III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 129battle.” She talked about her first trip to Africa—Barack took her to Kenya to meet his father’s
family—and the realization that, as much as white society fails to account for the African-
American experience, so does any conception of pan-blackness. In The Audacity of Hope,
Barack Obama perceives a vulnerability in his wife, one so closely guarded that even her
brother professed to me never to have noticed it. There was “a glimmer that danced across her
round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her,” he writes, “the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if,
deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a
moment, all her plans might quickly unravel.” (New Yorker, March 11, 2008)
Napoleon’s mother again. Could Michelle be a candidate for a nervous breakdown, or else for
uncontrollable transports of rage – likely to be couched in racist terms – out on the campaign trail?
We may be close to finding out.
OBAMA JOINS MINER, BARNHILL, AND GALLAND, REZKO’S LAWYERS
Obama went to work for the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill, and Galland. The firm
presents itself on its current web site in these terms: “Miner, Barnhill, & Galland was founded in
1971 and today consists of fourteen lawyers in two offices. Ten lawyers are resident in the Chicago
Office and four lawyers office [sic] in Madison, Wisconsin. The firm has acquired a national
reputation in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development work. In addition to its
practice in these areas, the firm represents a broad range of individual and corporate clients,
providing a wide variety of legal services.” On the surface it was a mix of socially conscious left-of-
center causes, therefore, with a good dose of lucrative corporate work, meshing well with Obama’s
neoliberal camouflage profile. But note the “economic development work,” since here lies the rub.
According to at least one account, Obama already knew that he wanted to get elected in the
Hyde Park neighborhood, a region of great sensitivity to the University of Chicago, and thus to the
Rockefeller family and to the US intelligence community in general:
When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama
to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr. Miner thought he was
recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr. Obama
recruited him.
Mr. Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of
the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city’s first black mayor, Harold
Washington. Mr. Miner, who had helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr. Washington and
served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.
The confident younger man “cross-examined” Mr. Miner about how Mr. Washington had
managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he
“got along with all these different types of folks,” Mr. Miner recalled.
“During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with
me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared this with
me — he was amused,” Mr. Miner said, laughing. “This isn’t where you land if you want to
curry favor with the Democratic power structure.”
It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run
for office from Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded
politicians independent of the city’s legendary Democratic machine. Mr. Obama chose to put