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By Root 1031 0

later in The Boston Globe went into greater detail. “What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification with what he calls ‘the typical black experience,’ paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice,” the Globe reported. It described “his unusual path, from childhood in Indonesia, where he grew up, he says, ‘as a street kid,’ to adolescence in Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents.” The article dwelt at some length on the influence of Obama’s father, who, it said, was born in Kenya, “studied at Harvard and Oxford and became a senior economist for the Kenyan government.” In high school, the article said, Obama began a regular correspondence with his father, “whose heritage was to be a major influence on his life, ideals and priorities.” One of Obama’s most valued possessions, the article said, was the passbook that his grandfather, a cook for the British before Kenyan independence, was required to carry. “He said that even though his heritage is one-half white, and although he has had a mixture of influences in his life, ‘my identification with the—quote—typical black experience in America was very strong and very natural and wasn’t something forced and difficult,’” the article said. Of Ann, it said little more than “His mother, who is white, is a Kansas-born anthropologist who now works as a developmental consultant in Indonesia.”

In an even longer article in the Los Angeles Times a month later, Ann was described simply as “an American anthropologist” and “a white American from Wichita, Kan.”

The marginal role to which Ann was consigned in those accounts did not go unnoticed. She had raised Obama, with the help of her parents, after his father had left for Harvard when Obama was ten months old. She had been his primary parent for the first ten years of his life. She had returned to Hawaii to live with him when he was in middle school. She had moved back to Hawaii from Indonesia for several months during his senior year. Yet in those accounts, Obama had been “a street kid” in Indonesia, then sent back to Hawaii to be “raised by his grandparents.” Yang Suwan, Ann’s Indonesian anthropologist friend, recalled Ann returning to Jakarta around the time of the Harvard Law Review election. As always, she was extraordinarily proud of her son. But on another level, she seemed crushed.

“‘His mother is an anthropologist,’” Ann told Yang, quoting an article she had seen. “I was mentioned in one sentence.”

The new girlfriend Obama had brought with him to Hawaii the previous Christmas was different from Ann. A young lawyer from Chicago whom Obama had met while working as a summer associate at the law firm of Sidley Austin, Michelle Robinson had grown up on the South Side of Chicago and had returned there after graduating from law school. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, a descendant of slaves, had been employed as a maintenance worker and later a foreman in a city water-filtration plant; her mother, Marian, had stayed at home with Michelle and her brother when they were young. The family was hardworking, churchgoing, and close-knit. As an undergraduate at Princeton and as a law student at Harvard, Michelle Robinson had been active in black student organizations. She moved systematically through her life, making sensible, carefully considered decisions, each building to the next. “I would say Michelle is much more like our grandmother,” Maya told me. “And I would say that my mother and my grandmother really were also opposites.” After the Christmas visit, Ann reported back to Suryakusuma. “She is intelligent, very tall (6’1”), not beautiful but quite attractive,” Ann wrote of Robinson. “She did her BA at Princeton and her law degree at Harvard. But she has spent most of her life in Chicago.” Ann, who prided herself on raising her children to have a global perspective, described Robinson as “a little provincial and not as international as Barry.” But Ann liked her. “She is nice, though,” she said. If Robinson and Obama were to marry after he graduated from law school, Ann told Suryakusuma,