Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Hussein Onyango - Obama never mentioned his paternal grandfather's bigoted letter?

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, while delivering a speech about race relations, Barack Obama asserted, among other things, that his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, was "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Obama mentioned the aforementioned incident [his grandmother's confession] in his 2007 memoir, Dreams from My father:

Obama, as a youngster, lived with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii. He awoke one morning and noticed that his grandmother seemed highly agitated, and that she had gotten into a heated argument with his grandfather.

Obama went on to explain in his memoir that his grandmother had been accosted by an assertive panhandler the previous morning while she was waiting to take the bus to work. Fearful that she might meet up with the aggressive panhandler again, she asked her husband, the following morning, to drive her to work, but he refused.

Madelyn Dunham told her grandson [Barack] that morning that the panhandler, "was very aggressive, very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”

But Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham, rejected Madelyn's assertion.

Madelyn had "been bothered by men before," Stanley told his grandson.

"You know why she’s so scared this time?" he told Obama. "I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason why she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.”

Obama then noted in his memoir: "[My grandfather's] words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure."

After he delivered his speech on race relations, Obama was asked to elaborate on this incident, which seemed to cast a poor light on his grandmother.

“The point I was making," Obama said, "was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know – there’s a reaction in her that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and sometimes come out in the wrong way and that’s just the nature of race in our society."

However, it is worthwhile to note another incident that occurred with Obama's paternal grandfather - a race-related incident that Obama, to best of my knowledge, never mentioned... Hmmm..... I wonder why......

When Obama's parents announced their intention to get married, Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, was furious. He wrote an angry letter to Obama's maternal grandfather - Stanley Dunham - saying, that he did not want "the Obama blood sullied by a white woman."

Onyango also wrote a letter to his son reminding him that he still had a wife and children in Kenya.

Would your future, prospective wife "accept that you already have a wife and children?" Onyango asked his son. "I have not heard of white people understanding such things. Their women are jealous and used to being pampered."

Conclusion: Obama's maternal grandmother was fearful of an overly aggressive panhandler, who happened to be an African American. Hence, she was clearly a "typical white person" who exemplified "the nature of race in our society," a woman who made Obama "cringe". On the flip side, since Obama has never made mention of the bigoted letter that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyanga, penned to his son, that could only mean that Onyango was clearly an unprejudiced, unbiased and open-minded individual, who rightfully had legitimate concerns about "the Obama blood" being "sullied by a white woman." If this was not the case, Obama would certainly have mentioned the aforementioned letter in his book and in his speech about race relations. You can be certain about that one! Ahem..............