Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Obama is not a first-time visitor to Chicago. He visited the city 14 years earlier on a trip with Toot and his mother. As he drives through the city on his own in the present, he thinks of how much prettier the city is this time, the many African Americans who came to the city during the Great Migration (including Frank and writer Richard Wright), and Regina as a little girl in the city.

When Obama goes to a black barbershop to get a trim, he overhears patrons and barbers discussing how unfair it is that the city's aldermen complain about Mayor Washington's decision to offer patronage to African Americans by awarding them jobs and contracts. A barber explains to Obama that Washington's election made them feel for the first time that they were citizens on equal footing with everyone else.Obama remembers feeling pride when he read about the election, but his feelings lacked the emotional connection to Washington that he senses in the barbershop.

Later that day, Kaufman takes Obama to see a derelict steel mill and talks about how difficult it is to get people to transcend racial barriers so that they can organize and get their jobs back. Kaufman founded the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) to get churches from multiple denominations involved with unionization and efforts to force the city to bring back the manufacturing jobs that had been the foundation for the economic security of all races. When Kaufman explains that he sees bankers and corporations as the enemies of progress, Obama realizes that Kaufman has some idealism underneath his cynical exterior.

Kaufman then takes Obama to a rally, where Obama meets more of DCP's staff, including Will, Shirley, Angela, and Mona (all African Americans). The women in particular tell him how glad they are to see him, but they also explain that they really need to talk with him later. After sitting through the uninspiring rally, Obama learns more about his co-workers as they take a bus back into the city. Will is a former banker who decided to become a janitor and work in the church after being laid off. He decries the middle-class values that taint African-Americans' ability to focus on the need to uplift others. Will sometimes wears a clerical collar and even calls himself a minister, despite the fact that he is not ordained by any church.

The next day, Kaufman sets Obama to work interviewing people to uncover what each person's self-interest is. What Obama discovers is that his interviewees are proud of their accomplishments but nervous about the future because of "this dual senseof individual advancement and collective decline"(157) in a city that seems to be falling apart due to white flight to the suburbs and factory closings. The only thing that seems to unite everyone is their emotional connection to Harold Washington.Kaufman tells Obama that his interviews are too abstract. Obama needs to uncover people's emotional centers and to form relationships with them if he hopes to get them to act. Obama is upset at first by this hard-nosed perspective, but he eventually accepts that Kaufman is correct.

With this advice in mind, Obama discovers an important issue—the lack of police response to gang activity in African-American neighborhoods. Using his relationship with his interviewees, Obama schedules a meeting with ministers in a Baptist church in the neighborhood to ask for their support in turning out participants for a meeting with the police district commander on the issue.The meeting fails to gain the support Obama needs because the ministers distrust the motives of whites and white churches when it comes to community activism. Reverend Smalls, one of the ministers at the meeting, tells Obama that now that Washington is the mayor, people can work directly with City Hall instead of community activists.

Obama's meeting on crime and police response is also a failure. After the meeting, Kaufman explains that the meeting failed because the issue was too general, and Obama should have established stronger relations with community leaders who could turn people out for the meeting. When Obama tells Kaufman about Reverend Smalls' negative reaction to his proposal, Kaufman tells Obama that he has had run-ins with Smalls before and that Smalls is just a politician despite being a minster.

A discouraged Obama reflects on what Kaufman told him and ultimately concludes that "in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s" (163). Obama also realizes that he is "a heretic. Or worse—for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt" (163).

By this point, Obama has become more aware of how discouraged his DCP staff members are by Kaufman's dismissive treatment of them, his failure to focus on Altgeld (a failed housing project located on environmentally precarious land), and the poor performance of a jobs program that Kaufman had handed over to a suburban university to manage.

Although Kaufman claims Angela and others in the city are upset with him because he refuses to hire them to run these programs, Obama recognizes that Kaufman has not yet managed to sell his co-workers and the communities in which he works on the relevance of his plans to the specific concerns of African Americans.

On this specific day, Obama meets with his staff at St. Catherine's Church (their home base).Angela, Will, and Mona tell Obama they are so fed up with Kaufman that they all plan to quit. Obama manages to convince them to stay for the time being by angrily reminding them that the community is depending on them.

Will later suggests that that they organize people by holding street-corner meetings, an idea that Obama at first greets with skepticism. The meetings generate so much interest that a regular meeting in the basement of the church is established. Obama comes to know Mary, one of his co-workers and a single mother, as she sets up one of these meetings.

At one of the meetings, Will surprises Obama by asking attendees to share personal experiences about why they want to be activists in the community. Will shares an emotional perspective that emphasizes how concerned he is that children no longer seem joyful because of changes in the community. His openness and tears inspire the attendees to share their concerns and hopes about the same issue. Obama's staff members remark after the meeting that Obama did not share why he was involved.

A week later, Obama and his staff meet Rafiq al Shabazz, president of a Roseland community organization dedicated to black nationalist business and community development programs. They then meet Mr. Foster, the former president of the Roseland Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Foster tells them that organizing the African-American community is a losing proposition because it refuses to emulate Koreans, who hire family and cooperate in order to thrive.

On his way from this meeting, Obama sees an open Korean market that reminds him of the same kind of stores he remembers from Indonesia. Obama realizes that such businesses depend on a coherent culture in order to thrive, but African Americans in the South Side of Chicago lack this essential context. Obama believes that the same lack of coherence that plagues African Americans will be repeated in places like Indonesia once the manufacturing jobs are lost there as well.

Obama and his staff's last stop is supposed to be a meeting with the administrator of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET), but the administrator is gone by the time they arrive. Obama notices when he looks at the MET brochures that none of their job training sites are located in the South Side. Obama decides to make a push to build a center in one neighborhood the focus of his next organizing campaign.

Obama and his staff engage in rigorous preparation for a community meeting with the director of the program, and the meeting ends in success when the director promises to build the center within in six months. Obama and his co-workers are gratified with their success. Obama's sense of encouragement is disrupted only by a yelling match with a drunk man who refuses his help.

As winter arrives, Obama struggles to adjust to the cold, blustery weather and begins to socialize more with his staff. He also comes to realize that understanding the "[s]acred stories"(190) that explain people's personal motivations in life is essential in being an effective leader. Obama even begins to share the details of his unusual story, cementing his place in the community.

Obama gets closer to Ruby, a volunteer from Altgeldand a single, African-American mother of a fourteen-year-old boy. Obama is shocked one day when Ruby shows up in his office wearing contact lenses that change her eyes from their natural brown to blue. Her choice forces Obama to reflect on the impact of internalized racism on the black psyche and to question his belief that a focus on practical, concrete programs instead of self-esteem is enough to achieve lasting change. "Could Ruby," Obama wonders, "love herself without hating blue eyes?" (195)

Rafiq's frequent outbursts on the subject of racially-motivated conspiracies against African American brings some tension into the DCP's efforts to partner with him in building the MET jobs center.Rafiq, a former gang member who converted to Islam, distrusts whites deeply and—like many black nationalists—uses a "steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country[…]as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair"(198).

This turn makes Obama uncomfortable, however, because it contradicts the "morality of subtle distinctions"(199) between white malice and white indifference he had learned from his mother.Even more concerning to Obama is that this form of black nationalism does not seem capable of turning out enough people to effect change without something like Harold Washington's campaign to unite people.Worse still is that some of the nationalist rhetoric at times even takes the form of racist speech against other ethnic groups such as Jews and Asians.Ultimately, Obama concludes that "purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem than it could for mine" (204).

After a visit to his family, Obama takes Ruby out to eat and to see Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, a play that focuses on the centrality of black women's self-love to survival. Ruby is deeply moved by the performance.

Auma, Obama's half-sister, comes to visit him in Chicago. Obama realizes as he embraces his sister at the airport that his love for her is deep despite their lack of contact over the years. Obama and his sister share what has happened in their lives so far, including the stories of their romantic relationships. Obama tells Auma about an extended relationship he had with a white woman in New York. The relationship ended when Obama realized that as the person of color in the relationship, he would always have to be the one to enter her world and not vice versa. For her part, Auma is now a student in Germany and dates a German student named Otto, whom she loves.

The two siblings discuss their father infrequently. When Auma does share some memories of their father, they are not good ones. Auma recalls that she and her brother Roy were forced to move in with Obama Sr. when he married Ruth, another American woman, after the visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten. In those days, Obama Sr. had a respectable job with an American oil company in Kenya, and he had (in keeping with tradition) several wives and multiple children whom Auma nevermet until later.

Auma's life took a turn for the worse when Ruth had children of her own (Mark and David) with Obama Sr. and favored her own children over Auma and Roy. Obama Sr. went to work for the government but fell out of favor with the ruling party in Kenya because he was Luo and because he publicly and loudly rejected tribalism. He even went as far as to offend Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first black prime minister, and was unable to find decent work a result. Obama Sr. eventually found a job, but it did not pay well.

By then, Obama Sr. was also a heavy drinker. Ruth left, and when Obama Sr. had a car accident while drinking, he lost his job. It was during this time that Obama Sr. returned to Hawaii in a failed effort to get Ann and his son to come back to Kenya.When Obama Sr. returned, he and the two children were forced to depend on family and eventually landed in a place in a bad part of town. The children, now pre-teens, were forced to fend for themselves. Roy, unable to deal with conflicts with his father, left Auma alone to address her father's demands.

Auma got a scholarship to go to a prestigious girl's high school where she was a boarder. In her junior year, Kenyatta died, and Obama Sr. once again was able to get a government job. Her father was by then a bitter man, however. When Auma was awarded a scholarship to study in Germany, she left without saying goodbye to avoid the possibility that her father might interfere with her student visa.

Her father once visited her in Germany after attending a conference in Europe and even took her to London to show her off to his friends there. In what would be one of her last conversations with her father, Auma told her father he had the chance to do right by George, his last child.Obama Sr. died in Kenya shortly after this conversation. Back in the present, Obama comforts Auma as she cries over what might have been had her father lived to cultivate an adult relationship with her. She tells Obama that their father bragged about him all the time.

As Auma falls asleep, Obama struggles to reconcile his image of his father as the ideal black man with the frail and flawed individual described by Auma. Obama feels strangely liberated as he realizes he need no longer be obsessed with trying to live up to his father's standards or image. That sense of freedom is tempered with the realization that if his father was susceptible to failure and weakness, he might be as well. Obama recognizes the same fear in Auma. Ten days later, Auma sits in the airport and tells Obama about visiting Alego and Home Square, the family's land back in Kenya and the place where their father is buried. She tells Obama that they need to go there.