President Barack Obama (D) was not always the laid-back cool 59-year-old he is today. He was six-years-old when his mother remarried, and the family moved to Indonesia. His step-father taught him how to be resilient and gave him “a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works,” historian Jon Meacham wrote in The Newsweek magazine.
After the future president was bullied, Lolo Soetoro came home with boxing gloves and taught his stepson how to “bob and weave.” At one point the boy was distracted:
‘I felt a hard knock to the jaw, and looked up at Soetoro’s sweating face. Sotero said “Pay attention.”‘
In his book Dreams of My Father, Obama recalled Sotero said:
‘Keep your hands up. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her. Which would you rather be?’
Obama joined Bruce Springsteen in a Spotify podcast Renegades: Born in the USA. The singer’s signature song Born in the USA seemed especially apt given that the rabid right and Donald Trump harassed the 44th president about being born in the USA.
The president said:
‘Listen, when I was in school, I had a friend. We played basketball together. And one time we got into a fight and he called me a “c—.” Now first of all, ain’t no c—s in Hawaii, right?’
‘It’s one of those things that — where he might not even known what a c— was — what he knew was, “I can hurt you by saying this.”‘
The president laughed and continued:
‘And I remember I popped him in the face and broke his nose. And we were in the locker room.’
Springsteen responded:
‘Well done.’
Obama continued:
‘I explained to him — I said, ‘Don’t you ever call me something like that.”‘
‘[Hurling slurs is] an assertion of status over the other. “I may be poor. I may be ignorant. I may be mean. I may be ugly. I may not like myself. I may be unhappy. But you know what I’m not? I’m not you.”‘
Obama continued:
‘That basic psychology that then gets institutionalized is used to justify dehumanizing somebody, taking advantage of ’em, cheatin’ ’em, stealin’ from ’em, killin’ ’em, raping ’em.’
‘Whatever it is, at the end of the day it really comes down to that. And in some cases it’s as simple as, you know, ‘I’m scared I’m insignificant and not important. And this thing is the thing that’s going to give me some importance.’
At a historically black church in South Carolina, Obama commented:
‘It’s (racism) not just a matter of it not being polite to say [the N-word] in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.’
