The American dream in black and white

An eminent lady once told me that one must suffer a “lack” in one’s childhood in order to motivate one to strive harder and reach for the stars. She told me she and a brother were not born rich and had to struggle through school. But the brother ended up living in Forbes, and she, a single woman, in Dasma.

I remembered that lady’s wise words when I read US President Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father (A Story of Race and Inheritance), a New York Times bestseller published by Three Rivers Press. Obama describes it as a “boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.”

Obama, who marks his 100th day in the presidency today, was just 33 years old and a Chicago lawyer when he wrote that book 15 years ago. Since then, he has accomplished what took centuries and a dam of heartaches for a black man and a divided nation to accomplish. His book reveals a man who has endured many “lacks” in his life (lack of a father’s presence, lack of a solid identity, lack of material wealth, lack of acceptance in society) and yet he used those “lacks” as springboards, and later as vessels, for success. The bigger the lack, the bigger the vessel to fill, and the more vigor he exerted to fill that empty vessel. In so doing, he more than make up for the lack. He turned “lack” to “luck.” Sometimes, that is called, “success.”

In his introduction, Obama writes of a “running strain of innocence” that his family had, but which the outside world had lost.

“They know too much, we have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union — a black man and white woman, an African and an American — at face value. As a result, some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, 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. 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. And If I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine alone, 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, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down.”

* * *

Obama divided his book into three parts. The first part, “Origins” is about his roots, from Kansas to Kenya, from Honolulu to Jakarta and about the people who shaped him.

Though Obama was defined by his search for his African father and what he stood for, he was molded by his white mother Stanley Ann and her parents Stanley and Madelyn. It is a story of unconditional love.

In 1961, when marriage between whites and blacks were still illegal in some American states, the Dunhams were presented by their daughter with a black baby boy. They could have convinced their 18-year-old daughter to give up the baby for adoption. Instead, they cherished that baby, displayed him on Waikiki beach for all the world to see, and even when the baby’s African father abandoned the child, they never spoke bitterly of the father to his son. I think that if America has its first black president today, credit should go to a white couple named Stanley and Madelyn.

As for Barack’s mom Ann, an anthropologist who defied convention by marrying a black man, and then an Asian, following the Asian to his homeland where she endured toilets where you peed straight through a hole, floods and blackouts; who woke up at 4 a.m. everyday to tutor her son before she left for work, she was Barack’s enabler. She always told young Barack that he got his brains from his father.

“I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her,” the future US president wrote in his book.

* * *

Because his white grandparents and mother didn’t make him feel any less special because of his color, Barack writes of two incidents that were rude awakenings in his life, unexpected initiations into the real world to which he belonged. The first was seeing the photo of a man with the features of a black man but the complexion of an albino (no, not Michael Jackson!). The caption in the photo said the man had undergone a chemical treatment to make his skin white, but now regretted it. The procedure was irreversible.

Obama, then just a boy, felt his face and neck get hot. He wanted to ask his mother about it, to calm his fears (that the procedure may one day be forced on him?). But he remembers that as in a dream, “I had no voice for this newfound fear.”

The second rude awakening was when his grandmother, whom he called Toot, suddenly refused to take the bus to work, as she always did. His Gramps was hesitant to drive her to work and Obama thought his grandfather was the unreasonable one. Till his Gramps told him why Toot was suddenly refusing to take the bus. She was approached by a beggar at the bus stop, who kept on asking her for more money. Obama laughed, saying it was only a beggar, till his grandfather told him, “She told me the fella was black.”

“The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure,” Obama wrote.

After Gramps decided to take Toot to work after all, Obama would say to himself, “(My grandparents) had sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubt if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might have easily been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”

* * *

Part 2, “Chicago,” tells of Obama’s community organizing days in Chicago and reveals the hard worker that he is and his sense of purpose. Part 3, “Kenya” is like a mixture of Roots and The Joy Luck Club, a colorful narration of Obama’s sentimental homecoming to Kenya and his immersion into their culture. He meets, for the first time, all his surviving seven brothers and sister.

Kenya ends Obama’s search for his true self — and his true self is the portrait of a black American. Despite his white mother and his love for her, the life of a black man has been his life, and he will not change it. He will anchor his struggles, hopes and dreams on this important slab of his identity. And he will find peace in it.

After crying at his grandfather and father’s graves, Obama said, “I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America — the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago — all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. My questions were my brother’s questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”

* * *

This book reveals a man with empathy, someone who knows how it is to have only one friend at recess time, knows Third World poverty because he’s lived amidst it, knows inner city poverty in America because he’s worked with it. He knows that you can be born in Alego, Kenya and one day have your child elected president of the United States, and how, with the right choices — you can make your race and inheritance (after 9/11 he was ridiculed because of his name Barack Hussein Obama) a blessing when it could have otherwise been a curse.

BHO (as in Barack Hussein Obama), I think you’re my new JFK.

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