Mixed Race Studies

A White Woman From Kansas

The New York Times
2011-06-02

Roger Cohen

LONDON—For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation…

…I found myself liking Dunham—the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, “Yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact”); the frankness with friends—“I don’t like you in your arrogant bitch mode.” Her 52 years were rich.

She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave—and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama’s white parent palpable for the first time.

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option…

Read the entire opinion piece here.