Obama Lies

In his memoir, Obama writes of one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness. The story about a Life magazine article that influenced him. The article was about a black man who tried to bleach his skin white. When Obama was told no such article could be found in Life, he says “it might have been Ebony”.

As a child living in Indonesia, one day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.” The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama wrote of the magazine photos in “Dreams.”

The problem is, no such photo exists. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?” At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.

In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently because his skin color.