Obama: Life Mission Is to Help Blacks and "Plow" Gifts Into Black Community

Some telling excerpts from a 1990 Boston Globe article in which the supposedly "post-racial" Obama frankly explains that his life mission is to help blacks and "plow" gifts into the black community:


Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright Globe Newspaper Company 1990

February 15, 1990

Section: METRO

A LAW REVIEW BREAKTHROUGH

Linda Matchan, Globe Staff

...

What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification with what he calls "the typical black experience," paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice.

...

In college, he specialized in international relations at Occidental College in Los Angeles and, for his final two years, at Columbia University in New York. He transferred, he said, "because I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities."

After short stints as a business journalist and as an advocate for a Harlem-based public interest research group, he conducted what he refers to as a "nationwide search" for community-based social action work with a liveable salary.

He found it in Chicago. He became the director and sole paid employee of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based advocacy organization for low- and middle-income blacks. His annual salary was $13,000. By the time he left, the organization had 13 employees and a solid record of accomplishments, from the removal of asbestos in public housing units to education counseling for disadvantaged youths.

Obama plans to return to Chicago after graduation -- "I've finally found a home," he said, smiling -- and intends to resume community work and possibly to enter politics.

"Having had access to the system, to a language that is sometimes foreign" to blacks, Obama said, "I have a certain mission to make sure that the gifts I've received are plowed back into the community."