By Jefferson M. Fish
One way of looking at Barack Obama's youth is as the story of a boy raised by a single mother and her parents who by dint of hard work and natural gifts overcame great odds to become President of the United States. This is a true story.
Another way of looking at it is as the story of a person who, because his father was from Africa, looks black. Since he grew up in a white family, however, he had to overcome impediments to developing a racial identity for which American culture provides no easy answers. This is also a true story.
Yet another way of looking at it is as the story of a boy losing his Luo ties before he knew he had them, becoming an American in Hawaii, and then being uprooted and taken with his new family to Indonesia at the age of 6, before leaving them behind to return to Hawaii at the age of 10. Another true story.
Many people-including me--find these stories of triumph over adversity inspiring. Some others, when thinking of Barack Obama as our president, find them upsetting. Their anxieties stem in part from a fear of the unknown: an inability to imagine what someone with his background might actually be like. What can we expect from a man whose white Kansan mother married men from Kenya and Indonesia? Children make fun of names-shouldn't childhood ridicule-for his names, for not being simply black or white or Kenyan or Indonesian-have had a negative effect on his personality? What kind of effect could his mother's marriages and life in Indonesia have had on a child?
These true stories of overcoming adversity are not, however, the only possible stories. There is much that they omit. They seem to imply that Barack Obama's childhood was unique-which, as with all individuals, it was. But it is also true that others, including my daughter, share key aspects of his multicultural multiracial upbringing, and that much is known about such children and their development. Barack Obama's experience resembles theirs in many ways, and these commonalities can provide reassurance for those who are made uncomfortable by his unusual background. Marrying someone different isn't for everyone, but as with other life choices, it has advantages as well as disadvantages.
Stories of overcoming adversity omit this positive side-that of profiting from unusual opportunities for growth. Dreams from My Father was written from a son's perspective. My wife and I grew up at the same time as Barack Obama's parents, and we raised our daughter in a family with a number of parallels to his. While there are significant differences as well, the similarities between the two families are suggestive-especially in that my daughter and he share characteristics with other children who grew up in comparable circumstances.
This story is written from a father's perspective. These reflections on how my wife and I raised our daughter are offered in the hope of promoting an understanding of our president and other children of cultural adventurers.
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During the spring of 1969, while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the SUNY Stony Brook psychology department, I met Dolores Newton, an African American anthropology instructor who had just returned from her second stint of field work with the Krikati Indians in the interior of Brazil. I have to admit that it was Dolores's beauty that first caught my eye; but it was the fascination with someone so different from me that hinted at an interesting and potentially exciting life together. The better we got to know each other, the more unknown worlds we discovered. While black people in America have many experiences in all-white groups, few whites have had the corresponding opportunity. Getting to meet Dolores's family and friends gave me that chance and allowed me to see that, despite stereotypes to the contrary, blacks were actually more culturally varied than whites. In addition to people from this country, there were immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, and even non-Westerners from Africa--while non-Western whites are hard to find.
Dolores and I read different books. We both had lots of records-mine were mainly Beethoven to Bartok, and the Beatles; hers were mainly Baroque, Folk, and Gospel. She played Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith for me:
Heart trouble, cancer, diabetes too,
If you need an operation God will give it to you.
He's a high-class physician. He guarantees his medicine too!
It was great music that I would never have come across without Dolores; its diction and enthusiasm were somehow missing from the halls of academe.
We were both social scientists, interested in understanding our fellow humans, but from the different perspectives of psychology and anthropology. (Ann Dunham became an anthropologist and Barack Obama, Sr. an economist.) People usually socialize with and are attracted to others like them and assume that their social reality is reality itself. Many social scientists find it interesting to question that assumption, and see those who are different from them more as a source of new insights than of discomfort. One of the things that drew me to clinical psychology was the opportunity to come into contact with exotic phenomena like delusions, hallucinations, and hypnosis. Dolores wanted to study living people who were as close as possible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors-and, by implication, as different as possible from us.
Even as social scientists, our contrasting perspectives were a source of continual surprise. We went to a party once, and in talking it over afterwards it was as if we had been to two different parties-- a Rashomon experience. I had noticed who was depressed or articulate or narrow-minded, while she had been paying attention to people's clothes as status markers.
One major difference between anthropologists and psychologists is that psychologists are very much of this culture, while anthropologists tend to be alienated from it. The anthropologist's fly-on-the-wall observer stance toward culture is sometimes misinterpreted as anti-Americanism by those who can't imagine what another culture might be like, or what the point might be of seeing the world through other people's eyes. It is as if the attempt to do so is disloyal or crazy. If looking at ourselves through the mirror of another culture reveals some warts then that must mean that we think the other culture is more beautiful.
Ann Dunham married a Kenyan and an Indonesian, had children by them, and lived for years in Indonesia. It was as unlikely a path for a girl from Kansas, via the University of Hawaii, as was Dolores's from Bedford Stuyvesant via Harvard to Central Brazil. (A curious similarity is that their interests and PhD dissertations both dealt with material culture-things people make.) One time, while we were dating, someone asked Dolores what the Krikati ate, and she mentioned bats, armadillos, and anteaters.
"What does anteater taste like?"
"It tastes a lot like monkey."
We were married in less than a year; and two and a half years later our daughter was born. While Dolores was pregnant, we gave a lot of thought to names. She thought that an American Indian name like Bearcat would go well with Fish, and for a while I was seriously considering Whirling Thunder as a boy's name. We considered foreign names, like Lyudmila or Oona. A friend of mine in graduate school had made up a satire on the MMPI personality test, and one of the items was "Sometimes I say things that are too terrible to think." My mother said "You aren't going to give her Krikati names, are you?"
A mother knows her son, and by that time she knew her daughter-in-law. We settled on Krekamey Ropkui, the names of two Krikati women Dolores had been close to and who had provided her with a lot of information. (Ropkui means Jaguar Woman.) I don't want to appear competitive, but when it comes to choosing names that do not conform to cultural expectations, there are lots of Barack Husseins in the world but only one Krekamey Ropkui.
When Krekamey was a few months old, I was carrying her around while grocery shopping. A little girl came up to me and asked her name. When I told her, she said "Why didn't you call her Mary?"
