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Madelyn 'Toot' Dunham

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Celebrity's Relative

The Resume

    (October 26, 1922-November 2, 2008)
    Born in Peru, Kansas
    Birth name was Madelyn Lee Payne
    Barack Obama's grandmother (maternal)
    Married husband Stanley Armour Dunham, in 1940
    Raised grandson Barack Obama from the age of ten onward from their Honolulu residency
    Vice President at the Bank of Hawaii (1970-86)
    Nickname 'Toot' is short for 'tutu' (the Hawaiian word for grandmother)

Why she might be annoying:

    She and her husband actively opposed their daughter's marriage to Barack Obama, Sr.
    She inadvertently found herself at the center of controversy after tapes of Jeremiah Wright's sermons surfaced and threatened to derail her grandson's Presidential campaign.
    In a speech addressing the controversy, Obama invoked her by saying: 'I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother ... a woman who helped raise me [but] who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.'
    Obama would elaborate on the remarks two days later, telling a radio interviewer: '[My grandmother] is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know ... there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.'
    Although generally well received, the speech and later comments were subsequently interpreted by some critics as a candidate 'throwing his own grandmother under the bus.'

Why she might not be annoying:

    She married Stanley Dunham on the night of her senior prom.
    Her brother was part of the Infantry Division that liberated the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald during World War II.
    She was one of the first women to be promoted to vice president of a bank in Hawaii.
    She and her husband took on the responsibilities of actually raising Barack while his mother pursued her studies in Indonesia.
    Although estranged from her daughter Ann, they reconciled after her daughter was diagnosed with uterine cancer, prompting her to move back home (she died within months).
    She died two days before her grandson was elected President.
    Barack Obama called her 'the rock of the family,' further saying 'whatever strength, discipline that I have comes from her.'

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 5 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 12 Votes: 91.67% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 10 Votes: 70.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 94 Votes: 55.32% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 86 Votes: 52.33% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 29 Votes: 51.72% Annoying