32 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyespecially women, in rural areas of developing countries. “She was a scholar who was one of the
first to see about microbanking,” Abercrombie says. In 1986, Dunham did a one-year development
project in Pakistan. That year, mother and daughter took a two-week journey along the old Silk
Route to China. Dunham’s work for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan was followed
by stints at People’s Bank of Indonesia and Women’s World Banking in New York. She also did
consulting work for the World Bank and US AID. “She was getting to pretty high-powered
positions, working in world organizations as an expert, but she always liked the people at the
bottom.”’ Naturally, any anthropologist doing field work needs to feel or feign a sympathetic
interest in people being interviewed, the ethnographic material of the study. This does not mean that
the sentiments are always genuine, but the anthropologist will be more effective if they are.
According to the Time magazine cover-up cover story in April 2008, Dunham became an
important official of the Ford Foundation with special responsibility for women’s and gender issues.
Her own track record in serving as a doormat for her first husband, the imperious Obama Senior,
would hardly qualify her as a feminist. Dunham’s subjective devotion to third world people was by
all indications sincere. ‘In her 40s, Dunham talked about adopting a baby. “She loved kids, and we
were taking too long making her a grandmother,” says Maya, noting that her mother never got to
meet any of her grandchildren. After seeing a news report about the offspring of children in Korea
born to African-American soldiers, she decided that would be the perfect addition to her multiethnic
family, Dewey says. Dunham was “very specific about what she wanted,”’ Maya says. Instead,
Dunham found herself battling both ovarian and uterine cancer. Until her death, she displayed the
unflappable temperament that she passed on to Obama, Dewey says. “She took it in stride,” she
says. “She didn’t fuss about it.”’ (Kim Chipman, “Obama Drive Gets Inspiration From His White
Mom Born in Kansas,” Bloomberg, February 11, 2008) Obama’s mother thus evokes a stoic or
quietist quality which we have seen in her passivity when she was abandoned by her first husband.
If, as candidate Obama categorically states in his own book, Ann Dunham represented the
decisive influence on his formative years, what can we conclude to be the content of that influence?
We have followed Ann Dunham from her youth as a provincial atheist and radical left liberal,
through her subsequent phases as a communist sympathizer, Third World enthusiast, anti-racist,
anthropologist, and to her final stage as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, US AID, and the
World Bank. Is there an invariant to this process? Ann Dunham was certainly concerned about the
problems of global poverty and economic underdevelopment, but she appears to have been
incapable of understanding which institutions were responsible for holding back mankind’s
economic progress. Worse, she ended up by going to work for precisely those institutions. Who
then, in her mind, was responsible for underdevelopment?
The acerbic but perceptive commentator Spengler of the Asia Times believes that he has
discovered the ruling passion of both Ann Dunham and her son Barack Obama, and that this ruling
passion is radical anti-Americanism. Spengler’s perspective is doubtless tinged with the cultural and
historical pessimism of Mitteleuropa, but his findings nevertheless compel careful attention.
Spengler starts by noting that
Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World
governments.... When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she
brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediately
following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history. Dunham’s experience
in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local