Excerpted from Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama copyright 1995 by Barack Obama. Reprinted by permission of Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
“That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. In letters to my grandparents [in Hawaii], I would faithfully record many of these events. . . . But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain [such as] the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been. . . . Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind–the terror that danced in my friend’s eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields . . .
“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. 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?”
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the fragility of a middle-class black neighborhood:
the concern with self-esteem among African-Americans:
“Ever since the first time I’d picked up Malcolm 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. . . . In talking to self-professed nationalists, . . . though, I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything white served a central function in their message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one depended on the other. For when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to black poverty, he was expressing an implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have to live as we did . . .
