Skin Bleaching Story Likely Found in TIME
Critics of Sen. Obama have been looking for anything to throw at him, and have lately seized on the fact that a story he said he read as a child in Life Magazine wasn’t able to be located there. The story was about a black man who had tried to bleach his skin, and Sen. Obama wrote in his memoir that it was a formative moment in the development of his racial identity.
After the Chicago Tribune reported that they could find no such story in the archives of Life (or Ebony, another possibility), many looking to score cheap political points on an issue of minor importance have highlighted the incident, ostensibly as an example of some sort of intellectual dishonesty.
A recent discovery means it’s time for that stop.
Piling on the negative media coverage bandwagon, Lynn Sweet underscores this point as a “gaffe” in her Chicago Sun-Times column today. More outrageously, an established anti-Obama commentator in Chicago falsely claimed that “It turns out the entire episode was a fabrication and fantasy of Barry O. Never happened. More ammunition for my forthcoming lawsuit that Obama’s book should be shelved under ‘Fiction’ and not ‘Biography.’” (It bears noting that in the same article he refers to Sen. Obama as “the glib Kenyan witch doctor.”)
Should we expect corrections (and perhaps an apology) from both?
An October 28, 1966 article in TIME Magazine entitled “What the Negro Has — and Has Not — Gained” is almost certain to be the article in question. It reported:
Yet for every Negro who flaunts his identity, a hundred try to camouflage it. Advertisements in the Negro magazines still hymn Nadinola skin bleach: “Lightens and brightens skin.”
Verification as to whether or not this is the article will hopefully be coming soon. Maybe in the future those with a bone to pick will choose a more substantial “fault” that is less likely to be invalidated in short order. If they can find one, that is.
(Thanks to Stacy for the tip.)
March 28th, 2007 at 8:35 am EST
i find it unfair how the media uses obama as an object of fixation to play out the fights they should be having internally (at best) among themselves… first, to extol him and now to drag him through the dirt. it seems to me as if they regreted having placed him on a pedestal and are now doing everything in their journalistic power to initiate his fall.. and putting their audience through an emotional roller coaster. perhaps it is unfortunate that he received so much positive attention. but what i see here is pettiness. i hope the media has the courage to own up to their own need to keep the media intensity either in good or in bad regardless of the consequences and move on to real substance. i agree, they do need to choose a more substantial topic. it is not obama lacking in substance, but the media looking for substance where there is none. the more i witness what is going on as an expatriot american, the more i stand behind obama.
he has substance and experience that only a few would be willing to admit as being presidential-i hope there will be a paradigm shift in politics that will cause many to see that his qualities are exactly what this country needs for us to heal and move on and grow, and especially this from the white house
i believe that obama’s strength is actually his experience, not his lack of it… and he needs to make an offensive in packaging and presenting his experience (as a community organizer-for example-having faced the frustration and being reflective enough to grow from it… this country needs his experience to mend the broken edges.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:00 am EST
this is a subtle reference to his black vote,it’s a bunch of nothingness,15 minutes orf fame.Obama planned his way to the white house well,no one is gonna stop his train.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:54 am EST
Hi JHC,
I think what is clear is that whether Ebony says it did an article, there were certainly products that advertised in Ebony that promised “skin bleaching.”
Yesterday was a ridiculous day for the news media (and, frankly in progressive circles, too) on Obama. But, in many ways, I think it might be a watershed as these multiple empty stories have been pushed back pretty aggressively by Greenwald, Sargeant, Carpetbagger, Media Matters, and you, of course.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:21 pm EST
If this is the article he read (no picture here of anyone who’d suffered skin disfigurement from the lightener), the dour statistics about economic disparity, educational and social discrimination, and voter/political participation kept to a bare minimum would have given pause to a young, idealistic black. Don’t know just how he’s found the determination to overcome those 1960s hurdles, but I certainly praise him for it.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:50 pm EST
Someone who has tracked down the original version of this TIME article has actually just alerted me to the fact that this is probably not the article Sen. Obama saw, as it doesn’t have the picture described in his book. Smart people are looking into this further, though, and I’m confident we’ll have an answer soon.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:16 pm EST
Lynn Sweet has it out for him. I’m guessing she supports Clinton.
August 6th, 2007 at 10:27 am EST
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.