What saves this narrative of Barack Obama’s early life from being a data dump (it is very long and marred by superfluous detail) is its account of how the future president recast himself, in his college and post-college years, as a biracial outsider, an exotic golden child tormented by the perplexities of racial allegiance. Washington Post writer David Maraniss shows that long before Obama entered politics, he fashioned a heroic myth of himself. It went something like this: Only by solving the riddle of his racial identity could he take up the struggle that was to be his life’s work.
Obama’s boyish exposure to different cultures had little to do with the conversion he experienced in his twenties, when he first felt himself called to be a biracial superhero. To be sure, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, told him stories about Africa, but he never saw the continent with his own eyes until he was 26, and his Kenyan father had almost no personal influence on him. Stanley Ann left Obama père in August 1961, shortly after the birth of Barack: The child would not see his father again for ten years, when the older man came to Honolulu for a few weeks. The visit, Maraniss writes, “turned out to be the only time” in the future president’s “conscious life that he would see his father in the flesh.”
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