Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.

How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?

my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative.

The air in the office was cool and dry, like the air of mountain peaks: the pure and heady breeze of privilege.

“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

“Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”

“If you want to grow into a human being,” she would say to me, “you’re going to need some values.” Honesty—Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came, even if everyone else, including the tax officials, expected such things. Fairness—the parents of wealthier students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no pride in the higher marks they might have received. Straight talk—if you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet. Independent judgment—just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean you have to do it too.

My mother’s confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny.

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.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.

could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions—like hurt or fear—you didn’t want them to see.

I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.

What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise.

we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!

maybe that was all any of us had a right to expect: the chance encounter, a shared story, the act of small kindness ….

“You know, sometimes I think the worst thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of our past. Without the white man, we might be able to make better use of our history. We might look at some of our former practices and decide they are worth preserving. Others, we might grow out of. Unfortunately, the white man has made us very defensive. We end up clinging to all sorts of things that have outlived their usefulness. Polygamy. Collective land ownership. These things worked well in their time, but now they most often become tools for abuse. By men. By governments. And yet, if you say these things, you have been infected by Western ideology.”

The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.