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Obama suffered racist abuse, says biography
The Nairobi Sunday Nation ^ | April 24, 2011 | Kevin J. Kelley

Posted on 04/24/2011 12:55:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

Most narratives about the parents of the president of the United States have been dominated by Barack Obama Snr.

The elder Obama — said to be brilliant, charismatic and self-destructive in roughly equal measures — serves as a fascinating figure for American writers seeking to analyse the president’s unique background and early influences. Obama Snr does stand at the centre of Obama Jnr’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

But Barack Obama Jnr barely knew his father, who left the family when his son was two years old and who died in a drunk-driving accident in Nairobi in 1982 at age 46.

President Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a far more formative force in his life, even though she too died young — of cancer at age 52 in 1995. And now Ms Dunham’s remarkable life is being examined in detail in a soon-to-be-published biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, by Janny Scott, a reporter for The New York Times.

Excerpts from the book were carried in the Times’ Sunday magazine.

Ms Scott’s account reveals that the future president was apparently a frequent target of racist abuse during his boyhood years in Indonesia.

He had moved there at age six with his white mother following her divorce from Obama Snr in the mid-1960s and her remarriage to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian she had met while studying at the University of Hawaii.

In one incident recounted by Ms Scott, the young Obama, then known as Barry, dodges rocks thrown at him by Indonesian children who also hurl racist insults at the boy. The book quotes Elizabeth Bryant, an American who knew Ms Dunham and her son in Indonesia, as saying recently that expatriate Westerners “were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks.”

Ms Bryant recalls offering on that occasion to intervene on Barry’s behalf. But his mother told her: “No, he’s OK. He’s used to it.”

The apparently relentless anti-black racism Barry experienced is further demonstrated in comments made to Ms Scott by Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who was working at the US embassy when Ms Dunham was teaching English there.

She would occasionally bring her son to work with her. “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the colour of his skin,” Mr Sigit says in the book — “with no evident embarrassment,” Ms Scott writes.

Ms Dunham, who defied the strictures placed on women in the years before the 1970s US feminist movement, was sure her son would grow up to attain greatness.

Benji Bennington, a friend of Ms Dunham’s from Hawaii, says in the book “sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’”


TOPICS: Books/Literature; Politics
KEYWORDS: indonesia; kenyabelieveit; naturalborncitizen; obama
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

” If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot. “


21 posted on 04/24/2011 1:41:08 PM PDT by verity
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
“Even be President of the United States”. Hurl. Either that's complete and utter BS or she did say it, truly believed it and took pains (and liberties through Toot’s job) to see that he could do it. I'm inclined to go with BS.
22 posted on 04/24/2011 1:41:47 PM PDT by liberalh8ter
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
the future president was apparently a frequent target of racist abuse during his boyhood years

So was I, as were many of my classmates, as white kids in a majority black school. So what?

23 posted on 04/24/2011 1:49:24 PM PDT by ApplegateRanch (Made in America, by proud American citizens, in 1946.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Then HOW did he get into Harvard Law with LSAT scores he’s afraid to release and a GPA from Columbia, lower than the “black adjusted” Harvard requirement?? Just curious, of course. But then...that means I must be a RAAAAACST, doesn’t it!


24 posted on 04/24/2011 2:03:13 PM PDT by Oldpuppymax
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

If Obama suffered “racist abuse” in Indonesia as a boy, it is still somehow the fault of white Americans in general, and of George W. Bush in particular. Like everything else.


25 posted on 04/24/2011 2:03:41 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Kevin! ...Kevin! ...Kevin!

YOU'VE BEEN PUNK'ED !!!

26 posted on 04/24/2011 2:10:12 PM PDT by TexasCajun
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
But Barack Obama Jnr barely knew his father, who left the family when his son was two years old...

Fail right out of the gate. The author can shove his sob story.

27 posted on 04/24/2011 2:13:04 PM PDT by MileHi ( "It's coming down to patriots vs the politicians." - ovrtaxt)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

:, (


28 posted on 04/24/2011 2:13:38 PM PDT by TribalPrincess2U (They don't need to do another 911. They have BHO and the Fleebaggers.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The author, Kevin Kelly, is doing a good job, if he really isn't politically illiterate, of hiding in plain site the real issue with Barack Jr's presidency - Barack Sr’s citizenship and “allegiance to a foreign sovereignty,” using the words of 14th Amendment Author John Bingham, to the Congress in 1866.

Or shall we cite Chief Justice Morrison Waite, Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874):

“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that.At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”

This is our progressive media working to keep everyone involved with the soap opera so that they won't notice that the Constitution requires a natural born citizen, a term, like most used in the Constitution, from our common-language and common-law at the time of the framers.

29 posted on 04/24/2011 2:14:17 PM PDT by Spaulding
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To: 2ndDivisionVet; Fred Nerks

fwiw.


30 posted on 04/24/2011 2:22:20 PM PDT by bvw
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To: Verginius Rufus
If Obama suffered “racist abuse” in Indonesia as a boy

If is the operative word here.

When I was a kid and went in 1950's to an integrated school in Chicago there was abuse hurled because of the following but not usually racial:

1. Skinny kids.

2. Big eared kids.

3. Dumb kids.

I suggest Barry was #3.

31 posted on 04/24/2011 2:23:59 PM PDT by BeAllYouCanBe (Until Americans love their own children more than they love Nancy Pelosi this suicide will continue.)
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To: BeAllYouCanBe

“the young Obama, then known as Barry, dodges rocks thrown at him by Indonesian children who also hurl racist insults at the boy”

Projectiles were just not up to the job, BLNT.


32 posted on 04/24/2011 2:36:19 PM PDT by outhousepatrol
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The book quotes Elizabeth Bryant, an American who knew Ms Dunham and her son in Indonesia, as saying recently that expatriate Westerners “were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks.”

This goes a little further to explain Obama's resentment. Stanley Ann was one of those insane liberal women who are so committed to "harmony" that they allow their children to be violently abused without a word of protest.

33 posted on 04/24/2011 2:47:23 PM PDT by denydenydeny (Rage all you want, looters & moochers, but the gods of the copybook headings are your masters now.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Since the kenyan and his regime came to power, he has set race relations back 50 years.


34 posted on 04/24/2011 3:22:37 PM PDT by The Sons of Liberty (Psalm 109:8 Let his days be few and let another take his office. - Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

How could his parents get divorced when his father was already married?


35 posted on 04/24/2011 3:51:59 PM PDT by doesnt suffer fools gladly (Liberals lie.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

.

Listen to this racist sob dis whites:
(quotes from his books)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI77cU3jsFs

.


36 posted on 04/24/2011 4:01:43 PM PDT by patriot08 (TEXAS GAL- born and bred and proud of it!)
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To: doesnt suffer fools gladly

Because the court was unaware of the other wife?

AFAIK, the already existing marriage meant the Hawaii marriage was bigamous and invalid. Or would be once discovered.


37 posted on 04/24/2011 4:54:27 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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To: denydenydeny
So much for the liberal idea that only white people can be racists.

I recall a long time ago reading something about the Vietnamese being very racist in their attitude towards anyone of a different skin color than themselves, which meant that half-black children fathered by US soldiers during the Vietnam War had a hard time of it. (Of course that had to do with Vietnamese still living in Vietnam.) I don't know if half-Caucasian children were similarly discriminated against.

38 posted on 04/24/2011 5:17:18 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Some people who have suffered from real or imagined prejudice do not just want to be equal, if given power, they want to get even. (paraphrased from a quote I once read)


39 posted on 04/24/2011 5:37:15 PM PDT by Sea Parrot (Being an autodidact, I happily escaped the bureaucratization of intellect)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Yeah tough Sh!t. I am white and I have suffered some of the most racist crap ever. Our Fore Fathers should have put this in. Congress shall make no laws based on skin color!


40 posted on 04/24/2011 5:49:53 PM PDT by Lees Swrd ("Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well")
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