In his memoir, Barack Obama recounts his upbringing in Hawaii; his college years; his stint as a community organizer in Chicago; and finally, his first visit to Kenya in the months before he began studying law at Harvard. Born to a white American mother and a Black Kenyan father (who was mostly absent from Barack’s life), Barack’s story circles back again and again to what it means to be part of a family or a community. Ultimately, he proposes that families and communities don’t have to look a certain way to be functional and supportive—people can get the support necessary to grow and thrive if they’re part of a family or community that supports its members and takes responsibility for the well-being of the group.
Despite having an absent biological father, Barack finds unwavering love and support from his extended family as he grows up. His father, whom he refers to as the Old Man, leaves Barack’s mother, Ann, when Barack is two years old. Ann remarries an Indonesian man, Lolo, when Barack is six years old, and the family moves to Indonesia. There, Lolo makes sure that young Barack is looked after and understands how to navigate childhood and school as an Indonesian, thereby helping Barack fit into their world in Djakarta. Upon Barack’s return to Hawaii for school at age nine, his grandparents, Gramps and Toot, take over where Lolo left off. They make sure that Barack attends the local private school, and Gramps in particular insists that Barack will have the tools and social capital—thanks to the relationships he’ll make at school—to go anywhere he wants when he’s an adult. The care that Ann, Lolo, Gramps, and Toot all show Barack begins to make the case that family doesn’t have to look a particular way in order to be supportive and caring. Even though Barack’s biological father is absent, his mother, stepfather, and grandparents provide him with more than enough love and support. What matters more than what a family looks like, Barack suggests, is the care they show to others.
As a young adult, Barack applies his understanding of nontraditional families to larger communities while he works as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago. There, Barack sees that despite his own success, being part of a fractured family can have the opposite effect: that of making young people feel unsupported. The inner-city youths whom Barack works with often turn to gangs, drugs, and violence to find community and meaning in their lives. Barack specifically attributes this to the combination of poverty and a lack of father figures—two things that, broadly speaking, Barack never had to deal with in his own youth. However, he also notices that in the South Side, children nevertheless have their mothers—while most of the religious leaders Barack deals with through his work are male, it’s the women in the community who are most committed to coming together and figuring out how to serve and protect their neighborhoods. These women, Barack realizes, are the glue in a community where many fathers are absent from their children’s lives—they’re involved in the churches, in the schools, and in the community campaigns Barack works on. Recognizing the integral role these women play helps Barack once again realize that families and communities don’t have to look a certain way in order to come together to support one another’s well-being—particularly the well-being of their children. And indeed, his own involvement as a professional community organizer—a person tasked with advocating alongside the residents and organizing community events—shows him that there are many routes to building a sense of community in an area.
Finally, in Kenya, Barack receives further proof that a comprehensive sense of responsibility to the group is what ties families and communities together. For the first time, Barack finds himself in a place in which it’s possible that someone will recognize him as his father’s son wherever he goes—and where relatives emerge on a consistent basis, asking for help or gifts. He also notices that, as in the South Side, there’s a conspicuous lack of successful men in the family who are able to shepherd the family toward collective success. With this, Barack begins to realize that being part of a family is about more than just providing emotional support. If he’s to accept his ties to his Kenyan family, this means stepping up to help financially where and when he can, maintaining his relationships with his family after returning to the U.S., and becoming successful in a way that will make the family proud. And with this, Barack comes to recognize that what binds communities and families together through change and hardship is a sense of duty and responsibility to the collective. Regardless of what a family or community looks like, Barack suggests that a group’s members must constantly strive for better for current and future generations—individuals’ commitments to others in the group are what enables families and communities to thrive.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family and Community ThemeTracker
Family and Community Quotes in Dreams from My Father
“I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”
Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me [...] that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. 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.
One thing I noticed, though. The woman so concerned with the cruder habits of her neighbors had a picture of Harold in her kitchen, right next to the sampler of the Twenty-third Psalm. So did the young man who lived in the crumbling apartment a few blocks away [...]. As it had for the men in Smitty’s barbershop, the election had given both these people a new idea of themselves. Or maybe it was an old idea, born of a simpler time. Harold was something they still held in common: Like my idea of organizing, he held out an offer of collective redemption.
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.
And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with [...]
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.
I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.
“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”
And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. [...] I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.
That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before [...]
By widening its doors to allow all who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained inseparably bound, that an intelligible “us” still remained.
I let my eyes wander over the scene—the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.
“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”
“But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also he is writing Kenya’s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn’t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he’d grown up with.”
I knew that, as I had been listening to the story of our grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had always been of an autocratic man—a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule. [...] What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.
I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
