Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

"[F]or the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been." 

Obama inscribes himself here as a placeholder for his family's dreams, particularly those of his father. The painful nature of this identity explains to a large degree why Obama's relationship with his father was such a difficult one and why Obama is only able to mature once he decides for himself who and what he wants to be.

"The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." 

This moment, which takes place in the library of the American embassy in Djakarta (where Ann works), represents Obama's first inkling that racism and internalized racism exist. 

"[S]he was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism. She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my father. Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power." 

In this quote, Obama describes the central beliefs of his mother, beliefs that still form an important part of Obama's perspectives on life. Ann's decision to paint Obama Sr. as a hero and exemplar of African manhood are part of the mythology surrounding Obama Sr.

"To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens we were to carry with style." 

Obama's mother also teaches her son to see African-American identity and history as being worthy of celebration and characterized by what Obama calls a certain notion of "cool" that are part of Obama's own perception of what it means to be African American.

"I was telling them was a lie, something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother. After a week of my father in the flesh, I had decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim—or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening." 

This quote describes both Obama's growing consciousness as a child of the absence of his father and his attempt to fill in that absence with fabulous stories about his father. His father's visit when Obama is ten begins the process of stripping away the idealized image Obama has of his father during these years.

"TV, movies, the radio; those were the places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style. I couldn’t croon like Marvin Gaye, but I could learn to dance all the Soul Train steps. I couldn’t pack a gun like Shaft or Superfly, but I could sure enough curse like Richard Pryor. And I could play basketball, with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent." 

Lacking a consistent African-American community, Obama gleans what he can of African-American identity from other sources. His efforts to engage with the surface aspects of African-American culture underscore the significant impact of the struggle over racial identity on his life.

"Perhaps if we had been living in New York or L.A., I would have been quicker to pick up the rules of the high-stake game we were playing. As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere. Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with me." 

As the child of a white mother and a black father, Obama learns to "code-switch" by utilizing various aspects of his identity depending upon the context. Obama's sense of himself is destabilized by this code-switching, however, and he frequently finds himself feeling inauthentic.

"We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. […] In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger." 

As a teenager in Hawaii, Obama continues to struggle with his racial identity. In this quote, Obama represents his dark vision of what it means to be African American during those years. This depressing vision of African-American identity is one of the motivations for Obama's aimlessness during these years.

“Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; […] All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border." 

In an effort to come to a better understanding of African American identity, Obama reads books by African American writers. Obama latches onto the idea of self-creation after reading Malcolm X but learns early on that failing to acknowledge his white family is impossible.

"But I hadn’t grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren’t defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals." 

In this quote, Obama represents his continued feelings of inauthenticity as he grapples with his racial identity while a student at Occidental. The closest analogy Obama is able to find to his own struggles is one that relates to class.

"'Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Obama. It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help. Children who are depending on you. They’re not interested in your irony or your sophistication or your ego getting bruised. And neither am I.'” 

This quote is one taken from a conversation Obama has with Regina, a fellow African American student at Occidental who takes Obama to task for being so self-involved and cynical. Regina's intervention in this quote sets Obama on a path to creating an African-American identity that is built upon service to the African-American community.

"My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there." 

At the end of his time at Occidental, Obama comes to understand that aside from race, the values and choices that he makes are important aspects of identity. This epiphany helps his to escape his sense of being stuck.

"I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son. I turned on the light and dug out his old letters. I remembered his only visit—the basketball he had given me and how he had taught me to dance. And I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint." 

The death of Obama Sr. when Obama is 21 does not at first register with Obama. Almost a year after Obama Sr.'s death, however, Obama at last becomes self-aware with regards to the way the image of his father has influenced his identity.

"Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned—because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life." 

This quote represents Obama's more mature perspective on what it means to be African American and the centrality of service and sacrifice to his ability to claim that identity for his own.

"I realized then, standing in an empty McDonald’s parking lot in the South Side of Chicago, that I was a heretic. Or worse—for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt." 

As Obama works with church groups in Chicago, he becomes aware of the negative impact that a lack of faith has on his ability to become a part of the African-American community in Chicago. This moment in the parking lot represents his realization that part of his feeling of dislocation is caused by that lack of faith. 

"[I]t was different for black folks." 

As Obama becomes a more seasoned community organizer, he eventually comes to recognize that Marty Kaufman, despite his good intentions, fails to recognize the added burden that racial prejudice has on the outcomes for African Americans. Obama internalizes this lesson and uses it to become a more successful community organizer.

"That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories." 

Part of Obama's education as a community organizer (and a politician) is the importance of listening to the stories people tell about themselves. This quote and his naming of people's individual stories of "sacred" (190) highlight an important element of Obama's charisma and the evolution of his ideas about how to work with people.

"Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes?" 

Obama identifies internalized racism as one of the significant challenges to achieving lasting change in America and escaping the "nightmare vision"(86) of race that haunts many African Americans. In this quote, Obama questions whether hatred of whites is a necessary step in liberating African Americans. 

"All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret."

Auma's stories about Obama Sr. serve as a revelation about how flawed Obama Sr. was as a political figure and a father. Although Obama is disappointed to learn about these aspects of his father's personality, Obama feels liberated by his more realistic understanding of the man his father was.

"And in that single note—hope!—I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world."

Before leaving church, Obama has a deeply emotional experience while listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright give a sermon with the title of "The Audacity of Hope." The sermon, which focuses on the connections between resilience in the face of despair in Biblical times and the lives of African Americans, marks Obama's increasing emphasis on religion as an important aspect of his racial identity.

"For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal." 

Obama feels a fleeting moment of liberation in Kenya, a majority black society in which being a black person is so common as to cease to be the determining factor in people's perceptions of themselves and others. That moment of liberation in an all-black society is a convention of African American travel narratives about Africa.

"It was the same dilemma that old Frank had posed to me the year I left Hawaii, the same tensions that certain children in Altgeld might suffer if they took too much pleasure in doing their schoolwork, the same perverse survivor’s guilt that I could expect to experience if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the throngs of young black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office. Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind."

Obama and all of his siblings struggle with the tension between personal ambition and responsibilities to family and community. This struggle is one that Obama marks as a connection between Kenyan society and African-American society. This tension is an important element of racial identity that Obama explores throughout the memoir.

"It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place." 

Obama's travel to Kenya and interactions with his family prove to be important experiences that allow Obama to lay to rest his struggle with his father's legacy and his uncertainty about his own identity. This quote reflects one moment during which Obama recognizes the impact of the trip to Kenya on his identity.