Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BARACK OBAMA

Reading, "Dreams from My Father," Part One

I’m only a few pages into Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father and I realize that the themes of this autobiography (published when Obama was 34) are racial identity and heritage, the lingering effects of racism, the search for connection, etc. But I get the feeling I’m in for a lot of discussion of race and racism, in a level of detail that looks set to be tedious.

From the introduction, when Obama is referring to being elected president of the Harvard Law Review: “A burst of publicity followed that election, including several newspaper articles that testified less to my modest accomplishments than to Harvard Law School’s peculiar place in American mythology, as well as America’s hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front—a morsel of proof that, after all, some progress has been made.”

Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Was America hungering for any optimistic sign on the racial front at that time? More so than usual? Was there more or less hunger at that time than now, or a decade earlier? (Off the top of my head, times of greater racial tension would have been in the following years — he riots related to Rodney King were in 1992, riots in Crown Heights were in 1993, the O.J. Simpson case was in 1994-1995…)

Two pages later: “When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it usually is a discovery, as I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose – the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.”

Obama goes on to say that the tragedy is not his but "it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife's six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates..."

Perhaps I’m just another naïve pale man of privilege, but do most Americans walk around carefully measuring others’ reaction to the revelation of their ethnic heritage? When you, dear reader, first learned that Obama’s father was black and his mother was white, did you make any “split-second adjustments”? Did you immediately begin searching his eyes for “some telltale sign”? Did you “no longer know who he was”?

When I first saw him, I thought, “he’s a liberal senatorial candidate who’s going to win his race in a walk because he can charm the hell out of the media.” But after I learned of his heritage, I thought… “he’s a liberal senatorial candidate who’s going to win his race in a walk because he can charm the hell out of the media.”

03/11 01:42 PMShare