Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

But she wasn’t prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath.

She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

I still trusted my mother’s love—but I now faced the prospect that her account of the world, and my father’s place in it, was somehow incomplete.

At some point in my absence, they had decided to cut their losses and settle for hanging on. They saw no more destinations to hope for.

Seeing all these black and white faces together in one place, I, too, found myself feeling cheered, recognizing in myself the same vision driving Marty, his confidence in the populist impulse and working-class solidarity; his faith that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground.

Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.