{"id":1387,"date":"2012-06-18T14:52:14","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T14:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1387"},"modified":"2012-06-18T14:52:14","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T14:52:14","slug":"second-fence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2012\/06\/second-fence\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Fence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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He was too dark in Indonesia. A \u201chapa\u201d child \u2014 half and half \u2014 in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An \u201cinvisible man\u201d in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss\u2019s biography, \u201cBarack Obama: The Story,\u201d<\/a> to be published Tuesday.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I read this article<\/a> (2326 comments) and it\u2019s fascinating to me, this search of being who you are and with whom you\u2019ll grow as a person and feel like yourself. Barack went through a lot and settled down in South Chicago with black folks. I kind of resist thinking about it but I crave it too. I don\u2019t have enough. I have too much of something else. Need more blackness.<\/p>\n

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Barry and Eric had much in common. They were tall, athletic, smooth, outwardly confident. Moore had grown up in Boulder, Colo., attended predominantly white schools, and like Obama had survived and thrived in an environment where there were few people who looked like him. He came to Los Angeles looking for \u201ca more urban African American experience\u201d where he, like Obama, could sort out his identity.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cObama was a multicultural mainstream Oxy guy,\u201d Hook said. \u201cHe fit right in with anybody. As long as you accepted him, he was good.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It sounds so<\/em> familiar to me. It\u2019s the base of our social design: we needed to be part of a group to survive, back in the day and it stayed as the \u201conly way it works\u201d. But when you\u2019re on the fence you don\u2019t choose a group somehow, you\u2019re invited and you can stay but you never really feel like belonging. Until it gets to a rawer level, people looking like you. Is it enough? I don\u2019t know I never joined a group of black folks. I would in LA.<\/p>\n

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He had been living in the rarified environment of Oxy and Columbia, self-absorbed with his choices, contemplating life on an intellectual plane, and here were people talking about sports and life and family in ways that were not fraught with meanings and symbols. \u201cI felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three fourths of the work force . . .) than I had felt in a long time,\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I do understand the refreshing change as it happened to me too, only in reverse: I had been living with countryside white collar down to earth folks and then I was on this intellectual Paris plane. It was good though I learned that with meanings and symbols comes a hell of a lot of BS and segregation, making me divided about knowledge. Sometimes, life is better when you just enjoy it plainly as a life form on a pretty stable amount of matter.<\/p>\n

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He was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? At times he confessed to her that \u201che felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.\u201d She realized that \u201cin his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black. I told him that. I think he felt very encouraged by my absolute conviction that his future lay down the road with a black woman. He doubted there were any black women he would feel truly comfortable with.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I never thought about my future with any specific concerning the ethnicity of the woman who I would share my life with, but it sure resonates with me. Fuck, it\u2019s like I could have a very private and interesting conversation with the president of the United States of America right now.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHis perspective was universal, removed, not racial. He had reservations about people of every race when it came to tribal thinking.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

*bumps fist* that\u2019s right. And it\u2019s where it\u2019s complex because humans tend to group themselves which is only good to a certain point where it becomes the worst thing. At first it builds up and then, it destroys. History proved it quite often and at a smaller scale, two words: indie game.<\/p>\n

But we people on the fence see that as easily as Jedi knights abuse Jedi tricks. And that\u2019s why we freak out\/are reserved: we want to be part of all groups and not being part of any group at all, at the same time. It\u2019s unnatural, that\u2019s for sure. The good part is that we have an angle, a capacity of weighing things that nobody has.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He was too dark in Indonesia. A \u201chapa\u201d child \u2014 half and half \u2014 in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An \u201cinvisible man\u201d in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss\u2019s biography, \u201cBarack Obama: The Story,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1388,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387\/revisions\/1388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}