Harvard Law Review Revisit
Harvard Law Reviewed (June 1990)
(cover photo/John Goodman).
Kicking down doors.
The Harvard Law Reviews first black president, Barack Obama.
by Elise OShaughnessy
The new president of the Harvard Law Review was somewhat taken aback by the deluge of media coverage that followed hard on the heels of his election. The New York Times ran a First Black headline, which probably wont be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama. The twenty-eight-year-old law student says he wasnt going to run for the office until a black friend talked him into it. Theres a door to kick down, the friend argued, and youre in a position to kick it down. The job does give him a great forum, but theres a trade-off. I like to read novels, listen to Miles Davis, he says. I dont get to do that anymore. I dont get dates anymore. Still, hes philosophical, even briskly cheerful, about his lost leisure. And thats because Barack Obama has a game plan: he wants to tackle the quagmire of Americas inner cities. Federal money alone wont do it, he argues. The deeper problem is that those communities are unorganized. We need to get more people planning. For preparation, Harvard Law School is a perfect place to examine how the power structure works. It gives you a certain language. When hes fluent, hell be able to translate the language of the streets (which I can speak) into the language of the Establishment, and vice versa. The sense of mission derives in part from his experiences in the Third World. He saw brutal poverty while growing up in Singapore (Editors note: We should have said Indonesia.) with his mother, an anthropologist, and his half-brothers and -sisters in Kenya still live hand to mouth at times. Obama says that his late fathers experience in the Kenyan government left him a broken and bitter man, and he responds warily to the assumption that he himself will run for office. If I go into politics it should grow out of work Ive done on the local level, not because Im some media creation. Though, as media creations go, hed be a pretty good one.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1990/06/obama199006