Flashback: Obama slammed American 'bootstrap myth'

Barack Obama

When Barack Obama decided to enter politics in 1995, he saw it as a means to advance his true calling – mobilizing "collective action" to build "collective institutions" – and disparaged the "right wing" ideal of fostering reform through personal initiative as the "old individualistic bootstrap myth."

The Dec. 8, 1995, interview by the Chicago Reader came shortly after his participation in Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March" in Washington, D.C., which Obama said reinforced his reason for becoming a politician.

"What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society," he said in the interview article, titled, "What makes Obama run?"

The Democratic senator's controversial pastor and spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., traveled with Farrakhan to Libya in 1984 to meet with dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Last year, Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine gave Farrakhan the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award, because the Nation of Islam leader "truly epitomized greatness."

Obama, as he began campaigning for the Illinois state Senate in 1995, said he primarily was running for office to fill a political and moral vacuum.

Interviewer Hank de Zutter wrote that Obama was "tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up – at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit – and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change."

Obama has refused to "disown" Wright after a self-described "firestorm" erupted last month when video excerpts of the pastor's fervent anti-America and anti-white declarations from the pulpit were broadcast by Fox News and others.

In a January 2006 sermon, Wright called America the "No. 1 killer in the world" and blamed the country for launching the AIDS virus to maintain affluence at the expense of the Third World. The pastor reportedly said in a sermon just after 9/11, "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color." In a 2003 sermon, Wright encouraged blacks to "damn America" in God's name and blamed the U.S. for provoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II and supporting Israel since 1947.

No John Wayne

Obama emphasized in the 1995 interview that black churches are "going it alone," with pastors thinking only about how to build their churches. They have community-service programs, he said, such as food pantries, but "until they come together to build something bigger than an effective church all the community-service programs, all the food pantries they start will barely take care of even a fraction of the community's problems."

"In America," Obama said, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."

Obama pondered what it would be like if a politician were to "see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them"

Obama said the "right wing, the Christian right" has done a better job of forming grass-roots activist organizations "than the left or progressive forces have."

"But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness and false nostalgia," he said. "And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility."

Looking back at Obama's high school years at the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii, the Chicago publication noted "he encountered race and class prejudice that would darken his politics even more. At first embarrassed by his race and African name, he soon bonded with the few other African-American students."

He quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground. He participated in bitter bull sessions with his buddies on the theme of "how white folks will do you."

The Chicago Reader said Obama had to reconcile those sentiments with the loving support he had at home from his white mother and grandparents and, quoting Obama, dismissed much of his buddies' analysis as "the same sloppy thinking" used by racist whites.

But he found the racism of whites to be "particularly stubborn and obnoxious," the Reader's de Zutter wrote.

'Mean, cruel times'

In the interview, Obama addressed the "unemployment catastrophe" among black youth, and declared any solution "must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent and international economy."

While he praised Farrakhan's "Million Man March," he said organizers lacked "a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change."

"Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don't also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers – whites, Latinos, and Asians," he said. "We must deal with the forces that are depressing wages, lopping off people's benefits right and left, and creating an earnings gap between CEOs and the lowest-paid worker that has risen in the last 20 years from a ratio of 10 to 1 to one of better than 100 to 1.

Clarifying, Obama said he didn't mean to suggest "that the need to look inward emphasized by the march isn't important and that these African-American tribal affinities aren't legitimate."

"These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a 'lock 'em up, take no prisoners' mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress," he said. "Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.

"But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done," he continued. "Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build."

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