Ray

After Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, his name came up more often in my conversations with my mother. Now that he was in the spotlight, so were all the places he'd been and the people that he'd known. Many of them are my old Punahou classmates, teachers, and coaches. They add to my two degrees of Barack Obama.

One evening at my last Punahou reunion, Keith Kakugawa's name came up in a conversation with some old classmates. Kakugawa, or Kaku, had graduated from high school with us. "Have you heard? Kaku's the first person from our class to have his picture on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.", someone pronounced. Everyone sort of grinned and chuckled over their cocktails. I had no idea what they were talking about. I wasn't in on the joke.

The last time I had seen and spoken to Kaku was at our tenth reunion many years before. He seemed to be trying to make a life for himself in LA like me. He had made an effort to attend the reunion, most graduates don't, and seemed to be doing okay.

As the conversation continued, I found why Kaku was the butt of their little joke. They explained, to my disappointment, that he'd been in and out of jail for drugs. He was living in out of an abandon car somewhere in South Central LA and had tried to call Barry Obama for money. I was pretty dismayed. Here were our classmates making fun of him in light of how fortunate and successful most of us were. None of them would last an hour alone in South Central.

"Poor Keith, what the hell happened to him?", I thought to myself. What went wrong?

After I returned home to the mainland I began reading articles about Obama on various news sites. From these articles I learned that he had written a book "Dreams From My Father" that included part of his life growing up in Hawaii. In it he discusses a person named "Ray" who helped Barry shape his search for his racial identity.

Investigative journalists had unveiled "Ray" as Keith Kakugawa. Reporters from the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the London Times, and so on had interviewed and photographed him. There was Kaku making headlines living out a car! According to this book and all this press, Kaku and Barry were friends in high school and had spent a lot of time together.

All of a sudden this started to get personal for me.

I was in Kaku's class for three years. Having arrived at Punhahou in ninth or tenth grade from the mainland, he was one of the newer kids there. I was one of the old-timers. Somehow we developed an unlikely friendship, but we did share a passion for sports.

Obama's depiction of Ray in "Dreams", although somewhat dramatized, is consistent with my one-on-one talks with Kaku over the years. I knew many who considered him "abrasive" or to have a chip on his shoulder. He didn't seem to mind me calling his bluff or poking fun at him. I also don't think many knew where he was coming from. However, the notion of Kaku being a "perfect mix", as some articles pointed out, is not consistent with mine. I thought Kaku was funny but sensitive, passionate, hard-headed, and in the very tough position of being a new kid and being of African-Japanese-Hawaiian (or Hawaiian-Japanese-African?) descent.

He did, however, seem to embrace more of his African-American heritage when speaking. I remember laughing the first time he called me "chump". I'd been called far worst. In some ways, he was the most outspoken person in our class. At least with me, he always had an ear.

Some articles attempted to discredit or question Obama's depiction of Ray as an "angry black" referring to him instead as a "perfect mix" in Hawaii's multi-racial society. However, an African-Japanese-Hawaiian person doesn't exactly epitomize the perfect mixture for the type of melting-pot we were living in at that time. There was only one other person of that perfect mix I knew of and that was Kaku's younger brother. Keith may have been "black" and, at times, may have been "angry", but he just wanted to be heard like the rest of us.

In Barry's senior yearbook section, he thanks his grandparents and a person named "Ray", but not his mother. Why wouldn't Barry thank his friend "Keith" or "Kaku"? Why use a pseudonym or code name "Ray" for someone so influential in searching for his place in America?