Barack Obama: A Good Student

Keshab Chandra Mandal, Ph. D.

E-Mail: mandalkeshab2013@gmail.com

Obama was a very good basket ball player. While living with his grandparents, Obama often participated in the esteemed Punahou Academy and excelled in basketball. In his high school he was known as “Barry O’Bomber” because of his long jump –shot ability.  He still likes to play the game when time and opportunity comes. He even went to gym at the university, where black men played. There he learnt positive attitude and skills through game. He graduated from Punahou Academy with honors in 1979. As one of only three black students at the school, Obama became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African-American. He later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self. "I began to notice there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog...and that Santa was a white man," he said. "I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking the way I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me." When Obama was senior in the Punahou Academy, he had put his studies aside and struggling with who he was. He was suffering from identity crisis. He got frustrated and and as a result, he experimented with drugs and alcohol to try to put the struggle out of his mind.

Obama also struggled with the absence of his father. "My father had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact," he later reflected. "They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed." Obama, Sr. eventually lost his legs in an automobile accident, also losing his job as a result. In 1982, he died in yet another car accident while traveling in Nairobi. Obama, Jr. was only 22 years old when he received the news of his father's passing away. "At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me," Obama said, "both more and less than a man." (Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama/ 26.10.2011)