92. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance - Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father is the autobiography of President Obama, published in 1995 after he was elected to be the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, but before the start of his political career. In addition to telling the story of his life, Obama talks a lot about his personal experiences with race and discovering his identity.

Most of us know the basics of Obama's life: he was born in Hawaii to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, and his parents separated when he was just two years old. Obama's image of his absent father was created by stories told by his mother and her parents; he didn't get to spend time with his father until he was ten years old when his father came to Hawaii for a month-long visit. His father died in a drunk driving car accident in 1982.

Obama moved with his mother to Indonesia when she married Lolo Soetoro, but returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents when he was ten years old for better educational opportunities. He stayed there until the end of high school, after which he moved to LA where he attended Occidental College. In discussing his freshman year, Obama says:

... [O]ur worries seemed indistinguishable from those of the white kids around us. Surviving classes. Finding a well-paying gig after graduation. Trying to get laid. I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren’t interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.

Even though this next passage is a bit long, it has so much depth:

That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives--although that's what we tell ourselves--but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Obama finished up his last two years of college at Columbia University and then moved to Chicago where he worked for a non-profit organization doing community organizing for the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the South Side. It was during this time that he decided to visit Kenya for the first time. On his way there, the flight attendant looks at Obama and asks him if he is related to Dr. Obama (i.e. Obama Sr.). It turns out their families were close.

I found myself trying to prolong the conversation, encouraged less by Miss Omoro’s beauty – she had mentioned a fiance’ – than by the fact that she’d recognized my name. That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A. or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, “Oh, you are so and so’s son.” No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue.

Something that came to mind after having read this book and Sarah Palin's book was Palin's comment during the 2008 campaign about how she loved to visit the "pro-America" parts of the country - implicitly implying that there were some parts of the country that she believed to not be "pro-America." Even though she later apologized for that comment, her book, in my opinion, maintained that same tone: the people who are "patriotic" and "so American" are the people who are most similar to her America. This memoir by Obama was very revealing and deep (and nonpartisan) and told so much about his life and lives of the poor black people in Chicago's projects. I hope Sarah Palin some day realizes that those people are just as "American" as the white farmers in rural America and "Joe the plumber."

Definitely a wonderful book, and I look forward to reading The Audacity of Hope.