The latest attack on Obama is that he's making up stories from when he was nine. In his memoir, Dreams from my Father, he remembers being horrified at nine upon seeing an article in Life magazine about a black man who bleached his skin with bad results.
I'm a Clarkie, but I don't care to see this kind of nonsense, and a research puzzle is always fun to tackle. Especially now it's gotten so easy with the internet.
Others are suggesting it might have something to do with a Time article called "What the Negro Has and Has Not Gained," but the reference there is a throw-away, and not at all likely to produce the horror he experienced.
Now I was a kid in the 1960s, and I remember confession magazines flooding the supermarkets. So my gut feeling is that it was something like that which he got his hands on. They were certainly the kind of thing to fill you with horror.
But here's a more reputable guess.
Walter White, "Mr. NAACP," was a prominent African-American who used his easy ability to pass for white to investigate 41 lynchings.
But in the late 1940s, he couldn't see the way out of the problem of racism. He published an article in Look magazine called, "Has Science Conquered the Color Line?" In it, he argued that skin bleaching "will provide a way to get fair treatment" and let African-Americans "live like other Americans and be judged on their own merits." He also suggested surgery to thin lips and noses. This idea did not go over well with other leading African-Americans and is considered a blemish on his career.
I know I've seen some very old magazines in some offices. I wouldn't be surprised at particularly old American magazines in other countries. And it's always possible that Obama's mother explained the problem with the idea.
Of course, the whole criticism is idiotic. If Obama were deliberately rewriting his history to make himself more appealing, that would be worthy of censure, but I don't think there is anything about this to suggest that. People who do that kind of thing usually leave a trail of similar falsehoods.
So my personal take is that it was probably a long-gone confession magazine, but that this Look article makes more sense than the Time one.
What do you think?