Stop-Obama

One of Obama’s best known (although least important) fibs about childhood experiences of racism, relates to an incident with a Life magazine issue:

A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine. [Scharnberg]

As the Daily Mail puts it

[Obama] wrote movingly of a turning point in his life when, as a nine-year-old, he read in Life magazine of a “black man who had tried to peel off his skin”…”no such Life issue exists”, and an exhaustive search of similar magazines failed to find any article remotely similar to the one Obama had described. [Stephen]

The Tribune was the first to break this story:

…the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians. [Scharnberg]

Obama claimed that the

…article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled. [Scharnberg]

and Obama recalls his initial reaction to this magazine Dreams of His Father

I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation [20]

When asked about this discrepancy

Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?” [Scharnberg]

so the Tribune checked-

(At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.) [Scharnberg]

 Did such an article ever exist, did Obama make it up, or was the magazine in question an Indonesian one, we will never know. In any case, the value of this lie isn’t as great as it appears. Rather, it is in the larger context of Obama’s consistent lies on racism of his youth, that it has any relevance.

***

Trackback URI | Comments RSS