In case you missed it, the Chicago Tribune ran a 4,346-word front page profile yesterday on Barack Obama's upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia. It makes for fairly interesting reading, though there aren't any bombshell revelations. However, here's one thing that caught my eye:

Every senior graduating from Punahou gets to design a quarter-page in the yearbook. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or quotes that best represent them.

On page 271 of the 1979 Oahuan, Obama's entry reflects the crossroads he found himself at as he prepared for life beyond Hawaii. He thanked "Tut and Gramps," his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn't mention his faraway mother.

He also thanked the "Choom Gang," a reference to "chooming," Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Obama admits in "Dreams" that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote in "Dreams."

This is a perfect example of where some of the "is he black enough" suspicion in the African-American community comes from. In "Dreams," Obama cast his drug use as being derived from the same pressures and influences that drive young black men in places like Detroit, DC, or Compton to become "junkies" when in fact he was hanging out at a prestigious private school in Hawaii "chooming" with his buddies. To suggest there's some sort of shared experience between the two seems like an obvious case of apples and oranges.