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Barack ObamaDreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Chicago”
Chapter 12 Summary
At the start of Chapter 12, Obama is at the Roseland MET jobs intake center with Rafiq as he prepares for the opening. Obama has agreed to hold the opening ceremony for the center at Rafiq's warehouse in the neighborhood. Many people, including Reverend Smalls and several aldermen, are excited about the opening ceremony because Mayor Washington has promised to make an appearance. The one thing Obama has asked of his staff is to recruit Washington for a DCP rally in the fall.
When Washington arrives, the crowd grows excited. When the mayor enters the room, he heads for and acknowledges Angela Rider (one of Obama's staff members) instead of engaging with Obama and some of the others who are eager to meet him. After Washington departs, the women on Obama's staff gush over all the attention Washington gave to Angela, but Obama is only concerned about whether Angela got the mayor to commit to the fall rally. Obama leaves in frustration. When Will tells him to he should lighten up and that Obama's impatience is the result of a desire to prove something, Obama denies the accusation.
In the aftermath of the success with the center and other projects, Obama's political stock rises, and he receives more invitations to participate in important projects with important people. Even Obama's own staff is impressed with him. Obama feels unsettled, however, perhaps because of the memories stirred by Auma's visit.
Meanwhile, Marty Kaufman informs Obama that he is ready to move on to start a new organization in Gary, Indiana. When Kaufman tries to convince Obama to come to Gary with him, Obama rejects the offer out of a sense of loyalty. Although Obama acknowledges that achieving real change in the South Side is difficult,he feels a sense of kinship with Mayor Washington, whom he suspects must have the same kind of constraints on what he can do.
Obama's sense of restlessness finally lifts when Dr. Martha Collier, principal at an Altgeld Elementary School, allows him to begin work with a parent-child group for students on campus. Obama learns that these parents (primarily young women) have learned to use the system to survive, but they still have dreams. Obama decides to work with the parents to force the management and the city to improve the living conditions and services at Altgeld.
The first issue the group zeroes in on is finding out if asbestos is in the apartments after Sadie, one of the parents, discovers a request for bids to remove asbestos from the management's office at Altgeld. Although Sadie is shy, Obama decides to support her in her demand that management and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) let Altgeld residents know if asbestos is in their apartments. When confronted, Mr. Anderson, the manager, claims that the apartments are free of asbestos and have been tested. Sadie departs only after receiving Anderson's word that these reports will be made available to the residents.
When Anderson continues to delay in fulfilling his promise, Obama tells Sadie that they will need to confront the CHA executive director to get answers. Only eight parents show up to accompany Sadie and Obama on the day of the meeting. When the group arrives at the executive director's office, the administrative assistant tells them the director is out. After reporters rush in to cover the meeting and Sadie begins running the press conference, an assistant finally takes the group back and explains to them that no tests have actually been completed.The assistant promises to make sure the tests are completed, and the group leaves after informing the reporters that a date has been set for a follow-up meeting with the director. Obama feels some measure of satisfaction and encouragement over this success.
When the day of the community meeting with the director arrives, Obama advises the parents participating not to allow the director to monopolize the microphone. The press will be there, so Obama believes that the meeting is an opportunity for the Altgeld residents to be heard at last. The meeting is far from successful. The director arrives late, and (remembering Obama's advice that they should not allow the director to dominate the conversation) Linda continually jerks the microphone away from the director when he attempts to answer her questions. The director walks out.
Later, however, the CHA sends people to clean up the asbestos and promises to secure federal funding to complete the project. When the budget comes in, the CHA tells the residents they can have plumbing repairs or asbestos clean-up with the reduced funding they are given by the federal government. Many residents (including Sadie), lose interest in working with DCP because they lose faith that real change can be advanced by the organization.
Chapter 13 Summary
Roy feels the great burden of being the eldest son, a role that comes with weighty responsibilities in Luo culture. Roy dreams of building a house in Kenya and reuniting the family, in fact. Obama promises to help with this responsibility, but this offer does nothing to alleviate Roy's worries. As Obama returns to Chicago, he gets the vague sense that Roy is in some kind of danger.
When Obama gets back, Johnnie tells him funding and other plans for the mentoring program are moving forward. The one problem is that the principal at the school is pressuring DCP to hire both his wife and daughter to work in the program (including the directorship for the wife). The two men are disappointed but eventually laugh at the brazenness of this corrupt action on the part of the principal.
That night Obama yells at a car of young African Americans who are playing their music loudly at midnight. As he attempts to see who is in the car, Obama realizes that he is different from these young men in that even as a boy he had a sense that he had a place in the social order of the world. When he realizes that these young men do not believe they have such a stake, Obama suddenly becomes afraid for and of the young men.
Chapter 14 Summary
Recognizing a kindred spirit, several members ask Obama to consider joining the church, but Obama remains skeptical of himself and his own motives for making such a move.
Mayor Washington dies on the eve of Thanksgiving. The entire African-American community of Chicago engages in both public and private grieving. In the absence of a succession plan, Washington's coalition engages in deal-making with the old political machine that ran Chicago prior to Washington's election. Obama is disgusted by what he sees.
The following February, Obama is accepted into Harvard. At a planning meeting with his partners in school reform and his staff, Obama announces his departure and the plan for Johnnie to succeed him in running DCP. Mary is upset with him, but Will tells Obama that it is only three years and that he intuitively knows that Obama will return.
Obama attends a service at Trinity the following Sunday. Reverend's Wrights sermon, "The Audacity of Hope," focuses on the theme of hope in times of despair from Biblical times to the present. Wright's sermon convinces Obama that faith gives African Americans "a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shamed about, memories more accessible than those of ancient Egypt, memories that all people might study and cherish—and with which we could start to rebuild" (294). Obama is so moved by this vision of community and hope that he cries.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
Obama continues to consolidate his identity as an activist and an African-American Midwesterner in these chapters. The most significant developments in these chapters, however, are Obama's early efforts to come to terms with what he is learning about the African-American community as represented in Chicago, particularly with regards to the hollowing out of urban communities, the problem with black nationalism, and the role of the black church in sustaining African Americans.
While Obama has become increasingly deft at navigating the treacherous world of Chicago politics, he has begun to notice some seemingly intractable problems as he works in the black communities of Chicago. Obama's encounters with black parents and their disaffected children are deeply concerning to Obama, particularly since these parents and their children represent the next generation of African Americans. Obama and Johnnie's encounter with gun-wielding teens, Kyle's explosive temper on the basketball court, and Obama's second-guessing of himself when he complains about the loud music being played by a group of young, African-American men after midnight are all illustrations of the challenges faced by young black people and the threats the emerge from a failure of hope. The troubles of Chicago have of course grown only worse in the years since the publication of the memoir, so Obama's concern seems prescient.
Obama also confronts an important strain of thought in African-American public life and politics—black nationalism—as he attempts to work with Rafiq. Obama examines black nationalism as a philosophy and political program and finds it wanting on many levels. His rejection of black nationalism is a definitive moment in his politics and in terms of how he defines himself as an African American.Obama's argument against black nationalism as a reasonable response to white racism is rooted in a rejection of the idea of racial purity (not surprising given his background) and Obama's perspective that black nationalism is simply impractical in a country dominated numerically by whites. Obama is at his most tentative in the passages in which he discusses black nationalism, however, perhaps a reflection of his discomfort with aiming a critique at his adopted community.
Finally, Obama undergoes an important rite of passage for many African Americans, namely, a religious conversion experience that he refuses to name as such. One of the bases of Obama's sense that he is an outsider in America when it comes to African-American identity is that he is not particularly religious. As Reverend Phillips explains to Obama, the black church has served as an important site in the constitution and sustenance of African-American culture; Obama's refusal/failure to engage in the important community ritual of attending church marks him as different and excludes him from an important institutional base for black politics in America.
Obama evinces a certain level of unease when it comes to discussing his faith in the memoir. He explicitly states that he wants to avoid the appearance of acting out of expedience when it comes to becoming a member of the church, so perhaps the refusal to name his experience in Wright's church as a conversion is simply out of respect for something that is personally meaningful to him. He instead presents his response to Reverend Wright's sermon, "The Audacity of Hope," as a profoundly emotional experience that provides another basis for identifying with the black community.
Information outside of the text—including the fact that Obama titled his pre-presidential book The Audacity of Hope and that Obama touched on the same themes in his 2004 address to at the Democratic nominating convention (his introduction to the national political stage)—would seem to indicate that this religious experience changed the trajectory of his life as an African-American man.
This section of the memoir shows Obama engaging with important aspects of African-American culture, including the problem of urban decay, black nationalism, and faith. Obama's clarification of where he stands with regards to these issues shows his firm identification with African-American identity.
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