Legal Law

My Father’s Dreams: A History of Race and Heredity by Barack Obama

A photo of America’s first black president is the cover of Dreams of My Father. Take a closer look and you will see a label that reads, “Your remarkable story in your own words.” But this book is not about Barack Obama, we all know that. This is the other Barack Obama, the president’s father.

The author’s ‘history of race and heritage’ is an autobiographical narrative that was first published in 1995 after Obama was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, but before his political career began. It dates back to his days in Honolulu, where he was born to Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya and Ann Dunham from Kansas. The book begins with a phone call Barack Obama Jr. received on his 21st birthday. A call from an unknown aunt in Kenya announced that he had just lost his father. “At the time of his death, my father was still a myth to me, both more and less than a man,” the author writes.

It is from this point that Obama begins to tell the story in reverse. He talks about his early days in Hawaii, where being ‘mulatto’ (mixed race) didn’t really matter. He talks about the stories his maternal grandparents told about his father: how he loved to dance and win people over. He follows it with his memories of Indonesia: statues of Hanuman, boxing with his mother’s Indonesian husband, battling chicken pox, beggars, and flying kites with low-level farmers’ children, servants, and bureaucrats.

It was his return to the United States to study in Hawaii and college in Los Angeles that changed his perspective. He realized that he was not black and he was certainly not white. Divided between two worlds, he sought refuge in alcohol and smoke, reading books on black history. After a brief stint in Columbia, New York, he decided to work as an organizer and moved to Chicago to work with the black community there. Obama recounts the difficulty of the experience, as his program faced resistance from entrenched community leaders and apathy from the established bureaucracy. After three years, he decided that he needed an education that would allow him to better serve those in need. He followed in his father’s footsteps at Harvard Law School and became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

But before Harvard, Kenya beckoned him. Here begins the most interesting part of the book: Kenya. He travels to his grandfather’s house in Alego and traces the history of the Obama clan with the help of his father’s other wife and his half-brothers. It was in Kenya, he found the freedom that he could not have in America. “Over a period of weeks or months, you could experience what comes from not feeling observed, the freedom to believe that your hair grows the way it is supposed to grow … The world was black here, and you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique in your life without living a lie and without committing treason. ”It was in Kenya, he rediscovered his father.

Obama says: “I saw that my life in America, the life of blacks, the life of whites, the sense of abandonment that I felt as a child, the frustration and hope that I had witnessed in Chicago, it was all related to a small plot of land an ocean away, connected more by the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were the questions of my brothers. Their struggle, my birthright “.

Like his speeches, Obama’s narrative is also lyrical. The book is not about racism or the atrocities of African Americans. It exposes the dilemmas African Americans face in their daily lives. Almost all of them were born in the United States and have not been to Africa. Still, they fail to connect with the nation that has treated their ancestors worse than animals. There, lives are governed by both history and destiny.

Obama’s account is refreshingly honest. What makes the book really interesting is Obama’s description of life in various places: Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and of course Kenya. It is an amazing story, beautifully told.

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