NYT: A Search for Self in Obama’s Hawaii Childhood

[RedEarth]

...I suppose the wingers will say this picutre is photo-shopped...


Barack Obama, third from left at rear, in 1972 with his fifth-grade class in a photograph from Na Opio, the yearbook of the Punahou School.


HONOLULU, March 12 — To his high school classmates, Barack Obama was a pleasant if undistinguished student, the guy who seemed happiest on the basketball court, the first to dive into the pumpkin carving at Halloween, the one whose oratorical prowess was largely limited to out-debating classmates over the relative qualities of point guards.

But Mr. Obama’s family here in Hawaii saw a more complex young man, a person whose racial confusion and feelings of alienation were matched with equal parts ambition, disquietude and lofty notions about where his internal struggles might lead.

“There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black president,” his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said in an interview over tea. “So there were intimations of all this early on. He has always been restless. There was always somewhere else he needed to go.”

It was his early search for a cultural identity on this plumeria-scented island populated with people of diverse origins, but relatively few blacks, that presaged his current political persona, his sister suggested.

“He couldn’t sit back and wait for the answers to come to him,” said Ms. Soetoro-Ng, the child of Mr. Obama’s mother from another marriage, who remains close to him. “He had to pursue those answers actively. People from very far-away places collide here, and cultures collide, and there is a blending and negotiation that is constant.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/us/politics/17hawaii.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print