What may be most telling about Obama’s predicament may be found in his reference to his white grandmother — her fear of black men on the streets and her stereotypical remarks about blacks. He said he cringed, but I’m betting he did more than that. Those remarks had to cut deep. A young boy who looks different from his immediate family is going to have identity issues of much greater magnitude than your run-of-the-mill “Who Am I?” questions all adolescents usually ask. His narrative of self-discovery and self-identification as an African American in Chicago begins there and the subtext is that his own source of emotional nourishment was polluted by a prejudice that was aimed indirectly at him. His grandmother — his surrogate mother at that point — rejected the black man he was becoming. The anger Obama heard in Rev. Wright’s church may not have felt so alien after all.