What I’ve Been Reading: A Memoir on Race and Identity (Part 1)

The following is the first part of a lengthy review of a nonfiction book I read recently. I originally was going to post all of it at once, but due to its length I decided it made more sense to split it up.

At the time I published my previous blog post on books I’ve read recently I was just finishing another book, one that I think is worth its own separate post. It is a memoir by a writer who at the time it was published was still in his thirties, but had already had a fairly interesting life and also had a somewhat unusual family background, which much of the book focuses on. The book covers a lot of ground, both topically and geographically. The author spends time in Asia and Africa as well as various parts of the United States. He talks about the history of his family and his own struggles with the issues of identity and race, while touching on a multitude of other topics, such as poverty, colonialism, and politics. The writer reveals much about his own evolution as a socially-conscious individual, through a borderline delinquent phase in his late teens when he got into drugs and partying and more militant activist phase in college before becoming a community worker and gradually coming to terms with his own identity. At the same time, he shows himself adept at conveying other people’s points of view as well. The book is quite well written, being literary and yet engaging, flowing much like a novel.

At the time it was first published in 1995, despite its virtues and some generally positive reviews in newspapers like the New York Times, the book didn’t exactly shoot to the top of the best seller lists. It sold a little under 10,000 copies, and eventually went out of print. However, it was republished in 2004 and became a best seller, garnering rave reviews. It has since been translated into more than two dozen languages. The audio book version won the author a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album in 2006, and in 2011 Time Magazine ranked the book among the 100 top non-fiction books in English since 1923. What happened to suddenly bring all this attention to the book? At this time it was first published, the author was preparing to run for public office for the first time. In 2004, when it was republished, he was running to become the first black US Senator since Reconstruction and had made a landmark speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention, resulting in enormous media attention that catapulted his book into the bestseller lists. The writer won the Senate election later that year and four years later he would go on to even bigger things. The author, of course, is Barack Obama, currently President of the United States, and the book is Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

As mentioned above, the book is quite engaging and well-written in its own right, but of course the later career of the author adds another layer of interest to it. Though most of the time when reading I was not consciously thinking of it, it was always at the back of my mind, and so every once in a while I’d have to shake my head in amazement at the fact that the writer who relates that he ran around barefoot catching crickets and engaging in kite battles with Indonesian kids in Jakarta (or Djakarta as he calls it), was laughed at on his first day of school back in Hawaii because of his funny name, got into booze, pot and blow (cocaine) in his final years of high school, became a straight-laced but emotionally isolated (almost to the point of misanthropy) student in New York, worked at organizing some of the poorer black communities in Chicago with varying degrees of success, and went on a fascinating trip to Kenya where he met numerous members of an incredibly complex family and learned about a fascinating family history that was about as far removed from anything American as could be, that the person who was relating all these things would someday go on to heights that even he himself obviously didn’t even begin to anticipate at the time.

Of course I could also hardly help but note elements of the tale that related to what I knew of Obama already. For instance, he talks about the time his father visited him, his mother and his maternal grandparents in Hawaii when he was ten years old, which was the only time he actually met his father after his first two years of life (which he seemingly had no memory of). His father was invited to talk to Obama’s class, and another teacher brought his class along to listen. Obama says he was thoroughly embarrassed to have his father there, but as it turned out both his teachers and his classmates were very impressed by his father. This incident and others make it clear that Barack Obama Sr. was a very charismatic speaker as well as being very intelligent, characteristics that his son clearly inherited. Likewise, his mother’s liberal attitudes clearly had an effect on his own political thinking. The emotional distance he tended to maintain from others through much of his life is still apparent in his cool, detached manner as President. Finally, his thoughtful internal debates about various issues fit well with both his intelligent grasp of issues and his occasional indecisiveness. He doesn’t spend a great deal of time talking about politics as such in the book, but it comes up at times in the section on his community organizing work in Chicago. At one point he makes the interesting remark that “in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty – and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.” He goes on to remark that he himself was “a heretic”, because he was so full of doubts. His talk of the power of certainty in politics immediately brought to mind today’s extremists in the Republican party, who at least act like they are totally certain that their ridiculous positions are correct, and I have to wonder if part of his difficulty in overcoming such opposition as president is that he still lacks that certainty – though I have to say, I like Obama all the better for having the intellectual honesty to admit to doubts about difficult issues.

I also found myself thinking what Obama’s opponents might try to make of the book. Of course there is nothing that supports the most loony claims about Obama, such as the assertion that he was born in Kenya or that he is a Muslim. The book makes it clear that the first was impossible (not only did Obama’s parents meet in Hawaii, but there is no indication that Obama’s mother ever even visited Kenya). As for the second claim, while Obama’s grandfather made a conscious decision to convert to Islam and his older brother did the same at the end of the book, Obama’s father didn’t seem to be a practicing Muslim, much less Obama himself, who didn’t even know much about his father and his family through much of his life. His stepfather Lolo, his mother’s second husband, was a Muslim, but as Obama said, “Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.” He was clearly not a fundamentalist.

It is true that Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia; he also attended a Catholic one. As for how much this affected his thinking at the time, this passage makes it clear: “In Indonesia, I'd spent 2 years at a Muslim school, 2 years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn’t overly concerned. ‘Be respectful,’ she’d said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words. Sometimes the nun would catch me, and her stern look would force my lids back shut. But that didn't change how I felt inside.” Passages like these show that Obama was basically an agnostic, at least at the time he first started working in Chicago. It is only at the very end of the Chicago section that he first listens to a sermon by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who he had met some time earlier as part of his community work, and is strongly moved by it (in fact, he says that Wright’s sermon on that occasion was titled “The Audacity of Hope”, which Obama went on to use as the title of his second book). Interestingly enough, though he was moved to tears by the sermon, one sentence reveals that even on this occasion he continued to doubt and question: “And if a part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts around us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams”.

Another assertion that some on the right have made about Obama, apparently based in part on this book, is that he hates white people. He does make clear that there was a period in his life where he very strongly identified himself as black, to the extent that he came across as fairly militant. But he also makes clear that this was in part because he felt insecure about himself, so he engaged in somewhat exaggerated posturing in an effort to prove himself to others. He mentions an incident in college where an older black friend came down on him because he made a negative remark about another black student who acted white. Obama later realizes he made fun of his white-acting classmate because he was essentially lying about himself by trying to act blacker than he was. In a sense it is merely the mirror image of an incident he relates from the time he first started going to school in Hawaii as a ten year old, a story in which he also unflinchingly paints himself in a negative light. There was only one other black student in his class at the time, a girl, and while they initially avoided each other one day they end up chasing each other around and falling on the ground together. A group of other children started to tease them, saying Obama was the girl’s boyfriend. His reaction was to deny it hotly and push her away to prove it. So when he was ten he still wanted to deny any connection to black people, while by the time he was a young man, he had gone to the opposite extreme and was trying to make himself as black as possible. It is clear that he ultimately felt neither attitude was right. So while there were times in his life where his attitude to white people might have been characterized as negative (though he never actually hated them – after all, he was raised by his white relatives, and despite some of the mixed feelings about them typical of adolescents, it’s clear he never hated them), that was not how he felt in later years, and it is absurd to hold his past ideas against him. I myself held some rather absurd political beliefs in high school (basically jingoistic Reaganite conservatism), so I know well that these things change as you learn more about the world.

It is nevertheless true that even at the time he was writing Obama clearly identified himself with blacks more than whites. He is even mildly critical of those of mixed ancestry who refuse to think of themselves as black, such as his college classmate Joyce and his half-brother Mark, whereas I sympathize more with their points of view. But Obama also makes clear that he is no black nationalist. In Chicago, he meets and even becomes almost friends with a black nationalist who he calls Rafiq (most people other than his members of his families are identifies by pseudonyms). But in the pages where he (very incisively) discusses black nationalism in detail, he makes clear that he doesn’t agree with much of it, and he also finds it ineffective. And in the end, he learns to reconcile himself not only to his African ancestry but to his white ancestry as well. While it seems to me that at times he exaggerates the importance of race and white dominance of American society and culture, I’ll also admit that this is easy for me to say, since even my experience as a minority in Asia are not quite the same as his as a black person in America (since Asian people – with some exceptions – tend to treat people of European ancestry well).

Interestingly, as revealing as the book is about Obama’s personal foibles, whether his occasional sullenness or rebellion as a boy, his experimentation with drugs, his self-centeredness as a young man, or his doubts and insecurities as he engaged in community work, there is one thing he says very little about, and that is his romantic or sexual relationships. The only specific reference to a girlfriend is when he tells his half-sister Auma about a white girlfriend he had in New York who he ended up breaking up with in part due to her inability to fully relate to the black experience (my impression is that he was asking too much of her, but he still had a fairly strong black consciousness at the time). In concluding this story, he also mentions that “there are several black ladies who’ve broken my heart just as good.” Other than this one fairly brief passage, there is nothing in the book about girlfriends, dates or anything along those lines. However, it is unlikely that he was being circumspect just because he might go into politics someday, considering all the other things he did write about (he remarks in his preface to the 2004 edition that “certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research”). More likely, he avoided talking about his romantic relationships because of his wife, who he had met and married by the time he was writing the book. I would not be surprised if she would have frowned on any dwelling on his past loves that was not strictly relevant to the main theme of his book.

One general impression I got from the book was that at least at the time he wrote it, Obama’s political thinking was somewhat more radical that his actions in office have tended to be. He makes strong arguments about the flaws in our current system and the damage it causes to the disadvantaged, whether in the US or elsewhere (see the long quotation below). His sympathy for the poor and downtrodden is clear throughout. On the other hand, even his more radical opinions – and none are really all that radical, at least to sensible, well-informed people – are stated thoughtfully and without heat. What’s more, the section on his work in Chicago also shows that even as a young man, he preferred to work somewhat behind the scenes (despite his ability to give inspiring speeches), to choose his battles, and to use persuasion to achieve consensus, rather than dragging people along unwillingly. This I think explains much of his presidency, for better and for worse. Despite the hysterical ravings of the extreme right, Obama is simply not an extremist or a rabble-rousing populist prepared to trample over the opposition to achieve radical change. If anything, he is too mild and not sufficiently willing to forcefully push through needed measures.

In part 2, which I'll post in a few days, I will talk about Obama's father, his Kenyan family, and his trip to Kenya.