Obama's ex-girlfriends shed light on his early years
This undated photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows the Democratic presidential hopeful, Obama, in New York City, while a student at Columbia University. Obama received his B.A. degree in political science in 1983 from Columbia.
/ AP(CBS News) A new biography about President Obama sheds light on a little-known part of his life -- his college and post-college years in New York City -- through the letters and journals of two women he dated at the time.
Vanity Fair on Wednesday published an excerpt of "Barack Obama: The Story," the biography by Washington Post reporter David Maraniss that Simon & Schuster will publish next month. (Simon & Schuster Inc. is owned by CBS Corporation, the parent company of CBS News and CBSNews.com.) The book details Mr. Obama's relationships with Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, women he dated in his early 20s.
Maraniss writes that Mr. Obama "receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life" in New York, which was illustrated in part by his correspondences with McNear.
Mr. Obama met McNear at Occidental College and later reconnected with her in New York in the summer of 1982. She returned to California after the summer, and she and Mr. Obama wrote a series of "passionate" letters to each other, Maraniss writes. He continues:
Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were "moving toward the mainstream." Where did that leave him? "I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups," he wrote. "Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs."
In another letter to McNear about T.S. Eliot, Obama writes, "Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism--Eliot is of this type."
Maraniss also gives details of Mr. Obama's relationship with Genevieve Cook, a 25-year-old he met in 1983, when he was 22. It was "the deepest romantic relationship of his young life," Maraniss writes.
In journal entries that Maraniss excerpts, Cook mused over Mr. Obama's personality, noting his reserved nature. "Barack--still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled," she wrote on March 22, 1984.
Mr. Obama described Cook in his memoir "Dreams of My Father" without using her name, recounting her as "a woman in New York that I loved...She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime."
The president later acknowledged that while Cook was his New York girlfriend, his description of her was a "compression" of former girlfriends.
Maraniss writes that Mr. Obama made his way to Chicago after taking interest in Harold Washington's mayoral campaign there. Coincidentally, Mr. Obama's current campaign adviser David Axelrod worked for Washington's re-election campaign in 1987.
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When we can move past the self-imposed necessity to mention a persons' race every time we talk about anyone of color, society will have turned a very important corner.
This story is about sex. That's all.
Not just any sex. Interracial sex. The kind that most Americans are still uncomfortable with. And not just any interracial sex - black man/white woman. The most uncomfortable kind of interracial sex to most Americans.
Let me tell you, nowhere than the South is this topic still feared as much. Why? Because of what slavery did. Slavers had sex with their women slaves ALL THE TIME. That's why so many blacks today are fair skinned, because they have white ancestors. And every Southerner alive knew this was going on - but none of them want to talk about it because it runs completely contrary to the "image" that Southerners have of "the Southern gentlemen" To this day most of them STILL WON'T talk about it because so many of their ancestors were slaveholders and probably doing it to their slaves out in the fields.
That's why so many in the South hate Obama. They see him as a mixed race - he's not chocolate black - and he reminds them of their own cultural shame. That's also why so many Southerners hate interracial marriage, interracial sex - because they can't stand the thought of "their white women" preferring those "black fieldhands" over themselves. They don't understand the attraction and it revolts them.
And that is why this story is running. If Obama's college girlfriends were black - nobody would give a rat's arse. But both were white, and both were sleeping with him. That's an unforgivable sin for many Southerners. They might bring themselves to accept Obama by just pretending that he was just another black who stayed within his own race. But now they got to face the fact that 2 white women - and pretty ones, not ugly ones - saw enough in him that they shared themselves with him.
If you study Obama you will soon learn something else about him. He's deeply interested in black/white race relations. Oh sure, on the national stage he's learned to shut up about it. But his policies and decisions favor the poor and downtrodden in the US. And the statistics are that the majority of these people are black. And before he got into politics and learned that you just don't talk about race relations in the US, he wrote and talked a LOT about race relations. His time of dating these white women was a period of time of finding himself and of exploration. And what he eventually found was that he was a black man - and proud of it. He didn't need a white woman on his arm to validate himself, so he stopped seeking them out - and ended up with a black wife. And being proud of being a black man - that's another unforgivable sin among conservative Republicans.
Conservative Republicans and Southerners are intertwined today - you cannot understand the Republican Party today unless you understand Southerners. And you cannot understand Southerners unless you understand what Slavery did to the South. And what Reppublicans like are black people who are ashamed of being Black. They like blacks like Clarence Thomas. Clarence is ashamed of being black, and he would change his skin to white in an instant if he could. Southerners like that because it reaffirms that cultural subconscious that slaveowners are superior and blacks are inferior.
There is a reason that people like Martin Luther King came from the South. Need, breeds. Northerners have racism too - but they don't have that historical cultural subconscious of slavery that Southerners do. Don't forget that Slavery has existed for longer in the US and Americas than it's been outlawed since the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. The US has abolished it, yes, but the descendent of slavery - racism - is still alive. And Racism is why this story is running in so many venues.
If you have any question that Obama will win in November - this story should put that to rest. The race card is being played here - but it's not being played like many people think, like Obama is the victim. Instead, stories like this serve to remind everyone about that Southern/Republican connection again, and they remind everyone about how Racist the Republican Southern party really is. And today - there's far more minorities out there that the Republicans are busy discriminating against than there are white men. Every woman, every black man and woman, every Latino man and woman, every homersexual man or woman, every union member is going to be reminded of how discriminatory that the Republicans and their policies are, they will be reminded that Obama and his wife are themselves minorities - and they are proud of it. Obama isn't a black man trying to be a white man - he's a black man PROUD of being black, not ashamed of it. That's why one of his former girlfriends said he was hardly black - because he doesn't act like most blacks, because he doesen't act ashamed of what he is.
If this article alone does not remind people of the racism still out there, many of the comments will.
I am a white southerner and I have a mixed grandson. I was so scared for the child, when I first found out. My mother used to say "they won't fit in to either world". But the very day my granson was born, Obama was being innaugurated! Literally at the same time! The world changed that day! Mixed children don't have to fit in to either world anymore, they can claim the world as their own! Those children will be what heals the wounds caused by slavery in this nation faster than anything else will!
OBAMA 2012
Love letters belong to the two people involved and nobody else.