Obama’s ‘Singular’ Mother

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/obamas_singular_mother_20110512/#

Obama’s ‘Singular’ Mother
Posted on May 12, 2011
By Ann Gerhart


This review is from a syndication service of The Washington Post.

The key to understanding the disciplined and often impassive 44th president is his mother, as Janny Scott, a reporter for the New York Times, decisively demonstrates in her new biography, “A Singular Woman.”

The solicitousness that can anger liberals, the deliberativeness that can infuriate conservatives, the unusual belief in both empirical research and human goodness, the wicked cutting humor—all of it comes from a woman who defied conventions.

A bookish outsider and only child, Ann Dunham was plunked down in Hawaii the year after it became a state by her restless father and her resolute mother. In her first months as a college freshman, at 17 years old, she got pregnant by her first boyfriend, an older student from Kenya named Barack Hussein Obama, who left her when the baby was 11 months old. Twice she married men from different cultures and races, then divorced them. With the help of her parents, she raised two biracial children as a single mother on the Pacific islands of two nations, got degrees in math and anthropology, spent years in peasant villages studying Javanese cottage industries, and pieced together grants and development work to make money and provide for her children’s education. Colleagues credit her with helping pioneer microcredit as a tool for lifting women out of poverty.

Through Scott’s meticulous reporting, archival research and extensive interviews with Dunham’s colleagues, friends and family, including the president and his sister, a portrait emerges of a woman who is both disciplined and disorganized, blunt-spoken and empathetic, driven and devoted to her children, even as she ruefully admits her failings and frets over her distance from them.


A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother
By Janny Scott

snip//

Better, instead, to follow the guidance of Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, who always instructed her young research assistants, and her children, to emphasize “accuracy, rigor, patience, fairness, and not judging by appearances. “ ‘Don’t conclude before you understand,’ ” a friend from the Ford Foundation recalled her saying. “ ‘After you understand, don’t judge.’ ”

.... a wonderful, wonderful mother. ;)

You thought I was gonna say "Mama Grizzly" huh? :)

They sheltered and helped raise a half black child in 1961 and forward. In 1961, many women and girls were disowned by their parents for even dating a black man. I think his grandparents traveled far from their upbringing.

May all three rest in peace.