Mixed Race Studies

President Obama’s basketball love affair has roots in Hawaii high school team

The Washington Post
2012-06-09

David Maraniss

To say that President Obama loves basketball understates the role of the sport in his life. He has been devoted to the game for 40 years now, ever since the father he did not know and never saw again gave him his first ball during a brief Christmastime visit. Basketball is central to his self identity. It is global yet American-born, much like him. It is where he found a place of comfort, a family, a mode of expression, a connection from his past to his future. With foundation roots in the Kansas of his white forebears, basketball was also the city game, helping him find his way toward blackness, his introduction to an African American culture that was distant to him when he was young yet his by birthright.

As a teenager growing up in Hawaii,he dreamed the big hoops dream. He had posters of the soaring Dr. J on his bedroom wall. A lefty, he practiced the spin moves of Tiny Archibald. And in the yearbook of an older high school classmate who wanted to be a lawyer, he wrote: “Anyway, been great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am an all-pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you. Barry.”

It never happened, of course. But the adolescent known as Barry kept on playing, even after he took back his given name of Barack and went off to college at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard and went into community organizing, then politics in Illinois. He played whenever he could on playgrounds, in fancy sport clubs, at home, on the road. During his first trip back to Honolulu after being elected president, he rounded up a bunch of his old high school pals, got the key to the gym at Punahou School, and went at it. When the pickup game was over, Darryl Gabriel, who had been the star of their championship-winning team, found himself muttering to another former teammate, “Man, Barack is a lot better than Barry ever was!”…

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Obama’s alliance with the left is an uneasy one

The Washington Post
2012-06-09

Peter Wallsten

President Obama bristles when he is the target of activist tactics he once used

Barack Obama entered the stately Roosevelt Room and assumed his customary spot. Many of the nation’s leading immigration advocates had been waiting for him inside the windowless meeting space in the West Wing, eager to make their case. The president’s reserved chair was situated at the center of the long conference table, its back slightly elevated, a gentle reminder of power, but this did not seem to intimidate the activists on that March afternoon in 2010.

One after another, they spoke their minds, telling the president what he had done or not done that bothered them. They complained that a rising number of deportations on his watch were “terrorizing” Hispanic neighborhoods and tearing apart good families. They warned that he was losing credibility with a crucial constituency that had put its faith in him.

Obama’s body stiffened, according to several witnesses, and he started to argue with them. If they wanted meaningful change, he said, they should focus their pressure on the Republicans in Congress who opposed reform, not on him. He was with them but could only do so much. “I am not a king,” he said.

That night a group of Hispanic lawmakers came to the White House. They, too, were coming to talk about immigration, and after hearing about the earlier confrontation, the lawmakers were bracing for another argument. Instead, they encountered a president in a reflective mood, almost contrite.

“Look who I am,” Obama said, as several guests recalled. He reminded them that as a black man he had experienced discrimination in his life and understood “what it feels like for people to not be treated fairly.”

The variations in his demeanor that day and night illuminate the competing impulses of sympathy and frustration that have characterized Obama’s relationship with liberal activist groups since he entered the White House. Their uneasy alliance has gone through three distinct phases, moving from great expectations to tense confrontations to pragmatic coexistence as the next election approaches. With Hispanics and gays — key liberal constituencies that moved early in Obama’s tenure to openly challenge the Democratic president — the tension has mostly been about means more than ends, when more than what. The president’s history, his temperament and style, his idealism vs. his ambition — all have come into play as he has responded to pressure from these two essential segments of his base…

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