(no subject)

[eirias]

Reading Obama's memoir, you learn that as a kid he was called Barry. As a young adult he reverted to using his full name. That's not all that striking; a lot of young people change their self-presentation in this way. But I think it is a fairly striking choice for anyone with political ambitions. I think a lot of people would have switched back to the more "American" (more on that in a later post, I hope) -sounding name on entering Harvard. Obama's success with the other route is a reminder, I think, that squashing your identity is no way to get elected.

Comments

[japlady.livejournal.com]

As a black man, working as a community organizer in a black community, barack Obama actually denotes black pride -- its an african name, not a name an african slave might have been given by his master.

Then when he ran for state government, again he was representing the same community. I seriously doubt he thought when he was a community organizer that he would ever represent on the federal level, let alone run for president.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. It's hard to know where his ambitions were when he decided to go to law school, of course (and that was post-community-organizing, IIRC). But you're right that even if his ambitions were high, if his ideals were also high and he was aiming to use that law degree to represent (for instance) low-income black Chicagoans, the choice makes a certain kind of sense. Still, it strikes me as kind of awesome, because I think a lot of people would have made the moral calculus that it was more important to make sure you could get a position somewhere, even if you had to squelch some of the things that made you want the position in the first place.