Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Barack Obama

Reading this autobiography today is an unavoidably different experience than to have read it in, say,
1996 when Barack Obama was not yet on the public radar. His notoriety, then, was limited to some relatively small academic circles because of his selection as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. There are probably not seven people on planet Earth today without some knowledge or opinions of who Barack Obama is, and, to some extent, his biography. So it becomes necessary to approach this book with an intentional effort not to filter or color his words with what we expect to read. It has to be seen as the honest, forthright words of a young man's struggle to understand the complexity of race, and his own identity and heritage.
Similarly, this is a book that could not be written today. Not by Barack Obama anyway. Since The Speech in 2004, when he went to dead center on the public radar, the handlers, and advisers, and packagers, and pollsters, and consultants would never allow it. The forthrightness would be diluted into the familiar cliches and platitudes the entourage thinks people want to hear, or should hear.
In the narrative, Obama honestly discusses his early realization that his skin color caused people to react differently to him. He suffered rejection and ridicule in the mostly white private school he attended in Hawaii, but when he gravitated toward the other blacks, he found himself an outsider to their perspective as well. He was raised by his white mother and grandparents, and didn't share the disdain for whites he found in many other young blacks. The theme, then, of the book, as we follow Obama through his childhood years in Hawaii, and from age 6 to 10 in Indonesia, through his college years in Los Angeles, then attending Columbia in New York City, then to his years working as an organizer in a housing project in Chicago, and finally to Kenya to “find” who his father was, is the search for personal belonging and truth. The honesty on these pages is engaging. He openly discusses his youthful attraction to drugs and alcohol. There are, of course, anecdotes of white folks' exploitation and rejection of African Americans, but there is also an honest examination and revelation of misguided, erroneous ideas, attitudes and behaviors within the black culture as well.
Arguably, the most interesting section of the book is Obama's time visiting Kenya. His father, also Barack Hussein Obama, was mostly an enigma to him, as other than a month long visit when Obama was only 11, his knowledge of his father, and his entire paternal history, came from stories his grandparents and mother told him. After being accepted at Harvard, he left his job in Chicago to spend a few weeks in Europe, then with his extended family of sisters and brothers (different mothers) and cousins and grandmother in Kenya. As he explored Luo tribal culture and tradition and listened to his grandmother's detailed recounting of his family history, modern African culture, specifically Kenyan, took on a metaphorical parallel to Obama's own blended identity. While the people cling to many tribal beliefs and customs, and there is pride in their heritage, there is an unmistakeable dilution and blending, both from the influence of the colonialist period, and the modern world gradually seeping in. Dress, diet, economics, and attitudes all reflect non-African influence. Barack Obama's ethnic heritage is not singular or pure, but Africa shows there may be no such thing.
There is a temptation when reading from these early Barack Obama thoughts to point to passages as “AHA!'s”, to connect these early, less guarded, developing views as the seeds of an ideology we may or may not agree with. And that may be true. But an honest reader must note the book is 15 years old, and the progression of the experiences cited here much older still. None of us, if we're old enough, would want every idea or observation we expressed at 18, or 25, or 45 years old to define us now, and it would be unfair to apply that to Barrack Obama. Taken as a chance to see race in America through eyes very different than our own, it's a great opportunity and a good read.