Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreams from My Father, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Community
Fathers, Sons, and Manhood
Race and Identity
Storytelling and Truth
Summary
Analysis
Winter arrives, making work difficult. People fight over limited parking spaces and others don’t come to meetings at all. Marty encourages Barack to take time off and create a life for himself outside of work, but Barack doesn’t listen. Instead, he finds that his relationships with Angela, Mona, Shirley, and other leaders in the organization offer more than a traditional social life would. He joins people at church and parties, and he connects with some of the community members he interviews. A family tells of sacrificing so that their son could get a law degree, only for that son to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and become unable to work. Others tell him stories of debilitating medical issues or parents dead due to alcohol. Through listening to these stories, Barack feels comfortable sharing more about his own past.
Once again, Marty shows that he understands the necessity of community, which is why he tells Barack to throw himself into life outside of work. For Barack, though, he discovers that sharing stories and working so closely with people in Chicago helps him create a community for himself without even having to look outside of work. As he gets a sense of how tragic the lives of some people have been, it becomes easier for him to share some of his own tragedies—some of which share similarities to these stories (Lolo, for instance, turned to alcohol).
Themes
As time passes and as Barack swaps stories with other organizers, he feels like his world is coming together. He feels like he has a place and discovers that Marty was right: there’s always community if one digs for it. Barack also learns things that are less cheerful, however. For instance, Ruby throws herself headlong into organizing after the botched police meeting, and Barack takes an interest in her son Kyle, who’s alternately enthusiastic and sullen. Once, near Christmas, Barack invites Ruby to his office to give her his gift for Kyle. He’s shocked to see Ruby wearing blue contact lenses and abruptly says her eyes looked better before. Barack feels awful and realizes he expected leaders to be able to ignore the draw of fashion magazines.
Barack’s altercation with Ruby over the contacts shows how difficult it is to eliminate internalized racism—even for activists and organizers devoted to helping free Black people from the devastating effects of white supremacy, some vestiges of white supremacy (such as a preference for blue eyes) persist. Even though Barack is right to suggest that Ruby doesn’t need to wear contacts to be beautiful, he also recognizes in this moment that he’s being insensitive. By making Ruby feel ashamed about her insecurity, he’s blaming her for a society-wide issue and distracting from the bigger work at hand.
Themes
One of Barack’s Black female friends impatiently calls him out for being surprised “That black people still hate themselves.” Barack explains that this isn’t exactly correct—since seeing the Life photograph, he’s learned about the divisions between “good” and “bad” hair, lips, and skin color among Black women. He notices that these conversations only take place in small groups and never in front of white people. Eventually, he dismisses the idea that Black people just need self-esteem to save themselves. Barack recognizes that while self-esteem might help, poverty does more harm than poor self-esteem. But Ruby makes him question this, as does hearing Black people speak poorly about other Black people or using the n-word to scold their sons. He realizes that Black identities stem from a history of hating and being hated—and he wonders if Ruby can love herself without hating blue eyes.
As Barack mulls over his thoughts on Ruby, Black beauty, and Black self-esteem more broadly, he must continue to contend with the fact that racism is still alive and well—and still guiding the lives of Black people, no matter how confident they may seem. And indeed, Barack suspects that Ruby chose the contacts in the first place because she felt like she needed to change her appearance to look beautiful. In other places, Barack confirms this: hearing Black people speak disparagingly about their own race suggests to him that Black people have internalized many of the racist, stereotypical beliefs white people hold about Black people.
Themes
One morning, Rafiq calls early, asking for Barack to try to get the MET center into a storefront near his office. Barack figures an alliance with Rafiq will be useful, as Ms. Alvarez proves difficult to work with. Rafiq, however, is awful to work with—during meetings, he shouts about how horrible Black people are to each other. He believes that all Black people hate white people, and that people who aren’t bound by blood, religion, or race won’t help each other. Barack takes issue with Rafiq’s hatred of white people, though he sees this hatred has its uses: it avoids blaming Black people for their poverty and helps redirect their anger. Barack begins to understand how hatred and nationalism, as defined by the Nation of Islam, might be able to help Black people.
Remember that Malcolm X’s ideas were instrumental to Barack growing up. Now, as an adult, he begins to see that some of Malcolm X’s ideas may have their place, but that doesn’t mean that people like Rafiq aren’t playing with ideas that, in some situations, can be dangerous or reductive. To this end, while Barack recognizes that while it’s possibly useful to encourage Black people to hate something other than themselves, Barack also knows plenty of white people—namely, his family members—who don’t deserve that kind of hatred.
Themes
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As Barack sees it, though, nationalism—at least as peddled by Rafiq—doesn’t help much. Rafiq refuses to ask his congregation to show up to protests and is suspicious of any Black person willing to attend. And Barack sees that, unfortunately, nationalism is more of an attitude than a program due to the small presence of the Nation of Islam in Chicago. Barack occasionally picks up the group’s newspaper, which runs stories that seem like they came from the AP—except they call out, for instance, that certain senators are Jewish. He watches a Nation of Islam toiletry line rise and fall, presumably because white people still control markets. This, Barack decides, is why nationalism is a successful emotion and not a successful program: white people still have power, and Black people and businesses need to survive in a world created by white people.
What Barack discovers is that ideas may have merit, but that doesn’t mean that they always translate well into action. This is why the Nation of Islam toiletry line fails so miserably: despite the Nation of Islam’s desire for separation between races, it’s a much bigger project to actually create separation and be able to profitably run a business that has nothing to do with other white-owned or controlled businesses, like banks, landlords, or newspapers. It’s also worth noting here that Barack implicitly calls out the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitic rhetoric; part of the group’s push for separatism included vilifying other races and religious groups, especially Jewish people.
Themes
Barack realizes that Rafiq isn’t interested in changing the actual rules of power; he just wants to put Black people in power. Barack notices that Rafiq’s rhetoric begins to go against what Malcolm X wanted, as Rafiq and other Black politicians turn to race-baiting and peddling conspiracy theories about other ethnic groups. No one seems to take this talk seriously, but Barack sees it damaging efforts to build coalitions. Barack decides that racial or cultural purity can’t give Black Americans self-esteem—instead, self-esteem must come from their stories and their experiences.
As Barack watches Rafiq’s actions, he ultimately comes to decide that the Nation of Islam—an organization that he admired as a teen—cannot give Black people the dignity and hope they need. Rather, Barack believes that Black communities must focus on telling their stories to people who care and attempting to build coalitions with people who want to help—no matter who those people might be.
Themes
Several weeks later, Barack invites Ruby to come to a meeting with him on the north side. They eat at a Vietnamese restaurant and then Barack takes Ruby to a performance of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. The Black actresses tell their stories and sing songs, dancing the entire time. The student group behind Barack and Ruby cheers when the show is over. Ruby thanks Barack and they drive home in silence.
The play For Colored Girls does exactly what Barack believes Black people in Chicago should do: it tells the stories of Black women without shame, and it makes it clear that there are all different ways to be Black and experience life as a Black person. This allows Barack to essentially tell Ruby that she’s not doing anything wrong—and he gets that now.
Themes
