38 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyracial identity which forms an important part of Mein Kampf. There is, however, some question as
to whether Obama’s account of his repeated racial mortification by racist or thoughtless whites is
accurate, or whether it represents a fictitious construct designed to bolster his credibility for his later
career in Chicago as a black identity politician. Obama was on the basketball team at Punahou and
seems to have enjoyed some prestige. Some accounts report that, while he was a student in the late
1970s, he carved his name in the pavement outside the cafeteria of Punahou School. These graffiti
reportedly read: “King Obama.”
Here begins Obama’s intense, consuming preoccupation with race, the great central issue of his
subsequent life, in spite of what he now says. He learns about the imperative of race from a black
friend named Ray: “Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no
independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.” (Dreams 81) Obama
experiences this assumption of a racial identity as a narrowing and constriction of the spirit of his
own personality which he is nonetheless driven to accept: “following this maddening logic, the only
thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until
being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the
final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for
that too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. N****r.” (Dreams
85)
During one phase, Obama became intensely preoccupied with the literary expression of his own
situation as found in the works of such writers as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes,
Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. All but the last of this number, he judged, had
been consumed by anguish, doubt, and self-contempt. Almost all of them had “eventually
succumbed to its corrosive force,” and these had ended up as “exhausted, bitter men, the devil at
their heels.” (Dreams 86) Malcolm X, Obama found, was better and stronger: “even as I imagined
myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d
once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might
somehow be expunged. I know that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental.” (Dreams
86)
The Daily Mail stresses Obama’s later account of racial humiliation at Punahou: ‘...while there,
says Mr Obama, he was tortured by fellow pupils – who let out monkey hoots – and turned into a
disenchanted teenage rebel, experimenting with cocaine and marijuana. Even his grandparents were
troubled by dark skin, he says in his book, recalling how once his grandmother complained about
being pestered by a beggar. “You know why she’s so scared?” he recalls his grandfather saying.
“She told me the fella was black.” Mr Obama says his soaring ‘dream’ of a better America grew out
of his ‘hurt and pain.’ This is the incident Obama referred to later in his Philadelphia speech on
racism of March 2008, after the first phase of the Jeremiah Wright scandal had exploded. The
British reporters doubt that this was the real story: ‘“Friends, however, remember his time at school
rather differently. He was a spoiled high-achiever, they recall, who seemed as fond of his
grandparents as they were of him. He affectionately signed a school photo of himself to them, using
their pet names, Tut and Gramps. The caption says: “Thanks... for all the good times.” He worked
on the school’s literary magazine and wore a white suit, of the style popular with New York writers
like Tom Wolf at the time. One of his former classmates, Alan Lum, said: “Hawaii is such a melting
pot that it didn’t occur to me when we were growing up that he might have problems about being
one of the few African-Americans at the school. Us kids didn’t see colour. He was easy-going and
well-liked.” Lon Wysard, who also attended the academy, said the budding politician was in fact