A White Woman From Kansas - NYTimes.com

A White Woman From Kansas - NYTimes.com: "Unbound by convention, Dunham the anthropologist was nonetheless the anti-hippie with her cache of can-do Kansan wisdom: “You’re not okay, I’m not okay, and I know how to fix it.”
The fixing was not quick. Dunham knew that. “Well, life is what it is,” she would say: As in getting pregnant at 17 by the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawaii, the brilliant Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who loved her and left her — for Harvard. Adulthood was thrust on her early. One colleague recalls her saying: “Don’t conclude before you understand. After you understand, don’t judge.”"


To an unusual degree, because of the absence and because he was half-black, he had to define his own identity — hence the almost feline coolness, the hermetic quality in the president.