It's beginning to feel like it...and that each of us was born in a separated dimension. You know who I'm talking about.
I've been busy as a bee today—in a good way.
However I have to take time to share a few things.
LA Weekly will be featuring a profile of me on Thursday, the 21st. The subject? My mirror life with Obama and the effort to save the Kenyan school named in his honor.
Oh, yeah and the site is up! A lot more basic than I had envisioned but we’ll see what happens as I add features.
And here's the hot newsflash: my mother is white. Well, that’s what Jerome Corsi assumed when he used my father’s four-year old Obama op-ed as reference material for his best-seller The Obama Nation
[Philip] Ochieng's point in writing this insightful piece was not just to set the record straight on Obama Senior. More important, he sought to describe how Obama Junior, when first visiting the "Home Squared" of his father's native village during his 1992 trip to Africa, was confronted with the perplexing accusation, "You're lost!"My mom’s response: “Well, that certainly isn’t the first time someone has described me in that manner.” (I could hear her smirking over the phone.) Well heck, me neither. However, my father does mention my name in the op-ed and a quick bit of Google work would have revealed that I was probably not half white. It's an...interesting...assumption. But what can one expect from someone who uses Andy Martin as a source?The expression comes from the Luo verb lal, which Ochieng explained means to disappear or be away for a long time without an explanation. "Simply by being born and growing up in America, Barack Junior had never been a Luo: He had lal," Ochieng wrote.
From there, Ochieng argued Obama Senior "had lost his way by marrying a white woman -- Barack Junior's mother." Ochieng confessed that he shared this plight. For decades he was estranged from his daughter, who was born of a white woman who left him while Ochieng was in the United States studying.
The part about my parents’ separating also leaves the impression that my father was in the US studying while my mother was in another country. Wrong. They separated—later divorced--while both lived in the US in the same abode.
Out there somewhere is a list of things which are allegedly wrong about Corsi’s book. I don’t know what any of the items on the list are but if it's an accurate list, then this item should be on it.
Seemingly unrelated: my step-father and I were agreeing the other day that there are no coincidences. You'll see what I'm talking about on Thursday.
UPDATE (January 31, 2009): After seeing the misconception about my family on the web several times in the last six months I finally got to contact Mr. Corsi about the mix up. He was very nice about it.
