{"id":19302,"date":"2011-12-27T23:10:34","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T23:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19302"},"modified":"2011-12-28T02:15:15","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T02:15:15","slug":"a-white-woman-from-kansas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19302","title":{"rendered":"A White Woman From Kansas"},"content":{"rendered":"

A White Woman From Kansas<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2011-06-02<\/p>\n

Roger Cohen<\/strong><\/p>\n

LONDON\u2014For a long time Barack Obama\u2019s<\/a> mother was little more than the \u201cwhite woman from Wichita<\/a>\u201d mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times<\/em> profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan<\/a> silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan<\/a> figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman<\/a> of discovered black identity, \u201cDreams from My Father<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, thanks to Janny Scott\u2019s remarkable \u201cA Singular Woman<\/a>,\u201d absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham<\/a>, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from \u201cfloating through foreign things,\u201d as one colleague in Indonesia observes, \u201cShe was as type A as anybody on the team.\u201d<\/p>\n

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition\u2019s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng\u2019s<\/a> words, \u201cfascinated with life\u2019s gorgeous minutiae.\u201d To her son the president, \u201cidealism and na\u00efvet\u00e9\u201d were \u201cembedded\u201d in her.<\/p>\n

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit<\/a> in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia \u201cof \u2018smiling\u2019 or gentle oppression\u201d toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation…<\/p>\n

…I found myself liking Dunham\u2014the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, \u201cYes, peanuts do have faces\u2014smirky, nasty little faces, in fact\u201d); the frankness with friends\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t like you in your arrogant bitch mode.\u201d Her 52 years were rich.<\/p>\n

She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave\u2014and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama\u2019s white parent palpable for the first time.<\/p>\n

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham \u201cfelt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago<\/a> and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity\u201d that had \u201cnot really been part of who he was when he was growing up.\u201d She felt that \u201che was distancing himself from her\u201d in a \u201cprofessional choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson<\/a>, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A White Woman From Kansas The New York Times 2011-06-02 Roger Cohen LONDON\u2014For a long time Barack Obama\u2019s mother was little more than the \u201cwhite woman from Wichita\u201d mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,125,8,20,25],"tags":[8042,8662,8906,8663],"class_list":["post-19302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-ann-dunham","tag-janny-scott","tag-roger-cohen","tag-stanley-ann-dunham"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}