Who We Are

Barack Obama's maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham

Barack Obama will be taking time this week to visit his ailing 86-year-old nana, the woman from Kansas he affectionately calls "Toot". Several thoughts raced through my mind when I came across the photo of Madelyn Dunham and her husband. The first was Barack's striking facial resemblance to his grandfather and the second, how astonishingly the world has changed since that picture was taken.

Much ink has been spent contemplating the pros and cons of globalization. Up to now we have tended to discuss it in abstract terms--such as fair trade and integrated markets. But perhaps the greatest challenge born in this age of rapid communications and highly-mobilized capital is managing to soothe the antipathies and reignited antagonisms brought on by the social displacement and cultural disintegration.

Barack Obama's white American grandparents were raised in a stabler time when race and religion defined one's identity. I doubt when Stanley and Madelyn brought Barack's mother into the world they could have ever imagined that their future grandson would be seen as an "exotic" by their friends back in Kansas. From all accounts, their daughter's marriage to an atheist Kenyan intellectual was not immediately welcomed. I imagine their reaction might have been akin to being told that after growing up on bacon and eggs and steak dinners the Dunham family diet was to henceforth include Kuku choma and Mtuzi wa Samaki.

Had the Dunhams given in those initial misgivings the world would not be on the verge of a major transformation, at least in its perceptions. And yet, as profound as Barack Obama's impact has been on American politics it is conceivable, depending on how the fickle worm turns, that in a few hundred years his name will be a mere footnote. Take the curious and possibly ironic origin of "Hoosier", the sobriquet still worn proudly by residents of a state that was once base for the Ku Klux Klan and could now possibly swing to Obama.

John Finley describes the denizens of an Indiana backwoods cabin in his 1833 poem, "The Hoosier's Nest":

To seat him by the log heap fire,

Where half a dozen Hoosheroons,

With mush and milk, tincups and spoons,

White heads, bare feet and dirty faces,

Seemed much inclined to keep their places…⁶

In trying to divine the meaning of "Hoosheroons" ethnographers suggest it simply comes from "Hoosiers" and the word in the poem was a humorous take-off on such racial terms as "quadroon" and "octoroon" that were in common southern usage.

The obvious African-American point of reference led others to speculate that the term was coined for the black evangelist Harry Hoosier who accompanied the Reverend Francis Asbury and other Methodist preachers on their traveling rounds through Appalachia.

Born a slave around 1750, Hoosier gained his freedom by the turn of the century and became a well-known Methodist exhorter. Indeed, Black Harry was such an impressive proselytizer that Benjamin Rush conceded that "making allowances for his illiteracy he was the greatest orator in America." Before his death in 1806, Hoosier's homiletical gifts had made him the most widely known black preacher of his time, and arguably the greatest circuit rider of his day.

Hoosier was particularly disliked by Virginia Baptists for his preaching against the Calvinist proposition that those who were once in grace would always remain in grace. At the time Methodists were not only slighted as unsophisticated and unlettered but harshly denigrated for calling into question the virtues of slavery. The promiscuous mixing of blacks and whites that took place at frontier camp meetings was considered a serious mark against their breeding and good taste. So, it does not seem at all unlikely that Methodists could have been derided as "Hoosiers" in honor of old black Harry.

Whether or not the explanation holds water, it was that clash over race and religion that culminated in the civil war followed by the birth of the Klan and the vengeful institution known as Jim Crow.

America's 1950's Economic Expansion

With the United States emerging the dominant power post-WWII there was a great need for a new professional class that included business managers, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Unlike the Garvey Movement of the 20's and 30's, the NAACP and most other civil rights organizations were far less concerned with the working classes which represented the overwhelming majority of black Americans. They wanted greater upward mobility for the race's "talented tenth".

The Black civil rights movement devoted itself expressly to the opening of the professional world to blacks and other minorities. Though Brown vs the Board of Education involved integrating primary schools, the earliest NAACP test cases focused on postgraduate study. One of the group's first victories was in 1938 in "Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada", which held that Missouri violated equal protection guarantees by failing to provide in-state law school education for black students.

Igniting the Culture Wars



In the fall of 1957 President Eisenhower faced the first grave challenge created by the NAACP's drive for equality in education and greater integration among the professions. When Arkansas' Governor Faubus reneged on his promise to protect nine black students who wished to attend Little Rock's Central High School, the president responded by sending 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to command the state's National Guard and quell the violence.

It is important to remember that in 1957 Eisenhower, like most black voters, was a Republican, while Arkansas, like the rest of the South, was a white Democratic bastion that staunchly supported FDR's populism. A point vividly borne out by this bit of 1948 audio:



By pursuing upward mobility and social integration concurrently, the NAACP's strategy not only separated its potential leaders from the black community, it created a backlash of white resentment. It was the anger over "forced integration" that encouraged the GOP to abandon the aspiring black "elite" and employ Nixon's Southern Strategy. A strategy copied by Ronald Reagan whose second wife Nancy encouraged his startling about-face on behalf of big business.

It has taken over three decades but after eight years of George W. Bush, the put-upon, exploited white worker is getting past his daddy's resentment. He reckons to his buddies that in a globalized world where ethnic distinctions are fading as fast as good-paying jobs and old-age pensions, it's time to realize we'll all sink or swim as Americans.

Shocker:From rednecksforobama.net: Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley endorses Obama.

--"It’s high time regular country folk understand that Republicans do not have their best interests at heart."

This anecdote from an Arkansas "redneck" on his way to an Obama rally puts just how far we've come in telling perspective.

"We arrived around 1:00 PM, parked the Redneckmobile and got in line at the WW I Memorial. The line was already several thousand people long. We waited in line for about 2 hours, then another hour or so in the crowd. It was amazing! No friction, no short tempers, nada! And, buddy, we were packed in like sardines.

"About an hour before Barack was to take the stage... my dear wife has a massive asthma attack! She drops unconscious to the ground. I am unable to even pick her up because of my disability. A young black man we had been chatting with immediately picks her up and literally runs out of the crowd carrying her. On the way, a young white man joins the procession... they both run for the edge of the crowd and yell for the EMS personnel on site.

My gratitude to these two men is without measure. I know that without the cool and quick action on both their parts, she would not have made it."



Will Obama, thanks to Stanley and Madelyn Dunham's care and devotion to their biracial grandson, be able to heal the wounds from our three-hundred war between the races and our intolerant religions? Only his election and presidency will tell. But whether we conquer those fear-based animosities and survive will depend on whether as Americans we can put aside old labels, even when it means having to say good-bye to your grandfather's Grand Old Party.



To that I say, good-on-ya Susan-- Hang in there, Toot, change is comin'!