denominational affiliation,” and are far more likely to be intermarried (54 percent versus 18 percent for all-white Jewish households — not surprising, since many interracial couples are also interfaith). Significantly fewer join synagogues (27 percent versus 47 percent), very few have mostly Jewish friends (18 percent versus 57 percent — again, not surprising considering that many have non-Jewish family members) and their use of Jewish day schools is less than half that other Jewish households.

Cohen, the study’s co-author, said multiracial and non-white Jewish households have a “very similar profile to that of the intermarried, with possibly more geographic spread.”

One of Be’chol Lashon’s goals is to bridge that gap between Jews of color and the organized Jewish community — by increasing awareness in mainstream groups about non-white and multiracial Jews and the “global nature of the Jewish community,” and by encouraging mainstream groups to host Be’chol Lashon programs.

“All our events are now partnered with a mainstream Jewish organization; it’s part of our policy now, so people are coming into Jewish spaces,” Tobin said.

Central Synagogue’s Rabbi/Cantor Buchdahl remains one of only a handful of non-white and multiracial Jewish clergy members.

But she said she’s raising fewer eyebrows than she once did.

“Ten years ago, even if I led an entire service in Hebrew, people would still challenge me afterwards with ‘Are you Jewish?’” she recalled. “It was such a disconnect for them, they couldn’t reconcile it. But these days, people might ask questions, but they don’t challenge me in the same way.”
Source: Published on The Jewish Week (http://m.thejewishweek.com)

Multiracial Exercise?

Once again, we wonder how many of these white and black girls are actually multiracial.  Excluded from studies one more time.

Benefits of Exercise Show Racial Differences

By Hannah Sacks

While exercise may be beneficial in combating obesity in adolescents, a new study suggests physical activity may be less successful in preventing obesity in black girls than in their white counterparts.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, examines the levels of physical activity and obesity of more than 1,100 girls at ages 12 and 14. The racial split was 538 black girls and 610 white ones.

Measurements of obesity include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definitions of obesity, the International Obesity Task Force body mass index cut points, and the sums of skin-fold thickness. The study also compares participants' physical activity and food intake, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Based on the girls' level of physical activity, they were divided into lower and upper halves within their respective racial categories. Twelve-year-old white girls in the upper half were 85 percent less likely to become obese at age 14 than their white peers in the bottom half. However, black girls in the top half were only 15 percent less likely to be obese two years later than black girls in the lower half, reports the Times.

The study concludes by suggesting that obesity preventions aimed at black girls may need to be adapted to account for their decreased sensitivity to the effects of physical activity.
Authors James White of Cardiff University and Russell Jago of the University of Bristol write that their results "suggest that prompting adolescent girls to be active may be important to prevent obesity but that using different approaches ... may be necessary to prevent obesity in black girls."
Source: Education Week

Hispanic Girls face Barriers

Hispanic Girls Face Special Barriers on Road to College

Hispanic women are more likely than Hispanic men to complete high school and college, but they still trail white and African-American women

By Katherine Leal Unmuth 

 

Dallas-After 15-year-old Valerie Sanchez spent a day of her spring break in Fort Worth touring the well-manicured grounds of Texas Christian University and listening to an inspirational talk from members of a Latina sorority, she felt sure of her future.

 

"I'm going to college," says the teenager after the visit organized by the Dallas center of Girls Inc., a national nonprofit group. "I want to be the first in my family."

But like many young Latinas, she faces a host of challenges in the coming years, as she works to graduate from high school, go on to community college, and then enroll in a four-year institution.

Sanchez moved from Mexico when she was 9 years old and enrolled in the 156,000-student Dallas Independent School District. After taking bilingual classes taught in Spanish and English, she found the transition to all-English classes in middle school difficult.

Consequently, Sanchez was held back in the 8th grade last year at Edison Middle Learning Center here in Dallas. She now attends tutoring sessions after school in addition to programs provided by Girls Inc. that focus on career planning and pregnancy prevention.

The plight of Latino young men often dominates the discussion of graduation rates. But young Latinas also face cultural, economic, and educational barriers to finishing high school and entering and completing college.

"There's the assumption that girls are doing fine," says Lara Kaufmann, a senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, in Washington. "It's true that within ethnic groups girls are doing better than boys. But they're not doing well."

Falling Behind

While Hispanic women are more likely to graduate from high school and college when compared with Hispanic men, some statistics suggest they trail behind African-American and white women on some such measures.

Postsecondary Engagement Lags for Latinas

 

Latinas ages 18 to 24 have lower postsecondary-engagement rates than Asian, white, and black women of the same age bracket. Asian women are twice as likely as Latinas to be either enrolled in higher education or to have a postsecondary credential.

According to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of 2011 Census survey data, about 17 percent of Hispanic females ages 25 to 29 have at least a bachelor's degree, compared with about 10 percent of Hispanic males, 43 percent of white females, and 23 percent of black females in that age span.

To delve into why such gaps persist, the National Women's Law Center collaborated with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund on a 2009 study on educational outcomes for Latinas.

While the middle and high school girls interviewed in the report said they wanted to graduate from college, they also said they didn't expect to achieve that goal. The report also cited challenges for them in reaching educational goals, including such difficulties as immigration status, poverty, discrimination, low self-esteem, higher rates of depression and attempted suicide, gender stereotypes, and limited English proficiency.

A cultural emphasis on loyalty to family also can play a role. Latinas may be expected to take on additional duties as caregivers, such as helping to watch younger children or aid elderly family members. They may be expected to live with their parents until they are married, making it difficult to leave home to go away to college.

Ties That Bind

Celina Cardenas mentors Hispanic girls in the 37,000-student Richardson Independent School District in the Dallas suburbs. Cardenas, a district community-relations coordinator, is Mexican-American and feels she can relate to their experiences.

"It's kind of like you're born with responsibility—especially the girls," she says. "Doing something on your own may not sit very comfortably with them because they may not want to let anyone down. I talk to them a lot about not feeling selfish that they're disappointing their family by going away, and understanding there's nothing wrong with having those goals."

Family loyalty can cause Hispanic girls to choose less-competitive colleges than they are qualified to attend so they can keep living with their parents. They may also not be well informed about financial-aid opportunities to attend more expensive schools.

University of Texas at San Antonio education professor Anne-Marie Nuñez says that when girls live at home while in college, they may have a hard time focusing on their studies because of family obligations.

"They may be juggling multiple responsibilities that pull them away from being able to focus on their studies," Nuñez says. "Other family members may not understand the energy they need to focus on their studies."

In Texas, a nonprofit online magazine written by girls, called Latinitas, aims to empower young women. The organization also provides workshops, mentoring, and college tours. On the website, Saray Argumedo, 23, shares her own experiences about the tension with her family when she studied at the University of Texas at El Paso.

"All I can do is ask for forgiveness when my mom questions why I spend all my time outside of the house studying, working, and getting involved in my community," she writes. "I thought that they would be proud of me, but why are they so angry?"

Teenage Motherhood

Young Latinas also are more likely than most young women in the United States to have their own children as teenagers. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, in Washington, about 52 percent of Latinas become pregnant before age 20, nearly twice the national average. In Dallas, the nonprofit group Alley's House helps mothers complete their General Educational Development, or GED, studies and build their confidence.

Yesenya Consuelo, 19, dropped out of Spruce High School in Dallas her freshman year when she became pregnant with her now-4-year-old daughter. Consuelo wants to study at a community college to be a surgical technologist, but she needs to pass the math portion of the GED, which she has failed twice. She comes to Alley's House for math tutoring four days a week.

Consuelo says her daughter is her motivation to finish school. "I'm trying to be the best I can for her," she says.

Despite the challenges, says Nuñez, the education professor, "the truth is Latino families have as high aspirations as other groups. Sometimes, they just don't know how to translate those aspirations to reality."
Source: Education Week 

Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama

‘American Tapestry’ hangs on Michelle Obama’s roots

By Bill Desowitz, USA TODAY

 

 

Imagine the revelation of Michelle Obama finally uncovering the mystery of her genealogy after becoming first lady: not only the discovery of an ancestral slave from Georgia, her great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia, but also that she bore several children to a Caucasian man on a farm in the mid-1800s.

Thanks to the in-depth research of New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns, missing branches have been restored to the first lady's elusive family tree. Now her book further explores a multiracial bloodline that flows throughout the South during Reconstruction and beyond and more prominently through Chicago's South Side during the swinging jazz era of the 1920s.

American Tapestry is not only the remarkable story of the first lady's family, providing insight into some of the wonderful traits that have been passed down to her, but also a microcosm of this country's story as well. It's unfortunate that not enough documentation survives to answer so many more questions, but the anecdotal tales shed light on a history that's been long suppressed in the first lady's family and within many other African-American families. Namely, the pain and shame associated with slavery and mixed races.

The story of the first lady's genealogy, though sometimes hard to follow, is riveting as Swarns pieces together the family tree, branch by branch and generation by generation. It certainly helped having Obama's long-lost cousin Jewell Barclay consent to a DNA test in Cleveland in the search for the truth. It was news to Barclay that so many of her relatives settled in Chicago and that she was related to the first lady. But then, one of the side benefits of this research is how so many of Obama's relatives reconnected.

It turns out that Melvinia's oldest son, Dolphus Shields, moved to Birmingham, Ala., where he became a prosperous Baptist deacon, homeowner and businessman. Purnell Shields, his grandson, relocated to Chicago with his mother in the integrated South Side, but later became embittered about the Jim Crow South and the segregated North.

On the other side of the family, the Great Migration north to Chicago contains its share of hardships: Obama's great-grandmother Phoebe Moten struggled with middle-class aspirations during the Depression with her minister husband, James Johnson, when racial strife soared. In a way, the real-life saga of struggle, survival, triumph and tragedy serves as an uplifting companion to Alex Haley's Roots and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Eventually, chance encounters in South Chicago produce Obama's grandparents. At which point, Swarn's narrative retraces the family branches produced in the Old South and post-slavery. "A lot of the time these stories get buried, because sometimes the pain of them makes it hard to want to remember," Obama recounts.

Thus, in the end, American Tapestry is about the crucial ties that bind the first lady.
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Bill Desowitz is the author of James Bond Unmasked.
Source: USA Today

How Obama became black

How Obama became black

By David Maraniss

He was too dark in Indonesia. A “hapa” child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “invisible man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published Tuesday. These excerpts trace the young Obama’s arc toward black identity, through his words and experiences, and through the eyes of those who knew him well.

“How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?”
Everything about Barry seemed different to his classmates and first-grade teacher, Israela Pareira, at S.D. Katolik Santo Fransiskus in Jakarta, Indonesia. He came in wearing shoes and socks, with long pants, a black belt and a white shirt neatly tucked in. The other boys wore short pants above the knee, and they often left their flip-flops or sandals outside the classroom and studied in bare feet. Barry was the only one who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia that first year. Ms. Pareira was the only one who understood his English. He was a fast learner, but in the meantime some boys communicated with him in a sign language they jokingly called
“Bahasa tarzan.”

When [his mother] Ann accompanied him to school the first day, Ms. Pareira was confused. He looked like he was from Ambon, one of the thousands of islands comprising Indonesia. It was nearly 1,500 miles east of Jakarta, and the people there were known for having darker skin. In itself, this was no big deal; the classroom was heterogeneous: Javanese, Betawanese, Bataknese, Padangnese, Ambonese, Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist. But he did not look like his mother.

“She introduced herself as a foreigner, coming from Hawaii, and she pointed at Barry — ‘This is my son.’ We — me and the students who saw them for the first time — only asked ourselves, ‘How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?’ It was a big question for us. But watching her drop him off at school [day after day], we became used to the idea that Barry is her son.” To the other students, Barry’s young mother was even more exotic than he was, with her pale skin and long hair and sharp dresses.

“Whether you’re a Tamura or a Ching or an Obama, we share the same world.”
In Jakarta, many local kids looked at all Westerners as members of the wealthy class. But in Honolulu, many native Hawaiian boys displayed a prove-yourself-or-else hostility toward people with roots on the mainland. Where did this leave a hapa boy who lived with white relatives but had just returned from Indonesia and was half-African in a place where there were precious few blacks? His grandfather had told strangers that the boy was a descendent of native Hawaiian royalty. Some classmates remembered it differently, that Obama claimed his father was an Indonesian prince.

In retrospect, he would say that his name alone separated him, starting with the first day of fifth grade when his teacher introduced him fully — first, middle and last, Barack Hussein Obama. But in polyglot Hawaii, even his prep school was more than a collection of Johns and Susans and Binghams and Cookes. From a list of contemporaries, Barack mingled with the first names Nunu, Kaui, Sigfried, Malia, Lutz, Manu, Linnea, Saichi, Wada, Kalele and Nini. And for last names, Obama was there with Oba, Ochoa, Ogata, Ohama, Oishi, Okada, Oshiro, Osuna and Ota.

A few years later, Barry’s seventh-grade teacher, Miss Kang, posed eight members of her class for a yearbook photo in front of a blackboard that had the white-chalk message “MIXED RACES OF AMERICA” and a caption that read: “Whether you’re a Tamura or a Ching or an Obama, we share the same world.” Barry, looking pudgy-faced, sporting a paisley shirt and the beginnings of an afro, flashed the peace sign.

“I go by Barry so I don’t have to explain myself to the world.”
Obama’s friends and acquaintances at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he spent his first two years of college, sometimes heard him say that his father was from Kenya. On occasion he would lament that he did not know the old man, that he was gone from the family when Barry was a baby. Once in a rare while, the bitterness came out, or expressions of regret. Sometimes that part of the story was left unsaid, and the emphasis was placed on his family connection to the continent. To have an African father could be seen as a badge of distinction in the jockeying for place among the blacks at Oxy.

But the blood tie was all that Obama had then, along with a few letters from his father, the memory of his dad’s lone visit to Honolulu when Barry was in fifth grade and the stories he had heard from his mother and grandfather. He had never been to Kenya, never walked the earth around Lake Victoria, and his friend Eric Moore had.

Barry and Eric had much in common. They were tall, athletic, smooth, outwardly confident. Moore had grown up in Boulder, Colo., attended predominantly white schools, and like Obama had survived and thrived in an environment where there were few people who looked like him. He came to Los Angeles looking for “a more urban African American experience” where he, like Obama, could sort out his identity.

Together they listened to music and spent hours in the dorms dissecting the lyrics to Bob Marley’s 1979 album, “Survival.” It was among Marley’s most overtly political albums — a haunting, pounding expression of the black condition. The jacket featured the flags of 47 African nations, with Kenya in the top left corner. The song titles evoked the struggle of Africa and people in the New World with African blood: “So Much Trouble in the World,” “Africa Unite,” “One Drop,” “Ride Natty Ride,” “Ambush in the Night,” “Survival.” Obama, Moore and a few other friends broke down the songs and debated what they meant.

Barry Obama could take or leave much of the music that he heard most often in the freshman dormitory at Oxy, from new wave to punk, but it was the musical language of Bob Marley — and Stevie Wonder — that stirred him. “Obama’s consciousness, much like mine, was influenced by music, influenced by a recognition, an understanding, of the world through music,” Moore said. “Obama’s sense of social justice ultimately comes from Bob, or comes from Stevie Wonder. You can’t learn all that from a book.”

It was through their connection to music and Africa that Moore started calling Obama the name by which the world would come to know him. One day, as Moore recalled the scene, he and Obama were “sitting around, discussing the world . . . and I said, ‘Barry Obama? What is that derivative of?’ And he told me the story of how his mom had met his father. And I had been to Kenya. . . . It was a bit of serendipity in our lives. We were just kind of chatting. I was heckling a bit. . . . ‘Barry Obama, what kind of name is that for a brother?’ And he said, ‘Well, my real name is Buh-ROCK. Barack Obama.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s a strong name. Rock, Buh-ROCK.’ And we laughed about it. . . .

“He said, ‘I go by Barry so I don’t have to explain myself to the world. You’re my bro, I can give you the background on it.’ But it was basically an accommodation to the Anglo world, Anglo society. You don’t want to be singled out, necessarily.”

Obama carefully structured his persona at Oxy to avoid “being mistaken for a sellout,” he said in his memoir. But at Oxy, for the first time, though not the last, there were blacks who questioned how black Obama really was. Louis Hook, a senior when Barry was a freshman, was a leader of UJIMA, a black student group on campus. He had grown up in a housing project outside Los Angeles, was the first member of his family to get through college. Some of the African Americans at Oxy, Hook said, “just couldn’t tolerate the multicultural style of Obama. They called him an Oreo. . . . We’d get into some discussions about the Oreos.”

Hook said he understood the various African American groups at Oxy — the black separatists, the multiculturalists, everyone in between — and tried to act as a bridge to all of them. “Obama was a multicultural mainstream Oxy guy,” Hook said. “He fit right in with anybody. As long as you accepted him, he was good.”

“If America is ready for a black president, you can make it.”
During his days at Columbia University, where he transferred from Occidental, Obama discussed his struggle for identity not only with Alex McNear, an acquaintance from Oxy who became his girlfriend briefly in New York, but with a few Pakistani friends. One of his acquaintances in that group of friends was Mir Mahboob Mahmood, a student at Columbia Law School. An intellectual with a black belt in karate, he enjoyed discussing political theory and literature with Obama. They were never the closest of friends, yet their conversations seemed to bring out Barack’s innermost thoughts.

Mahmood remembered that “for a period of two or three months” when Obama was living at 94th and 1st, he “carried, and at every opportunity, read and reread a fraying copy of Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ It was a period during which Barack was struggling deeply within himself to attain his o

There was a riff in that book that Mahmood thought struck close with Obama. The narrator, an intelligent black man whose skills were invisible to white society, wrote: “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” His friend Barack, Mahmood thought, “took very, very seriously the lifelong challenge of continuing to play in face of certain defeat."

By Mahmood’s account, they had known each other only a few months when Obama posed this question to him: “Do you think I will be president of the United States? ”What did this mean? “I think it was a very serious question, and clearly at least in my mind this was where he was headed,” Mahmood recalled. His answer then: “If America is ready for a black president, you can make it.”

“I’m treated with a mixture of puzzlement, deference, and scorn.”
In one letter to Alex, he told her that it seemed all his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high school buddies from Hono­lulu were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me . . . the only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [of all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”

Here, at age 22, was an idea that would become a key to understanding Obama the politician and public figure. Without a class meant that he was entering his adult life without financial security. Without a structure meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, all leading to a sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a tradition was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his hapa status, white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions. To make a particular choice would limit him, he wrote to Alex, because “taken separately, they are unacceptable and untenable.”

In another letter, Obama informed Alex that after graduating he planned to spend several months in Indonesia and Hawaii. He was lonely, searching for connections wherever he could find them. “I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself. . . . I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine theirs.”

When he arrived in Indonesia, this place, once so familiar, now seemed alien as well. He had lived there for four years as a boy and had been visiting dutifully since his Hawaii days. But in a letter to Alex, he confessed that he felt disconnected. “I can’t speak the language well anymore. I’m treated with a mixture of puzzlement, deference, and scorn, because I’m an American. My money and my plane ticket back to the U.S. overriding my blackness.”

When he returned to New York, he spent one week supervising a group of temp workers who moved the files of the Fire Department of New York from one building to another. It was, he reported, “a fascinating experience affording me a taste of the grinding toil of a low white collar job, as well as the ambivalent relationship” between bosses and workers. Just one week, yet that job gave him a boost in his search for self-identity. He had been living in the rarified environment of Oxy and Columbia, self-absorbed with his choices, contemplating life on an intellectual plane, and here were people talking about sports and life and family in ways that were not fraught with meanings and symbols. “I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three fourths of the work force . . .) than I had felt in a long time,” he told Alex.

“He felt like an imposter. Because he was so white.”
If Barack and Genevieve Cook, his girlfriend in New York after he graduated from Columbia, were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. “Me and the Paki mob and that was it pretty much,” Genevieve said later, recounting Obama’s circle. It was a moveable feast of bounty and excess, friends losing themselves in food and conversation. But he was politely pushing away from the Pakistanis, she thought. He wanted something more.
Mahmood also saw a shift. For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. He was one of them, in that sense. But that is not what he wanted for his future, and to get to where he wanted to go he had to change — not cut off the Pakistanis as friends, but push away enough to establish a clear and separate identity. As a result, Mahmood recalled, “the first shift I saw him undertaking was to view himself as an American in a much more fundamental way.”
Trying to embrace his blackness, Mahmood thought, was “the second and probably the biggest shift I saw [in Obama during the New York years].

To be honest, he had never had many black friends. Not that he had anything against that, just that he was part of that other set, the international set. So for him this was a big thing. . . . Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and . . . that was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

Genevieve encouraged Barack’s search for identity. He was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? At times he confessed to her that “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” She realized that “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black. I told him that. I think he felt very encouraged by my absolute conviction that his future lay down the road with a black woman. He doubted there were any black women he would feel truly comfortable with. I would tell him, ‘No, she is out there.’ ”

“He could have been purple for all we cared.”
In came young Barack Obama for an interview with the Developing Communities Project board in a downstairs conference room at St. Helens of the Cross Church, in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago’s sprawling South Side. There sat Yvonne Lloyd, Loretta Augustine-Herron and Deacon Dan Lee, three community members on the board, along with a handful of priests. Obama arrived neat and fresh, wearing slacks, a sport coat, and shirt and tie.

“He’s six months older than my oldest child,” Augustine-Herron recalled thinking. “I looked at him and said, ‘He’s not going to make it.’ That was my first opinion. But as we got into the interview, he was so interesting. His comfort level. He was just very at ease. . . . The other thing is he was honest, and you can’t buy honesty. . . . We’d say, ‘What do you do in this case or that case?’ He was honest about his knowledge of the area, his knowledge about the situations. He would give us examples of things he could do, things he couldn’t do. He would say, ‘I’m not familiar with that, but things like that are things we will learn together.’ ”

Her concerns had dissolved by the end of the interview. “He could have been purple for all we cared. We wanted someone who was sensitive to our needs, which he was.”
The black women in the room that day, Augustine-Herron and Lloyd, along with their friend Margaret Bagby, quickly ushered Obama into their world. The three women were a generation or more older and treated Obama with protective concern as they would a favorite nephew, but were disarmed by his quiet confidence and generally followed his lead. They instructed him on the mores and idiosyncrasies of the South Side, accompanied him to endless meetings, warned him about what neighborhoods to steer clear of at night, pointed him toward other people who could be part of the network, and worried about his “health and welfare.” (Loretta: “We’d take him to lunch and we’d have sandwiches and burgers and he’d have a spinach salad. We’d say, SPINACH salad? What’s that?”)

Obama maintained some of his characteristic reserve, yet they drew him in with the warmth and noise and immediacy of their lives. Here was the day-to-day world of urban black America, a place that for all of his travels he had never really experienced before. He had driven through the streets of South-Central Los Angeles and walked up and down Lenox Avenue in Harlem, but this was different. In Chicago, Obama was finding — and being found.

“We do do that!”
Even as he was insinuating himself into the South Side culture and finding comfort in the black world there, Obama remained the participant observer. His perspective was universal, removed, not racial. He had reservations about people of every race when it came to tribal thinking. In private conversations with his assistant Johnnie Owens, a streetwise product of the South Side, he did not hesitate to point out what he saw as hypocritical aspects of prevalent black attitudes.

“He was very clear about the unreasonable aspects of how blacks saw things in the community,” Owens said. “For example, when African Americans would complain about ‘They always show us when somebody kills somebody . . . they show a picture of a black person on TV,’ people would say, ‘They always do that!’ Barack would say, ‘We do do that!’ Or oftentimes folks would be angry about the school system. He would say, ‘Well some folks didn’t prepare their kids well for school!’ He believed there was a lot more accountability that needed to take place in the African American community. He sounded like an outsider.”

Source: The Washington Post 
outlook@washpost.com
David Maraniss is an associate editor of The Washington Post.