A Promised Land

Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu in 1961 to an American mother, Ann Dunham, of Scottish and Irish origin, and a Kenyan father. Barack and Ann spent a few years in Indonesia, with his mother’s second husband, after which Barack returned to the Island of Oahu, Hawaii, where his maternal grandparents lived. He had very little contact with his father, who had returned to live in Kenya, and whom he felt had little impact on his life and his journey. Barack’s family made sacrifices to be able to send him to a prestigious high school, but he was not very interested in studying, and did not make much of an effort. A curious young man with a critical nature, even from a young age, he began to think deeply about race issues: in fact, Barack grew up in a white family and in a society in which, he himself admits, very few people looked like him. His experiences in Indonesia had opened his eyes to the tribal tensions within the country, and the gap that existed between the various social classes. Without any specific career in mind, he enrolled in Occidental College in 1979, where he spent two years, and then he transferred to Columbia University, New York. It was at this time that his ideas about the American nation and a dream of a country free of racism, where men and women are truly equal, began to take shape.