Finished "Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance." This is Barack Obama's first book, which was written 13 years ago in 1995. This book is every bit as inspiring as his later book, "The Audacity of Hope," but it is also more personal, at times raw, dealing as it does with his own struggle with the meaning of racial identity.
The son of a Kenyan scholar and a white teenage college student, growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, raised for long periods by his loving maternal grandparents, going on to college and deciding to pursue the unglamorous job of community organizing and finally going to Harvard Law School and becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review -- it is obvious that Obama is anything but ordinary.
Since Obama lately has been accused of cribbing points he made in recent speeches, I'm not going to try to create my own narrative to wrap around what Obama wrote. Instead, I'm just going to give you the passages that I marked to save as I read the book. I think these provide a useful summary. They also illustrate the deep foundation on which the words Obama speaks today are built.
Page 11:
Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos. And yet it wasn't until 1967 -- the year I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix performed in Monterey, three years after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, a time when America had already begun to weary of black demands for equality, the problem of discrimination presumably solved -- that the Supreme Court of the United States would get around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution. ...
Sure -- but would you let your daughter marry one?
The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New England transcendentalists or wild-eyed socialists in their family tree.
Page 50:
My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.
Page 79:
By the time I reached high school, I was playing [basketball] on Punahou's teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions -- like hurt or fear -- you didn't want to see. ...
My wife will roll her eyes right about now. She grew up with a basketball star for a brother, and when she wants to wind either of us up she will insist that she'd rather see her son play the cello. She's right, of course; I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood. Yet at a time when boys aren't supposed to want to follow their fathers' tired footsteps, when the imperatives of harvest or work in the factory aren't supposed to dictate identity, so that how to live is bought off the rack or found in magazines, the principal difference between me and most of the man-boys around me -- the surfers, the football players, the would-be rock-and-roll guitarists -- resided in the limited number of options at my disposal. Each of us chose a costume, armor against uncertainty. At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own.
Page 133:
In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.
There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.
Page 197:
"It's about blood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies."
That was the truth as Rafiq saw it, and he didn't waste energy picking that truth apart. His was a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race -- whereupon notions of loyalty ceased to apply. This narrowing vision, of blood and tribe, had provided him with a clarity of sorts, a means of focusing his attention. Black self-respect had delivered the [Chicago] mayor's seat, he could argue, just as black self-respect turned around the lives of drug addicts under the tutelage of the Muslims. Progress was within our grasp so long as we didn't betray ourselves.
But what exactly constituted betrayal? Ever since the first time I'd picked up Malcom X's autobiography, I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism's affirming message -- of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility -- need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.
Page 406:
(Barack Obama's half-sister Auma, who was educated in Germany and has returned to Kenya to teach, is tsk-tsking their grandmother's acceptance of the old rituals that gave women little say in their lives.)
"Much of what you say is true, Auma," she said in Luo. "Our women have carried a heavy load. If one is a fish, one does not try to fly -- one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I were young today, I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that's not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy."
Page 437:
The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power -- and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.* * *
But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
We hold these truths to be self-evident. In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcom and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country's borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man [his father]. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don't always satisfy me -- for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately prevail.
Below is Barack Obama reading from the introduction to his book.
Perhaps he will write that book about his mother. I will read it if he does.
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