A Place in Between

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Growing Up Biracial

His mother is white and from Kansas. His father is from Africa; and his wife's name is Michele. Will Jawando, a former staffer to Sen. Barack Obama, says that deciding whether he feels more black or white was a matter decided for him by his appearance and society.

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Jawando remembers being self-conscious about his biracial identity growing up. Just having his white mother pick him up from school would sometimes make him feel uncomfortable.

"How people see you has an impact on how you see yourself," he said. "The schools I attended and the communities where I lived were mostly black. You're around black people, you look that way, most people perceive you that way and you try to fit in, especially early on."

Jawando is light-skinned, but not so light, he says, that anyone would wonder if he had a white parent, Like Obama's father, Jawando's, though physically present until he was 8, did not play a big role in his young life. He has since tried to repair that relationship.

After reading Obama's "Dreams From My Father," Jawando wrote him a letter informing him of their striking biographical similarities and letting him know that he'd be honored to work for the newly elected senator. "I wrote it knowing I wouldn't get a response, which I didn't," Jawando recalled. "It was just something I needed to do."

In the fall of 2004, Jawando started law school at Catholic University, where he had also received his bachelor's degree and tussled a bit with the administration when he tried to start an NAACP chapter. He got a legal fellowship in the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then House minority leader. He started dropping by Obama's office informally and developing relationships with staffers -- among them Michael Strautmanis, then Obama's chief counsel.

When Strautmanis heard Jawando's story, he couldn't believe it. "Man, I'm calling Barack right now," he told Jawando. And when Obama returned to the office, the two were introduced. Obama, too, was in disbelief, Jawando recalls, and said, "What? You my brother or something?" This was in late 2005. By the spring of 2006, Obama's office had hired Jawando. When the senator introduced him at a staff meeting, he said: "We have William Jawando, who apparently is my long-lost brother." The staff cracked up.

Jawando left Obama's office in early 2007 when the senator's presidential campaign got underway. He wanted to continue focusing on legislative issues, and Brown offered an opportunity to be his point person on education and the judiciary.

Though he worked for Obama, Jawando has never had an opportunity to explore their shared identity, to flesh out what he knows about the senator from his reading. "I've never had the in-depth biracial talk with Barack. Maybe in the second term, when he settles in," Jawando quips. "That's not a 10-minute conversation."

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In "Dreams From My Father," Obama poses the question that would hover over his post-adolescent life: "Where did I belong?" He was two years from graduation at Columbia University and felt "like a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge," he writes, with no idea what he was going to do with his future or even where he would live. He had put Hawaii in the rear-view mirror and could no longer imagine settling there. Africa? It was too late to claim his father's native land as his own.

"And if I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place," Obama writes. "What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I might exchange on the a basketball court. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments."