NAME : SABINA BELHIC
SITE : CRNTM 01
Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro
A mother's unconventional life is reflected within Obama
Thursday, March 13, 2008
In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, Obama has called her his "single mom." But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Obama.
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women's work, helped bring microcredit to the world's poor.
She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by Martin Luther King. And when Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart - a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in her life.
"She felt that, somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister. "That was very much her philosophy of life - to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places."
Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Obama.
They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he has also made some different choices - marrying into a tightly knit, African-American family rooted in Chicago's South Side, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.
Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about "prized keepsakes" - others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a "trophy wife" - Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of Oahu's South Shore where his mother's ashes were scattered.
"I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book - less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life," he wrote in the preface to his memoir, "Dreams from My Father." He added, "I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."
In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother's memory sparingly. In one ad, she appears fleetingly - porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son.
"My mother died of cancer at 53," he says in the ad, which focuses on health care. "In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well."
He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known.
"She was a very, very big thinker," said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women's World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. "I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power."
Her parents were from Kansas - her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann - her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name - was born on an army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.
In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the school's first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare. Her parents were upset, Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted.
The marriage was brief. In 1963, Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Stanley Ann Soetoro and Barack followed.
Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent, curious and open. She never dated "the crew-cut, white boys," said one friend, Susan Blake. "She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her."
Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. She wanted to work, one friend said, and Lolo Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese.
"There's a Javanese belief that if you're married to someone and it doesn't work, it will make you sick," said Alice Dewey, an anthropologist and friend. "It's just stupid to stay married."
That both unions ended is beside the point, some friends suggested. Soetoro remained loyal to both husbands and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. In reading drafts of her son's memoir, Obama has said, she did not comment upon his depiction of her but was "quick to explain or" defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character."
By 1974, Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.
"I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again," he wrote in his memoir. "More than that, I'd arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they'd leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight."
During those years, he was "engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."
Soetoro-Ng recalled her mother's quandary. "She wanted him to be with her," Soetoro-Ng said. But, she added, "although it was painful to be separated from him for his last four years of high school, she recognized that it was perhaps the best thing for him. And she had to go to Indonesia at that time."
Barack spent summers and Christmas vacations with his mother; they communicated by letters.
Fluent in Indonesian, Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Soetoro-Ng calls "life's gorgeous minutiae." That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.
"She loved living in Java," said Dewey, who recalled accompanying Soetoro to a metal-working village. "People said, 'Hi! How are you?' She said, 'How's your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?' They were friends. Then she'd whip out her notebook and she'd say, 'How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?' "
She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women's work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan; then she joined Indonesia's oldest bank to work on what is described as the world's largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.
Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in central Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south, where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese dishes like opor ayam were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women's organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots development.
As a mother, Soetoro was both idealistic and exacting. Friends describe her as variously informal and intense, humorous and hard-headed. She preached to her young son the importance of honesty, straight talk, independent judgment. When he balked at her early-morning home schooling, she retorted, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."
When Barack was in high school, she confronted him about his seeming lack of ambition, Obama wrote. He could get into any college in the country, she told him, with just a little effort.
He says he looked at her, so earnest and sure of his destiny: "I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed."
Soetoro-Ng remembers conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs. One Christmas in Indonesia, Soetoro found a scrawny tree and decorated it with red and green chili peppers and popcorn balls.
"She gave us a very broad understanding of the world," her daughter said. "She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure of a life."
Many of her friends see her legacy in Obama - in his self-assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent comfort with strong women. Some say she changed them, too.
After her diagnosis, Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.)
Obama has recalled talking with her in her hospital bed about her fears of ending up broke. She was not ready to die, he has said. Even so, she helped him and Maya "push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart."
She died in November 1995, as Obama was starting his first campaign for public office. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to Oahu's South Shore. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Obama and Soetoro-Ng placed their mother's ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.
"It's about race and class"
If the Spitzer affair causes us to lose sight of the broader reality of prostitution, then the biggest loser will be the girls for whom selling sex isn’t a choice but a nightmare.
"Lost" girls in the UK
Hundreds of British schoolgirls are "disappearing" due to forced marriages. Here's one example:
'They didn't take me seriously'
By Julian Joyce
BBC News
Ruksana's story
If the police and social workers had only listened to 12-year-old Ruksana when she told them her father had threatened to send her to Pakistan to be married against her will, then she says life might have been very different.
See also:
Fears over forced marriage levels
and
Lost girls in 'forced marriages'
Wajeha Al-Huwaider celebrates Women's Day 2008
Wajeha Al-Huwaider is sending a message to all Saudi women about driving on Women's Day
See CNN article "Saudi woman seeks driving acceptance on YouTube"
Happy Women's Day?
International Women's Day is like a wedding anniversary. If we don't celebrate it every day of the year, there's not much point.
As you celebrate (if you do), remember the female foeticide and infanticide that still goes on in India and China, among other places. Remember the sex slaves in streets and brothels around the world. Remember the victims of female circumcision (RIP Katoucha Niane). Remember the victims of honour killings. Remember the girls being forced into marriage and women in traditional communities who are dying of AIDS, infected by their husbands. I could go on, but I'm getting a bit depressed, and more than a bit enraged. So please, don't wish me Happy Women's Day (again) this year.
The more things change...
Marc Herold, a professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire, has found that the price of a modern-day sex slave (based on 2005 data obtained from Israel) is about the same as that of an African slave in Salvador, Bahia, in 1873. Converting 2006 US dollar values, a young female slave would have cost $6,703-$8,705 back then. The price in 2005 for women trafficked in Israel was $8,000 to $10,000. See Amnesty International, Israel
Then there's this report on the BBC news website:
"Sydney Police Free Sex Captives"
Australian police say they have broken up an international sex-trafficking ring after rescuing 10 South Korean women from Sydney brothels
Then there's this report on the BBC news website:
"Sydney Police Free Sex Captives"
Australian police say they have broken up an international sex-trafficking ring after rescuing 10 South Korean women from Sydney brothels
Mammies no more
Hillary's Scarlett O'Hara Act
By Melissa Harris-Lacewell | TheRoot.com
Why some of us aren't falling for it.
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Feb. 8, 2008--There's been a lot of talk about women and their choices since Super Tuesday, when African American women overwhelmingly voted for Sen. Barack Obama, while white women picked Sen. Hillary Clinton. Some pundits automatically concluded that "race trumped gender" among black women. I hate this analysis because it relegates black women to junior-partner status in political struggles. It is not that simple. A lot of people have tried to gently explain the divide, so I'm just going to put this out there: Sister voters have a beef with white women like Clinton that is both racial and gendered. It is not about choosing race; it is about rejecting Hillary's Scarlett O'Hara act.
Black women voters are rejecting Hillary Clinton because her ascendance is not a liberating symbol. Her tears are not moving. Her voice does not resonate. Throughout history, privileged white women, attached at the hip to their husband's power and influence, have been complicit in black women's oppression. Many African American women are simply refusing to play Mammy to Hillary.
The loyal Mammy figure, who toiled in the homes of white people, nursing their babies and cleaning and cooking their food, is the most enduring and dishonest representation of black women. She is a uniquely American icon who first emerged as our young country was trying to put itself back together after the Civil War. The romanticism about this period is a bizarre historical anomaly that underscores America's deep racism: The defeated traitors of the Confederacy have been allowed to reinterpret the war's battles, fly the flag of secession over state houses, and raise monuments to those who fought to tear down the country. Southern white secessionists were given the power to rewrite history even as America's newest citizens were relegated to forced agricultural peonage, grinding urban poverty and new forms segregation and racial terror.
Mammy was a central figure in this mythmaking and she was perfect for the role. The Mammy myth allowed Americans in the North and South to ignore the brutality of slavery by claiming that black women were tied to white families through genuine bonds of affection. Mammy justified past enslavement and continuing oppression.
Privileged, Southern white women were central in creating and propagating the Mammy myth. In 1923, the United Daughters of the Confederacy were nearly successful in lobbying Congress to erect a statue on federal land to honor "the memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South." The desire to memorialize Mammy reveals how Southern white women reveled in the subordinate role of their darker peers. These black women were vulnerable to the sexual and labor exploitation of slaveholders and household employers. These women masked their true thoughts and personalities in order to gain a modicum of security for themselves and their families. The Mammy monument was meant to display black women as the faithful, feisty, loyal servants of white domesticity.
In the face of the Mammy myth, real black women spoke for themselves against the monument. It was substantial, sustained, opposition from organized African American women and the black press that killed the Mammy monument proposal.
Media have cast the choice in the current election as a simple binary between race and gender. But those who claim that black women are ignoring gender issues by voting for Barack just don't get it. Hillary cannot have black women's allegiance for free. Black women will not be relegated to the status of supportive Mammy, easing the way for privileged white women to enter the halls of power.
Black feminist politics is not simple identity politics. It is not about letting brothers handle the race stuff or about letting white women dominate the gender stuff. The black women's fight is on all fronts. Sisters resist the ways that black male leaders try to silence women's issues and squash women's leadership. At the same time, black women challenge white women who want to claim black women's allegiance without acknowledging the realities of racism. They will not be drawn into any simple allegiance that refuses to account their full humanity and citizenship.
Black women want out of the war. Black women need health insurance. Black women need decent schools for their children. Black women need a strong economy that creates jobs. Black women need help caring for their aging parents. Black women want a Democratic win in the fall. Sisters chose Barack on Tuesday because they believe he can deliver these things and that is much more empowering than just having a woman in the White House.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University.
