My Inner Obama: Leader of The Freer World

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Author’s Note: This column was first published exactly three years ago, when Barack Obama was campaigning for his first term as President of The United States. I feel what I had to say bears repeating. Now.

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—7/4/11—I don’t care where you live or who you are or what language you speak: you need to read Barack Obama’s first book, the initial installment in his sure-to-be-long-ongoing-autobiography, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (www.crownpublishing.com). You need to get to know this particular man better if you consider yourself a citizen of (what was once called) The Free World.

I bought my copy at Costco, just for the popular-culture record, and ripped through it underlining very little, thought there were “Aha!” moments for me on virtually every page. I was just blown away by this young whippersnapper’s insight, candor, wisdom, perseverance, and maturity as a prose stylist. Sure, occasionally he mangles the case of his pronouns—which makes me want to volunteer, immediately, for Old Persnickety Grammar Lady of the Obama Camp. (I nearly had apoplexy when Michelle, in front of oh, about 10,000 people, said, “Obama and me didn’t grow up with silver spoons in our mouths,” or words to that effect. Note to Obama: get yourself a fussy, anal-compulsive grammarian on board, if only for the big speeches, because we’re all going to be quoting from them out here for years to come.)

Be that as it may, the book is a quiet masterpiece of the genre: the modern memoir; the post-post-modern memoir. I put it down thinking, “This man, though he’s about a decade younger than I, was brought up pretty much as I was. He’s a product of two distinct cultures, the supercharged American West of the 1960s, and places far, far afield. We both had a parent who went abroad courtesy of a Fulbright grant. We both had a parent involved in inner-city social work and activism in Chicago. We were, have been, both neither fish nor fowl and, so, citizens of the world (as opposed to any single country) from birth. We straddle a lot of big divides: some with more comfort than others.

But when people say they can’t “identify” with Obama because his background is “too exotic,” or somehow too far outside the mainstream American pale, I wonder what rock they’ve been living under for the last 50 years. My parents—lily-white Southerners who relocated to California and then Europe, committed Democrats, civil rights activists, children’s rights activists, and race-and-gender-blind-by-choice-and-will, made of me someone who saw neither an American face, nor a White face, nor even a female face whenever I looked into the mirror. I grew up knowing I was a grandchild of Lucy of Oldevai Gorge—along with the rest of humanity; and I grew up seeing every living thing as my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, myself.

In and out of our Pasadena and Chicago kitchens passed “generations” of Korean and African graduate students from my father’s classes, as well as “distinctly other” patients from my father’s psychoanalytic practice. (Not only were race and gender not the givens they were for many around me; what comprised sanity, or humanity itself, was another topic always under discussion.) I grew up with a pair of silver chopsticks in my hands; my first date was with a Korean classmate; my second was with a truly scary-looking, utterly harmless, Chicago South-Sider who styled himself a Marxist, ha, ha.

I grew up, I believe, very much like Obama, and I would dare to equate the sexism I encountered, from 1951 on, with the racism he encounters still. Yoko Ono, memorably, said, “Woman is the nigger of the world,” and I have felt that to be true since I came of age and began competing, with men, for jobs and status and power, and losing the fight most of the time, on whichever side of the pond I found myself.

Barack Obama has pondered race and multiculturalism, the concept of “being at home somewhere,” of belonging, of being the outcast, of being the alien versus being someone whose name and face ring a bell all his life. So have I, though that added element of difficulty for him—Blackness—was not part of my own life assignment this time around.

For years, due to my mother’s family’s deeply entrenched mythology, I thought I was of Anglo-Irish descent: all my maternal aunts were members of the Daughters of The American Revolution, for heaven’s sake. “We came down from Virginia.” “We came over from England.” Received wisdom. Received lies.

Only quite recently have I learned that my maternal grandfather’s people were von Bolemans: German immigrants to Upstate South Carolina. My mother’s father, a farmer, had coal-black hair, razor-sharp cheekbones, and a habit of squatting, in Malasana, or “Garland Pose,” while contemplating his fields. I look at the photographs of him and my raven-haired mother, and see Cherokee writ indelibly large. No one in the family will fess up to the truth, but I think a genome test would give the lie to the all-European myth of my maternal line.

On my father’s side are Ellenbergs. Blue-eyed, strawberry-blonde Ellenbergs. But, perhaps, Jewish Ellenbergs, too, before crossing the pond.

None of this was scrutinized too closely in my generation of offspring. I was often in the minority, wherever I found myself—amongst the Spanish-speakers and Asians of Los Angeles, amongst the Greeks of Greece, amongst the Jews of my Chicago prep school and, perhaps, an alien most vividly of all in the South, where I returned to attend college with parents who felt that if they did not “put in their time” amongst the racists of their birth-states, they were shirking their duty as activists. (Where does that impulse for community service, for service to humanity, shared by Barack’s parents and mine—and Barack, himself—originate? I missed out on that gene, for the most part, but I know it when I see it: it’s as familiar as home.)

OK, yes, I know he’s also a politician. I know he doesn’t walk on water (though, when he speaks, I find myself suspending my disbelief—but for the mangled pronouns). But why, like my father, like Barack’s mother, are some people just so darned romantic, idealistic and good? I’ve become such a cynic, myself, about humanity, and our motives, in general, that actually to accept the existence, again in my lifetime, of a generally noble man is difficult. Still, I’m working on it.

My own comparatively quiet trajectory through life only matters here, for the purposes of this essay, in this: that I am a so-called White, female, nominally American baby-boomer but, due to the vicissitudes of my peripatetic childhood and my parents’ “calling” to serve their fellow men/women, I gaze into the mirror of Barack Obama, and see myself.

It’s something I don’t think his campaign noticed, banked on, took into account: we are a lot more diverse, a lot more altruistic, a lot better prepared to accept Barack Obama as our Commander in Chief out here than they think. In fact, some of us are aching for it “to be so.” Some of us, come January [and come his second term as well], when he takes the oath of office, will only then feel “at home in America”; only then feel we have some (audacious though it may be) hope of returning to lead The Free World.