So you teach world civilization at La Pietra (a high school for girls in Honolulu)?
Yes, world cultures. I teach 9th grade world cultures and 11th grade U.S. history and the constitution. We do a lot of Bill of Rights stuff - a combination of civics and ethics, the whole ride.
Was your interest inspired by your mother and your brother?
More my mother. My interest in world cultures was spawned by traveling and living in a dozen different places with our mother. She worked in India and Pakistan and Thailand, Indonesia, of course, and Singapore, Ghana, you name it, but primarily South and Southeast Asia. Certainly, she was a socioeconomic anthropologist, but she also embraced those cultures in ways that were profound and in not entirely objective or clinical, or distance, in the way that was the standard once upon a time. Postmodernists actually figured out you can't remain objective.
But certainly my interest in American history and the constitution was encouraged by my brother and a lot of the work that he was doing. We are nine years apart in age. He, for instance, went to Columbia, and then I also elected to go to New York later and I spent summers with him in Chicago when I was a teenager so I developed an interest in that city. He fully offered an interesting example and fed certain interests of mine in American jazz and blues, art and other aspects of culture and politics.
In his books, Senator Obama talks a lot about the race issues while growing up Black in Hawai'i. A lot of his classmates say that they didn't realize what was going at the time. What did you see?
Very little, just to be honest, because of the age difference. What I saw was a man who was intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, fun-loving, who had a great many friends, but who also enjoyed spending a lot of time by himself with a good book, on a long walk, or engaged in acts of reflection. So in that way, that sort of set him apart, shall we say.
But in other ways, he was very much a typical teenager. He liked a good game of ball, he liked to bodysurf, he did not really at that time take himself too seriously, and although he was engaging in an invisible process of sort of self-evaluation, the visible part of him which is essentially happy, easy-going, affable, right? That was no less true. You know what I mean? He didn't really share any of his struggles. I did find out about the fact that he had larger questions that went unanswered in Hawai'i, primarily questions about race and culture.
His Blackness.
Exactly. The way it's constructed on the mainland. But he wasn't a tortured soul. He was thoughtful. But he also I think has always been someone who has elected to take on journeys of discovery and awareness on his own. He has always been rather independent. And although he had a great many friends, he sort of understood that the most challenging journeys of discovery would have to be undertaken alone. In other words, I think, he did and still does derive a tremendous amount of pleasure from the friendships he had in Hawai'I and in high school, but he didn't feel everybody needed to fulfill every purpose in his life.
The other thing I was curious about is the economic class issue. Because he doesn't raise it too much, but for anybody growing up in Hawai'i, when you mention Punahou, that's what comes up. Being working class,both you and the senator and going to Punahou, was there a disconnect going on?
Undoubtedly. There is more than one Hawai'i, just as there is more than one Chicago or New York, more than one Jakarta. I think that one of the gifts that was given to him and claimed by him in Indonesia was the fact that he was able to see people in very dire poverty. Through those early travels and because he was a scholarship kid, he was able to see that - he was able to understand people on both sides of the fence. And he was able to negotiate the worlds of the relatively affluent with a profound understanding of what it was like to be poor and to live in poverty. Although he himself has never been really poor, he had certainly seen it and for sure when he was growing up, our mother and my father were not well off. There was some struggle, which is why he didn't go to some fancy international school. They couldn't afford it. And our mother, the academic, never really made choices based on how much money, what kind of salary she would be earning. It was an academic's life in many ways, rich with ideas and people and community but not a lot of the finer things beyond monetary riches, yeah?
What do you think the importance of Hawai'I is to Senator Obama's story. What does it symbolize?
I think although Hawai'i is an imperfect or incomplete diversity, it's still certainly a more thicker, more consistent diversity than is available in many places in the world, right? And I think the fact that people are all chop-suey has made it different. Even though the Black community wasn't well represented here, I certainly think it offered him an ability to see identity in more complex ways: there wasn't just one way to be black or white or Latino or Asian or Local.
As a consequence of being from Hawai'I, he's able to negotiate a variety of cultures, to move gracefully and seamlessly between worlds. And I think also that he sees culture and identity in complex ways. He does not automatically feel that just because you come from one particular culture or one particular race that your interests, needs, desires can be predetermined. So I think that's made him a very good listener. It's an important quality to have. And I think he also emphasizes the commonalities that everyone shares. And he's an excellent bridge-builder, not only within cultures or between subcultures but between nations, and I think certainly that is one of his strongest gifts.
What is the importance of his sense of rootedness in Chicago? What do you think is there for him in Chicago?
I think while Hawai'i helped to make him very broad minded and flexible, Chicago has given him a real sense of commitment, you know, rootedness and community. I think Michelle and her family and Chicago more generally has given him a strong sense of place, an ability to kind of sit still and make a commitment and mean it. Our mother went all over the world in search of a very international understanding of the world. I think that offered potent lessons for him and examples for him but I also think part of his power comes from being able to make a decision and have a sense of place and then operate with a worldly understanding. It's a very grounded separate place.
Tell me about Michelle and what their relationship is like.
It's full of humor and strength. I think that he and Michelle really balance each other out. They're both strong, but I think she's also fiercely pragmatic and that has helped him to balance out the romantic parts of himself, the ultra idealistic, and possess that idealism but in terms of action - he's quick to remember these days that the solutions have to be practically negotiated. And it's all good to have these grandiose ideas, but you have to have a plan [laughs], and it has to be a viable plan. That's emerged during the course of their marriage. I don't know whether she's directly responsible for that. But I think that some of his romanticism has been tempered in a good way, in a wonderful way. She's a great mom and she does whatever is necessary to prevent lives of the children from being disrupted in any way. She makes sure that they have a real childhood, a profoundly good one and playful one and that they are not asked to take on too much in their lives. She's similarly protective of him and I think their marriage has into something quite beautiful.
Your mom used to joke with Barack that he would be the first Black president.
Yeah that's true. He was always good at winning arguments through very diplomatic ways, right. He would make you feel apologetic for losing an argument. [laughs] Now he was tremendously charismatic. And part of it came from - well you know the whole cliche of the mom saying to the child, 'You can be anyone you want to be.' But she really meant it when she was speaking to him![laughs]
I don't when that joke started, and I'm not saying that I remember it from when he was at Punahou. I'm saying I remember this from I was a teenager and he would have at that point been in his 20s. And he had started taking himself very seriously. Everything he did touch he was very successful at. He was obviously extremely bright and extremely capable. That was after he left Occidental, he had gone to Columbia he had transferred. He was living in very modest digs, surrounded by books and not much else, and that was the joke then.
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newjacob says:
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I thank all the people who support Obama, It's God will on Obama to win the precidential election.
I thank God also for everything he has done for us on obama,i pray that God should lead him and be with him through out is tenure. in Jesus name
November 6, 2008 at 2:09 pm