His inter-racial background has clearly been an important, if not the most important, aspect of his development. His father was a remote human factor, but he was clearly a man of great intelligence, who gained a ph.d at Harvard, and the Senator has, in adulthood, embraced his African roots. Immediate influences were his Kansas-born mother, and her parents, as well as his mother's second husband; and his environment, growing up mostly in Hawaii, but also in Indonesia.
The Senator does not dwell on his years at college in California and New York, rather skipping to the immediate post-graduate period of several years he spent working with the deprived population in south Chicago. He starts from the humblest of beginnings: there is nothing of privilege, neither in his attitudes, his background, nor his accessible resources. It is perhaps for these very reasons, that the concerns he develops for the forgotten white and black poor are bedrock, and I suspect that they are so strong that they may underlie all of his thinking. I suggest that the Senator has no problem in seeing the continuity between the poverty of south Chicago, and that which exists in Kenya, Indonesia, and every other place where privilege consigns the poor, at the very least, to oblivion.
I have, perhaps, only once read any biographical material which so frankly displays the development, thinking, and conclusions of the author. It is all the more extraordinary to have such honesty from a major political force.
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