What precisely Davis taught Obama we cannot know, but we do know a lot about Davis and what he believed. Davis, who started out as a writer and civil rights activist in Chicago, was a one-time member of the Communist Party. He moved to Hawaii because he came to the conclusion that mainland America was too racist. In Hawaii he worked for a labor newspaper with Communist ties, the
Honolulu Record
. For years he wrote a column called “Frankly Speaking.” On the side he wrote a pornographic novel,
Sex Rebel
, which was published in 1968, three years before he met Obama. The novel was written under the pseudonym Bob Greene, but Davis later acknowledged being the author. Billed as the “story of a fantastic Negro’s four decades of bedroom adventures,”
Sex Rebel
according to Davis was largely autobiographical: “all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences.”
When I was filming in Hawaii, I went looking for the shack where Frank Marshall Davis lived. It’s gone; the place has now been turned into a parking lot. But I did walk through the park where Davis solicited sex from women and young girls. From his account, Davis’s “actual experiences” were quite varied and harrowing. He describes wife-swapping, orgies, sadomasochism, urolagnia (I had to look it up), and even the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Davis concludes that he did the girl a favor. “She learned the finer points of cunnilingus, fellatio, 69, and basic sex facts she was unlikely to get elsewhere.” Obama says nothing about any of this, merely noting that in his late-night discussions with Davis, he and his grandfather would sometimes assist Davis in “composing dirty limericks.”
6
Much more important, for our purpose, is Davis’s ideology. He was a race guy who became an anti-colonialist. The transformation occurred in Hawaii and was helped by Davis’s recognition of Hawaii’s extreme diversity of races and colors. “On the mainland I have never thought of myself as anything but black,” Davis wrote. But in Hawaii “I have been mistaken frequently for Hawaiian, Tongan, and Samoan; once it was assumed I was a native of India.” Davis was amazed to see that “the white-black confrontation doesn’t exist here.” Hawaii, in this respect, was unique. But Davis also found in Hawaii a way to broaden his ideological framework. Hawaii, Davis saw, suffered from the same malady as Africa and most of the non-Western world. Davis termed this “a disease known as colonialism.”
7
Race isn’t a big issue in Hawaii; colonialism is. To see this you have to go beyond tourist Hawaii; you have to sample the local literature and hang out with the natives. On my recent trip to Honolulu, I picked up Haunani-Kay Trask’s book,
From a Native Daughter
. “We are Hawaiians, not Americans,” Trask declares. The book is one long rant against “the foreign, colonial country called the United States of America.” Trask details how Hawaii was victimized by missionaries and planters, and how the ultimate colonization occurred when the United States first annexed Hawaii and then turned it into a state. If we think that all of this is ancient history, we are wrong; statehood came in 1959, just two years before Obama was born. And statehood, Trask writes, was nothing to celebrate. Rather, it was part of an “ugly and vicious history that visited genocide on American Indians, slavery on Africans, peonage on Asians, and dispossession of both lands and self-government on native Hawaiians.”
8
At the University of Hawaii I also interviewed Willy Kauai, a graduate student who recently gave a talk on “Why the Birthers Are Right for All the Wrong Reasons.” Kauai’s argument is very interesting. He says that of course Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, but he is still ineligible to be president. That’s because the Constitution specifies not only that the president must be a U.S. citizen but also that the president must be “natural born.” The president, in other words, must be born in the United States. But Kauai’s argument is that Hawaii is not legally part of the United States because U.S. forces illegally annexed Hawaii in the late nineteenth century. So from Kauai’s point of view the birthers are right not because Obama was born in Kenya, but because Hawaii, where Obama was born, is actually a foreign country. The only difference between Hawaii and Kenya is that Hawaii is under direct U.S. occupation. Kauai said he would like to see a restoration of the Hawaiian kingdom, what he calls “independence for Hawaii.” I asked him if this would amount to Hawaii seceding from the United States. He said no. “Seceding would imply that Hawaii was ever part of the United States.”
Frank Marshall Davis likewise saw the world from the special vantage point of Hawaii. What he saw was a great movement of non-white peoples, black, brown, and yellow, all fighting against Western colonialism and imperialism. The civil rights movement, Davis saw, was only a tiny part of that broader struggle. Davis wrote, “I opposed any and all white imperialism and backed the nations seeking independence following World War II.” Even during World War II, Davis worried that America and Western Europe would impose a new form of neocolonial rule over the rest of the planet. Davis, for instance, blasted Winston Churchill for seeking a postwar alliance between Britain and the United States. This, Davis said, was simply to continue the project of British colonialism now aided by the wealth and power of America. “The postwar world envisioned by Prime Minister Churchill is obviously Anglo-American imperialism and global control.” Davis added that “big business of course would like to see it,” and while President Franklin Roosevelt seemed undecided, “plenty of powerful interests back the dream of Anglo-American imperialism.”
9
Davis despised Churchill as an imperialist. Years later, Davis’s protégé Barack Obama baffled many Americans by removing a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House and ordering it returned to Britain. (The bust now sits in the home of the British ambassador.) Davis also hated President Harry Truman and was vehemently opposed to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. Most historians regard the Marshall Plan as a remarkable gesture of far-sighted magnanimity. For Davis, however, the Marshall Plan was a “device” to maintain “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall were using “billions of U.S. dollars,” Davis wrote, “to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions of humans.” Davis noted that “I have watched with growing shame . . . as our leaders have used our riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.”
While Davis reviled Churchill, Truman, and Marshall, he praised Communist China and the Soviet Union. He credited the Soviet Union for “its determination to stamp out discrimination.... Knowing also that Russia had no colonies and was strongly opposed to the imperialism under which my black kinsmen lived in Africa . . . . I considered Red Russia [my] friend.”
10
Davis’s Communist sympathies were driven largely by his anti-colonialism, and young Obama recognized this anti-colonialism as the ideological tie between Davis and Obama’s father Barack Sr.
Another influence on Obama—one who might help explain Obama’s thinking on Israel—was the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Said had been a member of the Palestine National Council and supported armed resistance against Israel, causing one Jewish magazine to call him the “Professor of Terror.” Said’s actual field was literary studies, and his best-known books include
Orientalism
and
Culture and Imperialism
. “Orientalism,” as Said defines it, is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
11
Prior to his death in 2003, Said was the leading anti-colonial thinker in the United States. Obama studied with Said at Columbia University, and the two maintained a relationship over the next two decades. Obama attended a Palestinian fundraiser in Chicago in 1998 in which Said was the featured speaker, and Obama also befriended Said’s protégé Rashid Khalidi, who currently occupies the Edward Said chair of Arab Studies at Columbia.
We can see Said’s influence on Obama in their literary interests. Said’s
Culture and Imperialism
has a detailed critique of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. Said condemns Conrad for being insufficiently anti-colonial. “Conrad does not give us the sense,” Said writes, “that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism: the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia or America were incapable of independence, and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to an end.... As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom.” True to form, Obama describes a scene in college where he lays into Conrad. “It’s a racist book,” Obama says of
Heart of Darkness
. “The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black people are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.” Obama goes on to say that “the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. A particular way of looking at the world.”
12
In fairness, I’m not convinced that Obama is merely reflecting Said here, but it’s worth noting that Said’s sophisticated, unconventional reading of Conrad is echoed in Obama’s cruder but similar-minded rant.
While Said’s field was literary studies, however, his main interests were always political. He was a vehement critic of the United States and an even more vehement critic of Israel. America, Said argued, is a genocidal power with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries, and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” Israel had been a victim, Said conceded, yet “the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people.” Said argued that Zionism was an expression of European imperialism. “In 1948, Israel was created . . . as an integral aspect of the great age of expanding colonialism. European Jews . . . sought to create a Western colony in the East.” Moreover, “True to its roots in the culture of European imperialism, Zionism divided reality into a superior ‘us’ and an inferior ‘them.’” The Palestinians, according to Said, are the victims of “a continuing process of dispossession, displacement and colonial de facto apartheid.” Theirs is the last anti-colonial struggle, part of what Said terms “the universal struggle against colonialism and imperialism.” Since 1967, the West Bank and Gaza have been “occupied territories, militarily under the control of Israeli soldiers, settlers and colonial officials.” And now Israel has a new sponsor: in recent decades it is America, not Europe, that has most actively sustained this latest form of colonialism. “The United States,” Said alleged, “virtually underwrites the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and in effect pays for the bullets that kill Palestinians.” The Palestinians have every right to resist the Israelis, and such resistance cannot be dismissed as terrorism. Rather, Said insisted that the Palestinian resistance is “one of the great anti-colonial insurrections of the modern period.” The use of force against Israel is entirely legitimate “to repossess a land and a history that have been wrested from us.”
13
My goal here is not to assess the merits of Said’s argument; it is merely to suggest that whatever Said taught Obama, we can safely assume it wasn’t positive sentiments toward America or the state of Israel. Said is dead, but his protégé is now in the White House at a time when Israel is gravely imperiled and Obama can put Said’s radical ideas into effect.
Obama’s third founding father is the Brazilian socialist and leftist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, whom Obama first encountered at Harvard Law School when he enrolled there in 1988. There were other professors at Harvard whose courses Obama took and who subsequently claimed to be Obama mentors: Lawrence Tribe, Charles Ogletree, and so on. But these were run-of-the mill liberals of a type that Obama was wearily familiar with; he didn’t have much interest in them. Obama went looking for a man like Unger. As Obama wrote, “The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality, a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.” Obama said in an interview that Harvard Law School was “the perfect place to examine how the power structure works.” He went there, he wrote, to “learn power’s currency in all its intricate detail” so that this knowledge would “help me bring about real change.”
14
Bringing about real change has been Unger’s life work, gaining him the reputation of being the leading anti-colonial scholar in the field of legal studies. Obama took two courses from Unger: Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy. The two maintained a relationship that persisted long after law school. Unger says that they were intellectual partners rather than friends. Mostly, he says, they communicated by email and Blackberry. In fact, Unger skipped town and declined all interviews during the 2008 presidential campaign, fearing that his radical views might hurt Obama. “I am a leftist,” he later told an Obama biographer, “and by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary. Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could only do harm.”
15
Unger’s leftism was apparent when he left Harvard a few years ago to join the socialist government of Brazil. He was appointed to head a government-sponsored think tank called the Institute for Applied Economic Research. Yet the Brazilian Senate refused to approve his nomination, fearing that he would destroy the group’s reputation for reliable, independent analysis. President Lula da Silva gave Unger the job in a recess appointment, and Unger proceeded to do precisely what the Senate feared. He began to replace all the senior economists who had been critical of socialist policies. The uproar in the Senate and the media was so great that the president fired Unger. At this point Unger accused Lula of being a compromiser and a sellout. Unger proved too radical for the socialist government of Brazil, and he returned to Harvard, where he seems to fit right in.