If by talks about it you mean "quotes Obama talking about it", then yes, I suppose the article brings it up.
exactly. It brings it up to try and make a point about it, which makes the point, I've been making. It's a bizarre obsession that certain folks have about Obama.
Well, it's a fact. He is 50% white yet he is exclusively referred to as a black man because of his skin color. As has been pointed out, his upbringing was by whites with whites. Nearly all of his doper friends were white guys... :grin: Why are you so insistent on referring to him as a black man? Is it solely because of his skin color? Is it somehow "right" to be that superficial? Oh yeah, it's politics! Anyone seen this movie? http://youtu.be/0-73pwjNJes "How does it feel, Mr. Pilchack, being colored?"
Saw thread name. Curiosity piqued. Opened thread. Saw thread starter. Saw first paragraph went back to Obama's college years. Saw ensuing wall of text. Didn't read.
I don't insist on anything. As has been pointed out, he's referred to as black because that's how he's perceived and treated. Those are the experiences he's had. He's been raised far differently than almost any whites. When people see someone across the street, coming into a classroom, an office, a store, a restaurant, or anyplace else, they don't say "There is a 1/8 Pawnee, 1/8 Italian, 1/4 Irish, 1/2 black person who grew up in Malaysia, and Okinawa." They are identified primarily by what they look like at first. After that, they are allowed to self identify by whichever race they wish to on application forms. That's the established way things are done. The only people who all of a sudden have a problem with this in Obama's case are conservative whites, who try and make sure they deny as much of Obama's black experience as possible. It looks like you are joining their number.
Obama brought it up as it played a part in who he was, and in writing extensively about his experiences. The fact that things are condensed, and composites are used, are mentioned by Obama himself in the book. It isn't an uncommon practice at all, and isn't an issue except by conservative white guys who feel the need to deny as much of Obama's ties with black Americans as possible for some reason.
You should ask the president- he's obsessed enough by the subject to completely fabricate a black back story.
Who is denying his ties with black Americans? What the Marianiss book points out is that many of the supposed life changing events in Dreams are fabricated entirely, not condensed or composites. It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with Obama being a phony who has used self-fabulism to advance all the way to POTUS.
The Young Dreamer, With Eyes Wide Open ‘Barack Obama: The Story,’ by David Maraniss Barack Obama’s life, says his latest biographer, David Maraniss, was to an astonishing extent “the product of randomness.” His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the only child of a couple from Kansas, met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya, in an elementary Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, and the young Barry Obama would grow up in Hawaii and Indonesia, taking an odd, zigzagging and totally improbable road to the White House. And yet, Mr. Maraniss makes clear, despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author of his own life — an outsider, who, in the very American tradition of literary heroes like Gatsby, “raised himself” and forged an identity through a series of self-conscious and deliberate choices. He argues that Mr. Obama was determined “to avoid life’s traps,” including “the trap of his unusual family biography” and the “trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism.” As a result this book tends to be at its strongest when Mr. Maraniss uses his chops as a reporter to amplify what we already know from the president’s best-selling memoir (“Dreams From My Father”) and a host of earlier biographies and journalistic accounts. Once again we see a cool, calm, collected young man, his adaptability a product of growing up half-black, half-white in Hawaii and Indonesia. His detachment is at once a means of navigating those disparate worlds, “protective armor covering his determination to make a mark in the world,” and an emotional defense against growing up without a father and with a mother who parked him for years with her parents in Hawaii while she pursued a career as an anthropologist. The young Obama is a methodical decision maker, deliberate when it comes to career or relationship issues. (One girlfriend wondered if “somehow splitting himself off from people is necessary to his feeling of following some chosen route.”) He’s also a self-conscious seeker with a penchant for quoting Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot in his love letters and, perhaps most of all, an observer and instinctive writer, given to standing apart from his surroundings, whether working in the corporate world, which he did briefly after graduating from Columbia University (and felt like “a spy behind enemy lines”) or community organizing in Chicago, where a mentor told him, “You can either change stuff or you can write about it.” --------- Haven't read the book but Mr Obama sounds like a hard working, industrious person. So glad he is our president.
