Source: thelivingiseasy.wordpress.com

I’m going to cut right to the chase and pose this question straight up: Would African-American support for President Barack Obama be the same if Michelle Obama were a white woman? Oh Snap! No she didn’t just go there? Oh, yes I did.

I am a firm believer that we must be upfront about race relations in this country instead of acting like it isn’t worthy of discussion. Folks think about and act on their prejudices every single day, so there should be no reason why we don’t talk openly and honestly about race.

With that disclaimer, last week, the blogosphere had its attention on an excerpt from a new biography about the President called, “Barack Obama: The Story,” by David Maraniss. The excerpt from the yet to be released book focuses on the relationship the President had with Genevieve Cook, a 25-year-old Australian-born (white) Park Slope elementary school teacher, whom he met will living in New York City. Through observations from her diary, we learn that they first met at an east village Christmas gathering and he wooed her back to his apartment with promises of grub. They small talked on an orange bean bag chair before moving the conversation to the bedroom.

They were together for a while, at one point living together. Yet almost immediately Cook said that she began to notice that while the “sexual warmth” was definitely present, Obama, at many times, was also distance and wary in their relationship.  On time, he confessed to Genevieve his ideal image of the perfect woman, which he described at as strong, upright and a fighter, “a black woman I keep seeing her as,” she said.

Overall, I thought the piece interesting in that we get to see a more intimate side of a young Obama, which by most accounts is considered to be calm, deliberate and hard to read by most in the press. But besides the tawdry stuff about his relationship with this particular woman, we also get to see a black man of mixed backgrounds trying to find his place in both culture and society. The reference to him carrying around and rereading a tattered copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a story all about black identity, I found very endearing.

Of course, not everyone felt that way. A few friends of mine on Facebook questioned the timing of the release of the excerpt and its overall agenda. Some thought that some of the passages in the book, particularly finding out about his prior relationships with white women, would further question Obama’s blackness and drill down the narrative that Obama doesn’t really have a connection to the black community. I brushed it off until I began reading similar sentiments expressed in the comment section, mostly on black sites, which too covered this story. Comments such as:

“Couldn’t make it past the second page of this rubbish.  Do better, GOP! “

 “Well from what I was told president o was a virgin before he met his Mrs. right and on top of that I also recall hearing that Mrs. O was his only girlfriend *shrugs*”

Source: Thegloss.com

You never know when your romantic past is going to creep up on you and for Barack Obama that day is fast approaching. Next month, Simon & Schuster is preparing to release a biography of the president titled, Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, and the author delves extensively into the experiences that made Barack Obama who he is today, particularly his past relationships with Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, two women the President dated in the 1980s while he was a student at Columbia.

Drawing on Alex’s letters and Genevieve’s journals, David Maraniss paints a picture of a young man wise beyond his years, yet struggling to form an identity. Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from the book online and here are a few snippets of the insight into his young romances.

“The loneliness of Obama’s New York existence emerged in his letters to Alex McNear, a young woman from Occidental who had enchanted Obama when she was co-editing the literary magazine Feast, and with whom he reconnected when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Alex had always been fond of Barry, as she called him, and “thought he was interesting in a very particular way. He really worked his way through an idea or question, turned it over, looked at it from all sides, and then he came to a precise and elegant conclusion.” When Alex came to New York, she gave Obama a call. They met at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and, as she remembered the night, “we sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger. It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours. We walked slowly back to my apartment, on 90th, and said good-bye. After that we started spending much more time together.

“Alex remembered it as a summer of walking miles through the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at their apartments, visiting art museums, and talking about life. She recalled one intense conversation in particular as they stood outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obama was obsessed with the concept of choice, she said. Did he have real choices in his life? Did he have free will? How much were his choices circumscribed by his background, his childhood, his socio-economic situation, the color of his skin, the expectations that others had of him? How did choice influence his pres­ent and future? Later, referring back to that discussion, he told Alex in a letter that he had used the word “choice” “as a convenient shorthand for the way my past resolves itself. Not just my past, but the past of my ancestors, the planet, the universe.” His obsession with the concept of choice, he said in a later interview at the White House, “was a deliberate effort on my part to press the pause button, essentially, and try to orient myself and say, ‘Okay, which way, where am I going?’

“The long-distance relationship with Alex McNear after that summer—they would drift apart as time wore on—was conducted mostly through a series of passionate letters sent between his apartment (he was then living at 339 East 94th, in Manhattan) and hers, at 2210 Ridgeview Avenue, in Eagle Rock, California. By her account, the passion was as much about ideas and words as about their romance—what she later called “that dance of closeness through language.”

In December 1993, President Obama met Genevieve at a Christmas party at the age of 22, and it’s clear from her journal entries that they were pretty smitten with each other from day one.

“He noticed her accent. Australian, she said. He knew many Aussies, friends of his mother’s, because he had lived in Indonesia when he was a boy. So had she, before her parents divorced, and again briefly in high school. As it turned out, their stays in Jakarta had overlapped for a few years, starting in 1967. They talked nonstop, moving from one subject to another, sharing an intense and immediate affinity, enthralled by the randomness of their meeting and how much they had in common. They had lived many places but never felt at home.

“At night’s end, as Genevieve recalled that first encounter when I spoke with her decades later, they exchanged phone numbers on scraps of paper. “I’m pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.

“Genevieve’s journal-keeping started in 1975 during her final year at Emma Willard School, an academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York, and continued through her undergraduate years at Swarthmore and on into adulthood. As the relationship began, Genevieve was taken by Barack’s mind and the vibrancy of their discussions. Day by day, week by week, her perceptions of him became more complicated:”

Sunday, January 22, 1984
What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade—to not feel that doubt must be silenced and transmuted into distance.

Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.

Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.

Today, for the first time, Barack sat on the edge of the bed—dressed—blue jeans and luscious ladies on his chest [a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women], the end of the front section of the Sunday Times in his hand, looking out the window, and the quality of light reflected from his eyes, windows of the soul, heart, and mind, was so clear, so unmasked, his eyes narrower than he usually holds them looking out the window, usually too aware of me.

Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

When David spoke to the President for his book, he was well aware that the author would be reaching out to his exes and he didn’t seem to mind, asking with genuine curiosity how Genevieve was and what she was up to. At first I thought this book could raise the hair on the back of Michelle’s neck but thankfully these intimate portrayals are far more scholarly and introspective than scandalous. Sound’s like the president’s had it going on since back in the ’80s.

Are you going to check this new biography out?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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