Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit.

got a nephew about your age making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying. Folks that wanna make it, they gonna find a way to do it on they own. How old are you anyway?” “Twenty-two.” “See there. Don’t waste your youth, Mr. Barack. Wake up one morning, an old man like me, and all you gonna be is tired, with nothing to show for it.”

The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments. Every path to change was well trodden, every strategy exhausted. And with each defeat, even those with the best of intentions could end up further and further removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve.

I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories. In this way I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. Yet another sort of magic.

“When Old Man Daley was mayor, didn’t nobody say nothing about him putting all them Irish up in City Hall. But the minute Harold tries to hire some black people, just to even things out, they call it reverse racism—” “Man, that’s how it always is. Whenever a black man gets into power, they gonna try and change the rules on him.” “Worse part is, newspapers acting like it was black folks that started this whole mess.” “What you expect from the white man’s paper?” “You right. Harold knows what he’s doing, though. Just biding his time till the next election.”

But Harold had tried again, and this time the people were ready. They had stuck with him when the press played up the income taxes he’d failed to pay (“Like the white cats don’t cheat on every damn thing every minute of their lives”). They had rallied behind him when white Democratic committeemen, Vrdolyak and others, announced their support for the Republican candidate, saying that the city would go to hell if it had a black mayor. They had turned out in record numbers on election night, ministers and gang-bangers, young and old.

People weren’t just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn’t get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woke up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life….”

there was an empty seat next to Will on the bus, and in the glow of the freeway lights, he began to tell me a little about himself. He had grown up in Chicago, he said, and served in Vietnam. After the war, he had found a job as an executive trainee at Continental Illinois Bank and had risen fast, enjoying the trappings of the work—the car, the suits, the downtown office. Then the bank had reorganized and Will was laid off, leaving him shaken and badly in debt. It was the turning point in his life, he said, God’s way of telling him to get his values straight. Rather than look for another job in banking, he turned to Christ. He joined St. Catherine’s parish in West Pullman and took a job as the janitor there. The decision had put some strain on his marriage—his wife was “still adjusting,” he said—but according to Will, the ascetic lifestyle suited his new mission: to spread the Good News and puncture some of the hypocrisy he saw in the church.

“I try to avoid driving through Roseland when I can,” a woman from neighboring Washington Heights explained to me one evening. “People down there are just rougher. You can see it in the way they keep up their homes. You didn’t see things like that when the white folks still lived there.”

“Yeah, not bad. You’re starting to listen. But it’s still too abstract … like you’re taking a survey or something. If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people’s centers. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you’ll never form the relationships you need to get them involved.” The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people’s psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed. “I’m not a poet, Barack. I’m an organizer.”

stammered that the church had always taken the lead in addressing community issues, but Reverend Smalls just shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Things have changed with the new mayor. I’ve known the district police commander since he was a beat cop. The aldermen in this area are all committed to black empowerment. Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people? Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall. Fred, didn’t you just talk to the alderman about getting that permit for your parking lot?”

“The truth is,” one of the priests told me, “most of us out here are looking to get a transfer. The only reason I’m still around is that nobody’s willing to replace me.”

they complained about the new job bank that we had announced with such fanfare the night of the rally, but that had turned out to be a bust. As Marty had planned it, a state university out in the suburbs had been assigned to run the program—it was a matter of efficiency, he explained, since the university had the computers already in place. Unfortunately, two months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work through the program. The computers didn’t work right; the data entry was plagued with errors; people were sent to interview for jobs that didn’t exist. Marty was livid, and at least once a week he would have to drive out to the university, cursing under his breath as he tried to pry answers out of officials who seemed more concerned with next year’s funding cycle. But the women from Altgeld weren’t interested in Marty’s frustrations. All they knew was that $500,000 had gone somewhere, and it wasn’t in their neighborhood. For them, the job bank became yet more evidence that Marty had used them to push a secret agenda, that somehow whites in the suburbs were getting the jobs they’d been promised. “Marty’s just looking out for his own,” they grumbled.

In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions, then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the best patronage jobs that the Machine had to offer in the days before patronage became a dirty word.

“Maybe if you listened to other people a little more,” I had told him once, “they’d be more responsive.” Will had shaken his head. “I do listen. That’s the problem. Everything they say is wrong.”

In a small office sat a slight, wiry man with a goatee and a skullcap that accentuated a pair of prominent ears.

Attendance at evening meetings became more sporadic; people called at the last minute to say they had the flu or their car wouldn’t start; those who did come looked damp and resentful. At times, driving home from such evenings, with the northern gusts off the lake shaking my car across the lane dividers, I would momentarily forget where I was, my thoughts a numbed reflection of the silence.

It was during such times, when familiarity or weariness dissolved the lines between organizer and leader, that I began to understand what Marty had meant when he insisted that I move toward the centers of people’s lives.

That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

Marty was right: There was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterizing the work. There was poetry as well—a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask.

No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community—good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back.

By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase self-esteem seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves.

It was expressed when a black leader casually explained to me that he never dealt with black contractors (“A black man’ll just mess it up, and I’ll end up paying white folks to do it all over again”); or in another leader’s rationale for why she couldn’t mobilize other people in her church (“Black folks are just lazy, Barack—don’t wanna do nothing”). Often the word nigger replaced black in such remarks, a word I’d once liked to think was spoken in jest, with a knowing irony, the inside joke that marked our resilience as a people. Until the first time I heard a young mother use it on her child to tell him he wasn’t worth shit, or watched teenage boys use it to draw blood in a quick round of verbal sparring. The transformation of the word’s original meaning was never complete; like the other defenses we erected against possible hurt, this one, too, involved striking out at ourselves first.

Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race!

I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq wasn’t also right in preferring that that anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to the task.

It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions—between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference.

Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program. So long as nationalism remained a cathartic curse on the white race, it could win the applause of the jobless teenager listening on the radio or the businessman watching late-night TV. But the descent from such unifying fervor to the practical choices blacks confronted every day was steep. Compromises were everywhere. The black accountant asked: How am I going to open an account at the black-owned bank if it charges me extra for checking and won’t even give me a business loan because it says it can’t afford the risk? The black nurse said: White folks I work with ain’t so bad, and even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job—who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today?

Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power than in the color of those who had it and who therefore enjoyed its spoils. There was never much room at the top of the pyramid, though; in a contest framed in such terms, the wait for black deliverance would be long indeed.

The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth, telling her to cook him food. Ruth became very bitter at how the Old Man had changed. Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and myself that our father was crazy and that she pitied us for having such a father. I didn’t blame her for this—I probably agreed. But I noticed that, even more than before, she treated us differently from her own two sons. She would say that we were not her children and there was only so much she could do to help us. Roy and I began to feel like we had no one. And when Ruth left the Old Man, that feeling was not so far from the truth.

“One year, the Old Man couldn’t even pay my school fees, and I was sent home. I was so ashamed, I cried all night. I didn’t know what I would do. But I was lucky. One of the headmistresses heard about my situation and gave me a scholarship that let me stay on. It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself and never looked back.

He would have different women for short spells—Europeans, Africans—but nothing ever lasted. I almost never saw him, and when I did, he didn’t know how to behave with me. We were like strangers, but you know, he still wanted to pretend that he was a model father and could tell me how to behave. I remember when I got my scholarship to study in Germany, I was afraid to tell him. I thought he might say I was too young to go and interfere with my student visa, which had to be approved by the government. So I just left without saying good-bye.

“It was only in Germany that I began to let go of some of the anger I felt towards him. With distance, I could see what he had gone through, how even he had never really understood himself.

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.

Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud.

For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.

What stood in the way of my succumbing to the same defeat that had brought down the Old Man? Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul? The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.

“We’re trifling. That’s what we are. Trifling. Here we are, with a chance to show the mayor that we’re real players in the city, a group he needs to take seriously. So what do we do? We act like a bunch of starstruck children, that’s what. Standing around, cheesing and grinning, worrying about whether we got a picture taken with him—” “You mean you didn’t get yourself a picture?” Will smiled cheerfully and held up a Polaroid shot, then put a hand on my shoulder. “You mind if I tell you something, Barack? You need to lighten up a little bit. What you call trifling was the most fun Angela and them have had all year. Ten years from now, they’ll still be bragging about it. It made ’em feel important. And you made it happen. So what if they forgot to invite Harold to a rally? We can always call him back.”

They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.

“You hear that, everybody,” I said. “They build these big offices to make you feel intimidated. Just remember that this is a public authority. Folks who work here are responsible to you.”

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.

“My husband doesn’t think it’s a good idea, me spending all this time instead of looking after my own family. He says that the publicity went to my head … that I became prideful.” I suggested that as long as her family lived in the Gardens, she’d have to stay involved. “Ain’t nothing gonna change, Mr. Obama,” she said. “We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can.”

Johnnie took a sip of his beer, the foam collecting on his mustache. “I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I’m afraid of ’em. You got to be afraid of somebody who just doesn’t care. Don’t matter how young they are.”

I asked him if he was still thinking about the air force, and he shook his head; he’d stay in Chicago, he said, find a job and get his own place. I asked him what had changed his mind. He said that the air force would never let a black man fly a plane. I looked at him crossly. “Who told you that mess?” Kyle shrugged. “Don’t need somebody to tell me that. Just is, that’s all.” “Man, that’s the wrong attitude. You can do whatever you want if you’re willing to work for it.” Kyle smirked and turned his head toward the window, his breath misting the glass. “Yeah, well … how many black pilots do you know?”

Asante leaned back in his chair, his hands folded across his belly. “Is it any wonder that the black child loses interest in learning? Of course not. It’s worst for the boys. At least the girls have older women to talk to, the example of motherhood. But the boys have nothing. Half of them don’t even know their own fathers. There’s nobody to guide them through the process of becoming a man … to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Because in every society, young men are going to have violent tendencies. Either those tendencies are directed and disciplined in creative pursuits or those tendencies destroy the young men, or the society, or both.

Johnnie and I were quiet for most of the ride back to our office. We hit a patch of traffic, and Johnnie turned and said, “Can I ask you something, Barack?” “Sure.” “Why haven’t you ever gone to Kenya?” “I don’t know. Maybe I’m scared of what I’ll find out.”

He discussed Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago and the jealousy he had witnessed among some of King’s fellow ministers, their fear of being usurped; and the emergence of the Muslims, whose anger Reverend Philips understood: It was his own anger, he said, an anger that he didn’t expect he would ever entirely escape but that through prayer he had learned to control—and that he had tried not to pass down to his children.

Reverend Philips explained, an example of segregation’s hidden blessings, the way it forced the lawyer and the doctor to live and worship right next to the maid and the laborer. Like a great pumping heart, the church had circulated goods, information, values, and ideas back and forth and back again, between rich and poor, learned and unlearned, sinner and saved.

“By the way, what church do you belong to?” “I … I attend different services.” “But you’re not a member anywhere?” “Still searching, I guess.”

And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process; about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real estate ventures succeeded or failed. I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire. That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before, as he had boarded the plane to America, the land of dreams. He, too, had probably believed he was acting out some grand design, that he wasn’t simply fleeing from possible inconsequence. And, in fact, he had returned to Kenya, hadn’t he? But only as a divided man, his plans, his dreams, soon turned to dust…. Would the same thing happen to me?

That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.