Dreams from My Father

I am reading Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father. He is a very reflective writer, able to depict his thought process as it matures and deepens.
I am still in the first section of the book, “Origins,” where he writes about growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and attending college in L.A. and New York. The unifying thread in this section is Obama’s search for a racial identity. As we all now know, his mother was white, his father was Kenyan, his step-father was Indonesian, and he was born in a Hawaii struggling with its own racial identity.
As Obama tries to define who he is socially, academically, and culturally, he writes honestly about his less noble emotions and actions. Obama was not always the self-confident, assured, well-spoken man that he is today. He writes about defining himself in opposition to the only other Black student in his elementary school class, and later, of the anger he felt towards white people and the ambiguity he felt towards his own white grandparents.
One section of the book in particular caught my attention. It made me think of the students that I teach and of many of our Berkeley discussions about power, authority, and language.
When he is in high school, Obama brings a couple of white friends to a “black party” and witnesses their discomfort. Afterwards, one of the white boys comments, “‘You know man . . . that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties . . . being the only black guys and all’” (84). This remark sparks a strong reaction for Obama. He writes,

". . . I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court . . . If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self – the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. 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. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger" (85).

This passage is obviously upsetting to read. Obama’s views on race changed, deepened, matured, and grew more complex and nuanced due to the people around him and his reflective and inquisitive nature. But his sentiments here make me think of many things: of the readings from our Urban Ed class last semester and from our ESL class this semester; of a video I watched last year called “The Color of Fear,” a discussion on race between eight racially diverse men; and most urgently, of the students in the schools where I teach. Which students feel this way consciously? Subconsciously? I believe that it is a heavy and toxic burden to carry.