The Constant Reader –

By Claudette Upton

Title: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Author: Barack Obama

Category: Personal memoir

Published: 1995, 2004 

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, a Random House imprint

ISBN: 1-4000-8277-3

I’m a middle-aged white woman who was raised in Asheville by enlightened, liberal parents. My good liberal arts education included reading James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. My own inclinations led me to the works of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X and later to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other outspoken (uppity) women of every color and ethnicity.

But I have never read a book about
race that is as clear, as articulate, as transformative as Barack
Obama\’s memoir, written when he was only 33.

The Chicago Democrat, currently our only black Senator, was born to a Kenyan man of the Luo tribe and a white American woman from the Midwest. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii, were young and idealistic — and living in what was arguably the most harmonious multiracial state in the country. But Barack Senior left his wife and son when the boy was only two, first to continue his education at Harvard and ultimately to return to a newly independent Kenya. Barack saw him only one more time, at the age of ten, when his father (who by then had six other children in Africa) came to visit his American family for a month. He died in a car crash when Barack was 21. And so, like many people with absent fathers, Barack grew up believing in a myth, a legend, a father who was larger than life.

The story of his journey, physical and spiritual, to find his father\’s truth and discover the real meaning of family and community is also, inescapably, a story of race — of a black man, raised in a white world, finding his place in a country and a world where black people struggle every day to overcome. Race was at the root of the “constant, crippling fear that I didn\’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn\’t I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.”

His journey began in the mid-1970s, when he was in tenth grade in prep school (one of only a handful of black students) in Hawaii. His guide was Ray, an Army brat from Los Angeles, two years older and much more streetwise than Barack.

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man\’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man\’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher ‚Ķ wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn\’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his.”

“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. . . . Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”

Obama\’s words are unforgiving and unforgettable; he doesn\’t speak the language of compromise.

Through college, first in California and then in New York, he continued to alternately explore what it means to be black in America and escape through drugs and alcohol. Eventually he became a community organizer in one of Chicago\’s infamous projects, where his combination of idealism and practicality made him — sometimes — surprisingly effective. And then his African sister visited, and he discovered some painful truths about his late father, whose great promise had in the end been defeated.

“It was into my father\’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I\’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew ‚Ķ fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own — my father\’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people\’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

“The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.”

At 25, Barack traveled to Kenya to meet his father\’s people and nourish his confused soul. Kenya, independent since 1963, governed by black Africans — where, on Barack\’s second day in country, he and his sister were treated like second-class citizens in a Nairobi restaurant, ignored by the African waiters hastening to the tables occupied by white tourists.

“Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to myself. He would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of “Uhuru!” and the raising of new flags. But such memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and na?Øve. He\’s learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built.”

“If he is ambitious he will do his best to learn the white man\’s language and use the white man\’s machines, trying to make ends meet the same way the computer repairman in Newark or the bus driver back in Chicago does, with alternating spurts of enthusiasm or frustration but mostly with resignation. And if you say to him that he\’s serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is what\’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs; many will drown.”

“Then again, maybe that\’s not all that the waiter is feeling. Maybe a part of him still clings to the stories of Mau-Mau, the same part of him that remembers the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother grinding corn under a stone pallet.”

“He remembers a time, a way of imagining himself, that he leaves only at his peril. He can\’t escape the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.”

Barack Obama never found peace, but he did find resolution — and, in a sense, absolution, for his own fear and shame. And his election to the Senate gives us all cause for hope, because this is a man who will not compromise, not the way we are used to seeing politicians compromise.

But what he did for me, personally, by writing this book was to open my mind and my heart to the incredibly complex reality of being black in America and in a world so defined by race; to make me understand so many things about the black experience that as a well-intentioned and well-read white I had not understood. I can\’t say I feel more hopeful, having read this book, but I feel somehow stronger, and definitely wiser, for having read it. I will be reading it again and again.