34 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyIt is in this context that we should interpret the following comment from Ann Dunham’s former
anthropology professor, Alice Dewey. ‘“It’s too bad she’s not here,” Alice Dewey says. “She’d be
saying, with a little chuckle, ‘Here’s one of our own’ and ‘He’s going to show them.’” (Kim
Chipman, “Obama Drive Gets Inspiration From His White Mom Born in Kansas,” Bloomberg,
February 11, 2008) This raises the question of a possible future president who would be animated
by a resentment of or even hatred towards the American people, or at least towards the blue-collar
or white lower middle-class sectors of the American people, the ones most frequently accused by
wealthy elitists of harboring racial prejudice. Obama may indeed harbor such feelings of hatred or
resentment. It does no good to object that Obama does not propose an explicit program of using
austerity and sacrifice (as demanded by the Trilateral financier oligarchy) as a means for punishing
blue-collar American and the white working poor for their alleged racist crimes; Obama is much too
slick an operator to make any such admissions. If anything, it is Jeremiah Wright who has already
made the admissions for him. Obama approaches his task of campaigning with the cynical and
manipulative detachment of an anthropologist carrying out field work among some old stone age
people, like the Yanomami Indians: he is treating the American people as ethnographic material in
the great Trilateral experiment of depression crisis management, and the results will be horrifying.
“HE’S GOING TO SHOW THEM”
Precisely what is it, we must ask, that Obama is going to show the American people if he should
succeed in taking power? Will he proceed to act out the deeply felt resentments of his mother
against American society? Will he exact revenge for the racial slights and humiliations which he
believes he has undergone?
It was during his time in Indonesia that young Barack Obama underwent a dramatic experience
which helped to establish the primacy of race and racial identity in his thinking. (Dreams 51 ff.) He
was at the time nine years old, and his mother was working at the US Embassy in Jakarta. While
sitting in an office waiting for his mother, young Obama was looking through some issues of Life
magazine. Here he found an article which he says he experienced as an “ambush attack.” The article
described the plight of a black man who had decided to use a harsh chemical treatment in order to
lighten the color of his skin. Obama says he was horrified to see a picture of the man, whose skin
had been flayed off by the chemicals, leaving him scarred and disfigured. ‘“I imagine other black
children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama later wrote. According
to a recent magazine article, Obama’s account cannot be taken at face value because ‘no such photo
exists, according to historians at [Life] magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked
about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been in Ebony or it might
have been ... who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Chicago Tribune, archivists at Ebony
searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.) In fact, it is
surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his
nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious
of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.’
(Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) Perhaps Obama is bending the facts in order to document what
he considers to be his own growth in personal awareness from a relative indifference to racial
matters to race and racial identity as a central concern, which he obviously believed by 1995 —
perhaps under the influence of such race theoreticians as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright — to
represent a superior level of awareness. Obama’s mother Ann Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian
cancer, a few months after the publication of Dreams from My Father.