This talks about Obama’s upbringing at Punahou school, where my wife also attended…..Enjoy
GRACE WITH RACE Sunday, February 03, 2008
MICHAEL BAUGHMAN
In 1971, at age 10, Barack Obama moved from Indonesia to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Soon he enrolled at Punahou School , where he became known as “Barry.” In his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” his grandfather visits the Punahou campus with him. “Hell, Bar,” the grandfather says, “this isn’t a school. This is heaven. You just might get me to go back to school with you.”
In 1948, at age 10, I moved to Hawaii from western Pennsylvania and enrolled at Punahou. Before the move I attended a dingy public elementary school in a suburb of Pittsburgh , an area once described by H.L. Mencken as the ugliest place on earth. I too was taken at first sight with the beauty of Punahou’s Manoa Valley campus, its spacious fields and palm-lined roads, the steep backdrop of green mountains.
Obama and I earned good grades, participated in athletics, remained at Punahou through graduation, then left to attend college on the East Coast. Obama’s father was Kenyan, his white mother a native of Kansas . My father was Pennsylvania Dutch, my mother a direct descendant of Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, who fought against the Americans during the Revolutionary War.
I can’t pretend to know Obama’s mind, nor can I be certain of his political motivations; but we have fundamental things in common. The formative teenage years are a difficult and vital time of life, and because Hawaii is such a unique place I feel secure in assuming that he went through a process of maturation that must have been similar to mine.
Hawaii is an exceedingly complex stew of cultural and ethnic feuds and alliances. Newcomers, particularly newcomers who can’t readily be labeled, are bound to have a difficult time fitting in.
Punahou itself contributed significantly to the complexity and confusion. The school has long been regarded by the local population as a place where privileged rich people send their children. In Obama’s words, “Punahou had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites.”
The school was founded in 1841 by the missionary families who, in 1893, stole the islands from the natives through an act they called “annexation.”
Many generations of the “elite” missionary families have attended Punahou, and continue to attend. As a result there are understandable reasons for the animosity regarding the school. In 1953 and 1954 I played for Punahou teams that won Interscholastic League football championships. When 30,000 fans packed the old Honolulu Stadium for the deciding games those years, at least 29,000 of them cheered mightily against us.
Several descendants of the Americans principally responsible for the arrest of Queen Liliuokalani and the overthrow of the monarchy became friends of mine during my Punahou years. One of them occasionally traveled to South America , with his horses, for weekend polo matches. All of them eventually inherited huge sums of money, vast tracts of land, or both.
But I learned early on that these people weren’t necessarily to be envied. During visits to the homes of my wealthy friends in Manoa and Nuuanu Valleys and Kahala, I glimpsed the same kinds of revealing scenes that Obama records — a reclusive mother sneaking a drink of gin in the kitchen at lunchtime, a red-faced father muttering vile obscenities into a telephone.
The gulf between rich and poor is exaggerated in Hawaii , and, for many residents, Punahou has always symbolized rich haoles and always will. But poor boys and girls, most often athletes in my day, also attend the school. Though some angry fans called us haoles (Hawaiian slang for whites) when we ran onto the stadium football field, we had a Samoan running back, a Filipino quarterback, Hawaiian tackles and Japanese guards — and me, at right end, beside my best Hawaiian friend, Curtis Iaukea.
Off campus, during the teenage years, bad things sometimes happened to me in Honolulu , most often when I drank too much beer. Downtown one night, a friend and I were beaten bloody and unconscious by a gang of Japanese boys. We had been dumb enough to tell them we went to Punahou. I had several late-night fights in the parking lot at Kau Kau Korner, the popular Waikiki drive-in of the day.
Irrational conflict can be as instructive as formal schooling. Somehow, by the time I was ready to graduate, ethnic and economic differences had become almost meaningless. The change occurred so gradually I was barely aware of it. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama puts what I’m getting at this way: “A year passes and you know you feel differently; but you’re not sure what or why or how. . . .” What I do know is that every class at Punahou, every walk down a Honolulu street, every ride on a city bus, every team I played for was multiracial. I had my problems, my insecurities, my fights, and I finally ended up with friends of every imaginable ethnicity and, thankfully, became virtually blind to their differences, if indeed there are any.
When I left Hawaii after my senior year, on my way to Boston University on a football scholarship, I spent the summer in Detroit with an aunt and uncle. There I was exposed to genuine racism. After Hawaii it came as a shock. The N-word was used often and venomously by almost everybody I spoke to in the working-class neighborhood. I spent a lot of my afternoons at Briggs Stadium watching the Tigers play. I sat in the cheapest seats in centerfield, with blacks, and felt very much at home among the people my aunt and uncle and their neighbors feared.
A few years later I traveled extensively through the segregated South, then served a tour as an enlisted man in the Army. I learned more about ignorance and prejudice, and I realized that Hawaii , though by no means without its serious social flaws and grave economic problems, surely comes as close as anywhere on Earth to achieving racial tolerance.
In June 2005, my Punahou class celebrated a weeklong 50th reunion. One of my memories is an early morning meeting at Waikiki Beach with two old friends. Curtis Iaukea, after a career in professional football and then professional wrestling, operates a rental stand at Waikiki , and when I arrived he was already there, sitting on the beach wall by the old concrete pier. Ed Jensen, a Portland resident and the retired CEO of Visa International, showed up soon afterward. There we were, a former wrestler, a liberal professor and a high-powered capitalist — and we got along just fine. Even though I don’t know exactly how or why it happens, that, I believe, is the fortunate result of living one’s formative years in Hawaii.
So I believe Hawaii has to be one large reason why Barack Obama is a man so clearly comfortable in his own skin. Hawaii is why I believe him when he says he wants to move from self-serving partisanship toward productive inclusiveness. I believe he might even be able to make good on his promise to transform the red and blue states into the United States . I certainly think he can take us to a better place than we’ve been occupying as a country now for a good long while. If all of it happens, if any of it does, we should probably thank Hawaii .
Michael Baughman lives in Ashland with his extended family. He is an emeritus English professor at Southern Oregon University and the author of several books.
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