During Barack Obama’s younger years, life is simple, and his identity is nothing to fret over. His mother, Ann, loves him; his grandparents love him; and his father, though absent, is someone to look up to. However, one fateful day when he’s nine years old, Barack opens up a Life magazine to a piece about Black people who used skin lightening creams with disastrous effects, complete with photographs. This marks the moment in which Barack (who’s biracial) begins to suspect that being Black is, possibly, something to be ashamed of—and from then on, Barack constantly struggles to figure out what it means to be a Black man in America. Through his journey of self-discovery, he proposes that fully comprehending and accepting one’s identity as a Black person entails learning about one’s roots, understanding racist systems of power, and recognizing the varied viewpoints of other Black people.
Seeing the Life photograph raises immediate feelings of shame and suspicion in Barack; it suddenly makes racism real for him. He attributes his earlier innocence to his white mother’s habit of buying him books about civil rights and famous Black figures and to the particular melting pot culture of Hawaii, where—in theory at least—there is enough diversity and few enough Black people that it’s easy enough to pretend racism doesn’t exist there. Upon seeing the photograph, however, Barack begins to wonder if his mother knows about skin lightening. And later, when he returns to Hawaii to live with his white grandparents, Gramps and Toot, he feels that there is a gulf opening up between him and them because of their different skin colors. This eventually transforms into anger: Barack comes to understand that as a Black man in the United States, where minorities still experience discrimination, many white people (intentionally or not) see him as a threat. He can’t control whether or not people treat him like a human being, no matter what he does or doesn’t do. This sense of alienation from the people who raise him lead to increasing feelings of powerlessness and anger, which culminate in Barack’s college days spent escaping from his identity through substance abuse and mocking fellow Black students who act too “white.” Especially given his Hawaiian upbringing (in comparison to his classmates’ upbringings in Chicago, Compton, or New York City), Barack feels the need to prove his Blackness to his college peers. However, even his Black peers eventually begin to call him out on what they identify as bad behavior. They impress upon Barack that his apathetic, exclusionary attitude doesn’t make him Black—it just makes him rude.
Through his friends’ advice and his later experiences as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago, Barack begins to understand that his youthful desire to prove that his Blackness is normal. While he may have settled on a life path focused on serving other Black individuals through community organization, other Black people find different ways to express and connect with their roots. Barack ends up in Chicago in the first place because of an increase in crime, poverty, and drugs in Chicago’s South Side, especially among young Black men. In working to overcome these obstacles, Barack must reckon with the fact that for many of the people he seeks to serve, Jim Crow laws (which enforced racial segregation in the U.S.) are only a generation removed. Being Black, to them, means constantly struggling for basic survival and respect. For some—especially young boys—this means turning to violence and drugs. For others, this means embracing the legacy of Malcolm X, a civil rights leader who advocated for Black empowerment through separatism. For others still, this means working within their church communities (which often collaborate with Barack’s organization) to create change within Chicago. Being exposed to these many different ways of grappling with being Black helps Barack see that there isn’t one correct way to think of his identity. It can (and does) change as he grows and is exposed to new ideologies and ways of thinking—and especially as he begins to connect with his Kenyan family in his mid-twenties.
Barack makes the case that in his experience, Africa isn’t just a convenient silver bullet that helps Black Americans discover who they are. Rather, although learning about or traveling to Africa can help illuminate Black Americans’ historical roots, it raises as many questions as it answers. In the year before his first trip to Kenya, Barack meets a guidance counselor, Asante, whose mission is to introduce Black male students to Africa. He insists that learning about Africa can give boys the sense that they’re part of something much larger even than simply the history of Black Americans’ struggle for freedom and respect. In Asante’s eyes, learning about Africa offers a window into a world that’s centered around the experiences of Black people and that encourages them to be proud of who they are. Barack experiences some of this during his first trip to Kenya—for instance, it’s exhilarating to realize that his skin color doesn’t matter because everyone there looks like him. But he also discovers that Kenya doesn’t offer him the version of his ancestors that he hoped for. His grandfather Onyango, for instance, wasn’t a traditional African man who stood up to British colonialism, as Barack assumed. Rather, Onyango was the first in the family to adopt Western styles of dress, work in white homes and establishments, and learn Western farming methods that ultimately made him rich. In short, Barack finds that African history and culture, both at large and on a small scale, don’t exist separately from the white, Western world—it exists in opposition to or in tandem with that world. Barack’s final coming-of-age moment comes as he realizes this, suggesting that coming to terms with one’s Black identity means also coming to terms with the way that white culture and Western imperialism have made this a struggle at all.
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Race and Identity Quotes in Dreams from My Father
In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.
White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase. Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.
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.
“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.”
The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to?
Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color?
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.
“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.
“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.”
Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; [...] It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along.
“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.
