I’m reading through Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell and finding it, so far, not exactly chock-full-of-shocking tidbits. Mendell, a Chicago Tribune reporter, has covered Obama since 1998 and is, so far, following in the footsteps of Obama’s Dreams From My Father, interviewing key figures in Obama’s life. Hopefully the book will get more interesting when we come to Mendell’s natural beat, Chicago politics, but fifty-some pages in, it’s DFMF: The Travelogue.
But there are a few passages that are intriguing.
There were few family disagreements, Maya [Obama’s half-sister] said, but Obama and his mother debated emotionally over one topic: Obama’s connection to Malcolm X. His mother tried but failed to understand the anger brewing within the 1960s black nationalist leader, who perhaps was best known for urging his followers to seek black freedom, “by any means necessary.” “She just didn’t understand — and she wanted to,” Maya said. “She was a little naive, and she was very sweet and she was very liberal and she just didn’t understand how anybody who had been subject to discrimination could then be exclusionary in their tactics. She didn’t understand the anger… And I think, although she tried, she was not equipped to help Barack deal with what it is like to be a black man in this country. I don’t think she knew at all how to help him. I think she just wanted him to feel better. She was such a loving mother. She just wanted to make him feel like everything was okay.”