Tragic Details About Barack Obama's Childhood In Hawaii

Barack Obama had a diverse range of experiences as a child. "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child," he shared (via Miller Center). "And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me." Other than when he briefly lived in Washington as a baby, and when he lived in Indonesia from 1967-1971, Obama spent most of his childhood in Hawaii. While this may sound like his upbringing was an exciting paradise, he experienced adversity and sad circumstances, including separations from both of his parents, racism, and identity concerns.  

Before he was born in 1961, Obama's parents overcame obstacles to get married. Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham met at the University of Hawaii, and Dunham got pregnant soon after. She was 18 when they married, and she decided to pause her college education. As an adult, Obama questioned how big a role his conception played in his parents' decisions.     

In Hawaii, Obama forged a strong relationship with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. They helped raise him, and he appreciated the stability they provided. "Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots ... I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were," he told The New York Times in 2011.

During his childhood, Barack Obama hardly got to spend any time with his father, Barack Obama Sr. When Obama was two, his parents separated, and his father never lived in Hawaii again. He only saw his dad in person one time after his father moved away. He was 10 years old, and his dad's visit was a pivotal experience. "My father gave me my first basketball and introduced me to jazz," the former president explained on Instagram.

Unfortunately, there were also some fraught moments during the month Obama spent with his dad. After Barack told his classmates a fallacious story about his father being tribal royalty, he experienced dread when his dad was invited to give a presentation at his school. Fortunately, his father captivated the class, and discussion didn't turn to any of the bogus claims. 

However, when Obama's dad denied his request to watch a Christmas TV special, it precipitated an uncomfortable argument between his parents and grandparents. "I wasn't that happy that he had showed up," he later recalled on "Renegades." "I was kind of eager for him to go ... I had no way to connect with the guy." He also experienced a lot of emptiness as a result of this brief reconnection with his father. "The visit left me with more questions than it answered, and I knew I would have to figure out how to be a man on my own," he concluded in his Instagram post.

Even as a young child, Barack Obama struggled with questions about his identity. When he was a preschooler, Obama remembered hanging out with his grandfather at the beach. Sometimes people were curious to know if Obama was Hawaiian. In response, his grandad sometimes told them that Barack was related to Hawaiian royalty. However, while he appreciated his grandfather fooling these overly inquisitive visitors, he also saw a more serious side to the incident. "I wasn't easily identifiable," Obama explained to Bruce Springsteen on their "Renegades" podcast. "I felt like an outsider. There was visible proof that I wasn't like everybody else."

In his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama chronicled how his internal conflicts about racial identity grew as he got into his high school years, particularly as he thought about his different interactions with his family, friends, and other people in his community. "I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds ... convinced that with a bit of translation on my part, the two worlds would eventually cohere," he wrote. 

After he went to college, Obama's concerns about fitting in continued to dominate his thoughts. However, around this time, his started seeing his questions from a new angle. "My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't, end there," he concluded in his book.

When he was 10 years old, Obama experienced racism in his grandparents' apartment building. Obama encountered a neighbor in the elevator, and he was surprised when she got out to avoid him. "She came right back up but was just worried about riding an elevator with me," he recalled in 2016. Previously, he also detailed the incident in "Dreams from My Father," and explained that the woman had accused him of deliberate pursuit. On the contrary, he was headed the same direction because he was on his way home.

On another occasion, one of Obama's childhood friends decided to insult him by using a racial slur during a heated argument. Things escalated quickly. "I remember I popped him in the face and broke his nose," Obama explained on "Renegades." After his friend was shocked at his reaction, Obama gave him a firm directive to stop using offensive words. On the podcast, he went on to discuss the dangers of racist behavior, noting that it had far-reaching impacts as a "basic psychology that then gets institutionalized, is used to justify dehumanizing somebody."

Unfortunately, these weren't isolated incidents. Obama experienced multiple acts of racism as a kid, and he didn't hesitate to call out adults for their bad behavior. In one instance, things got particularly fraught and Obama verbally lashed out at his basketball coach for using the n-word.

Barack Obama was six when he and his mom, Ann Dunham, moved to Indonesia. After living there for four years, his mom wanted Obama to return to the U.S. to continue his education. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to move with her son right away. During this time, Dunham wanted Obama to live with his grandparents for no more than one year. Things went according to plan, and Dunham later returned to Hawaii.

However, after a few years, Dunham wanted to move back to Indonesia as part of her graduate studies. This time, Obama was the one who initiated their separation. As a teen, he didn't want to be uprooted and have to make new social connections from scratch. The prospect of living with his grandparents seemed like a more appealing option. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," Obama later explained to Time. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."

Obama's mom reportedly struggled with living apart from her son. "In his senior year of high school in Hawaii, she goes back just to be with him because she realizes it's the last year of his childhood," Janny Scott, who wrote a biography about Dunham, explained to NPR. Based on her research, Scott determined that Dunham "had a kind of longing for a closer relationship with him."

As a teen, Barack Obama anticipated that his grandparents would be permissive when he returned to living with them. "They'd leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight," he wrote in "Dreams from My Father."  During high school, Obama's focus shifted to social activities rather than academics, and he started drinking alcohol.

Unfortunately, Obama also tried marijuana and cocaine. As he explained in his memoir, he was enticed by the prospect of using drugs to escape from his problems and questions about his identity. When Ann Dunham returned to Hawaii, she was concerned about her son's behavior. "'One of your friends was arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven't even started on your college applications,'" he recalled his mother saying. Thankfully, Obama and Dunham had a tight bond, and her words made an impact on him. However, rather than follow in his parents' footsteps and attend the University of Hawaii, Obama opted to go to Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

In addition to his memoir, Obama was forthcoming about these past mistakes when he was running for president. In 2007 Obama spoke to a group of high school students, and he noted that it took a while for him to experience an epiphany about his teenage behavior. "It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time'" (via NBC).