Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Several years later, it is three o'clock in the morning, and an intoxicated Obama is brooding over an argument he had with his friend Regina the night before. Since his realization about matters of race back in Hawaii, Obama has learned "not to care" (93). He spent his remaining years of high school numbing himself with alcohol and marijuana. He had even considered doing heroin, but he stopped himself when he recognized the physical symptoms of addiction in the person who offered him the drugs.

Smoking marijuana with his friends in Hawaii had given Obama an unquestioned membership in "the club of disaffection" and allowed him to "laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism" (94). Even that sense of belonging diminished as Obama noted the poor outcomes for people of color in his circle in comparison to those for whites.

When Ann confronted Obama about his mediocre grades and casual reaction to the arrest of a friend for dealing drugs, Obama responded by telling her he thought success was more about luck. Obama was surprised that his mother still believed that his future as a black man could be determined by hard work. Why should he work hard, he asked her, when Gramps had done just fine without a college education? Ann told Obama that he already had a better education than Gramps and left the room.

After this conversation, Obama did manage to graduate and decided on a whim to go to school at Occidental College, located outside of Los Angeles, California. Nevertheless, he knew even then that he was just "going through the motions"(96). Before Obama left Hawaii, Frank pointed this out when he accused Obama of just doing what was expected by going to college. College, according to Frank, was “an advanced degree in compromise"(97) that was the cost of functioning in a world dominated by whites. Obama needed to stay vigilant, according to Frank.

Being at Occidental, with its distance from the more racially-fraught environs of inner-city Los Angeles, makes it hard to be vigilant, however. The African Americans Obama encounters during his freshman year all seemunworried about compromising their racial identities, partially because there are enough African Americans to make up a "tribe" (98). Within this tight social group, Obama listens to the same kind of critiques of whites and race that he remembered from Hawaii but also sees that black students are almost indistinguishable from their peers in terms of the kinds of worries they have (grades, dating, and getting a job after graduating). To Obama, it seems that they stay in each other's company because they are tired of trying to puzzle out race.

Obama still feels out of placebecause of his multiracial origins and is unable to stop thinking about race. Obama sees himself as having more in common with the children of middle-class African Americans. These students tendto focus on being identified as individuals as opposed to members of a race. Obama recalls a conversation with Joyce, a multiracial black student who complained about how it was African Americans, not whites, who insisted that she had to choose a side. Obama bitterly thinks that this attitude is an understandable but shameful cop-out by people who want to escape their racial identities.

Obama understands their desires because he recognizes the same impulses in himself. His choice of friends—"politically active black students" (100) and other alienated people on campus—reflect his desire to establish his affiliation with African Americans. Despite these choices, Obama is called out by Marcus, a friend he sees as racially authentic, after ridiculing one of their black acquaintances for his middle-class ways. In the aftermath of this conversation, Obama comes to recognize that his efforts to claim an African-American identity feel inauthentic.

The only person with whom Obama canbe himself is Regina, whom he met after Marcus asked her to take Obama to task for reading a colonialist novel. Regina was intrigued by Obama's response to her questions and the two became friends. Regina is a Chicago native and daughter of working-class parents. Obama envied Regina's rootedness in a specific "place, and a fixed and definite history" (108). Ironically, Regina envied Obama's childhood in Hawaii. That initial conversation with Regina helped Obama develop a "stronger, sturdier, […] constant, honest portion of [himself], a bridge between [his] future and [his] past" (105).

During his sophomore year, Obama becomes involved with the divestment movement, a push to get corporations and institutions to stop investing money in South Africa, a country in which the segregationist policy of apartheid makespeople of color second-class citizens. Obama is recruited to give a speech at a rally on campus. Obama's plan for his speech is to talk about divestment's importance and to "dramatize the situation for activists in South Africa" (106) by having white students dressed in military gear drag him from the stage before he can finish the speech.

Obama's eloquent speech captures the audience's attention, however, so he is not ready to surrender the stage when the students drag him away. Marcus, Regina, and the others carry on as planned. Watching them, Obama becomes convinced for the first time that their activism is amateurish, a "farce" (107) that only occasions mild amusement from the college trustees who seethe rally as they step into a meeting.

Obama attempts to explain these feelings to Regina later that night at a party at his place. When she praises him for the speech, he tells her that he refuses to give another speech on behalf of African Americans because he believesegotism is at the root of his participation. She disagrees with him and grows angry when he calls her naïve. According to Regina, Obama's problem—the problem of most activist African-American men—is that heforgets that the main focus is on helping others instead of worrying about hisown feelings and hang-ups.

Reggie, Obama's friend, interrupts the conversation to tell Regina about the great parties Obama throws. One party was so over the top that the women who cleaned up after them were dismayed about all the cleaning that would need to be done in the aftermath of the party. When Obama says nothing about this joke, Regina, whose grandmother spent her life cleaning up after people who did not appreciate her work, is incensed and leaves the party.

On the morning after this argument, Obama begins to realize that he is hearing the same criticism—"Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess. It’s not about you"(110)—from both his family members and the black people in his life. Obama understands that he is lost as a result of fear of being an outsider, a pretender. Maintaining an ironic distance, as he did when talking about his speech with Regina, was just another expression of that fear.

Obama imagines Regina's grandmother looking at him and wordlessly demanding that he exercise determination in making his way. He imagines a series of women—a Mexican maid, Lolo's grandmother, and Toot—all asking him to do the right thing. "My identity might begin with the fact of my race," thinks Obama, "but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there" (111). 

Obama arrives in New York after transferring from Occidental College to Columbia University after his sophomore year. When he gets to the apartment he had planned to sublet from a friend, no one is there, so Obama sits on the stoop to read a rare letter from his father. Obama's father writes that he has come home after taking care of some government business abroad and that the entire family is excited that Obama plans to come to Kenya after graduation. Obama's father believes the trip will give his son a chance to understand where he belongs.

Ever since the argument with Regina, Obama has been wrestling with the issue of where he belongs. While he no longer lives as carelessly as he once did, he still feels adrift because he lacks a community tied to a specific place, and neither Africa nor Hawaii seemlike good options. One of his motivations for moving to Columbia University was to improve his chances of connecting with African Americans in communities in New York. Since most of his friends were moving on or had moved on (including Marcus, who dropped out of college), there was very little to keep him at Occidental in any event.

Obama eventually decides to sleep in an alleyway because he has no money. In the morning, he calls Sadik, a friend who lives on the Upper Eastside, and takes a cab to his place.Sadik laughs over Obama's idealistic perspective on what the city has to offer and warns Obama that the city tends to corrupt such sentiments. The two men eventually become roommates, giving Sadik a unique perspective on how Obama transforms into a sober person who runs every day and studies hard.

Fearful of giving in to the materialism of the city, Obama views it with suspicion. Obama's cautious perspective about the city is also inspired by his observation of the way race and class resentments stoked by the policies of the Reagan administration conspire to destroy black communities. The city is also deeply polarized in terms of people's economic status and access to housing.Although Obama is able to enjoy the cultural attractions of the city, he knows that the situation in the city means that it will be hard to become a part of the city, especially if he decides to have children.

Ann and Maya come to visit Obama during his first summer in New York. The visit is filled with tension because Obama insists on lecturing his mother and sister about the problems he sees in the city. The tensions come to a head one night when the family goes to see a screening of the film Black Orpheus, a 1950s retelling of a Greek myth with Brazilians of African descent playing the lead roles. While Ann loves the film, which she saw as an impressionable young woman years ago, Obama finds it to be crude and full of stereotypes. Her love of the film reminds him of a conversation he had with an Englishman who complained that he never could fully communicate with the members of a Sudanese tribe he visited. The problem with these interactions across racial lines is that "the emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves" (124).Obama avoids talking with his mother after that night.

Several days later, after Ann sees an envelope addressed to Obama's father, she tells him that her marriage to Obama's father had failed in part because of pressure from HusseinOnyango Obama, Obama Sr.'s father. Hussein Onyango disliked Ann and threatened to have his son's visa taken away if he did not comply with his wishes. When Obama Sr. received a scholarship to attend graduate school at Harvard, it was too good an opportunity to pass up and the family was separated. Although Ann and Obama Sr. considered reuniting during the visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, Ann was married to Lolo at that time.

Ann also tells Obama that his father was late for their first date. Ann was so fascinated with him that she waited an hour for him, just as Obama Sr. expected. Listening to this story and considering Ann's response to the film, Obama comes to understand how young and innocent his mother was when she met his father and how much love she had for his father. He realizes that what Ann is attempting to do is to help him understand his father better. Obama is reminded of this perspective on his mother when he calls her later that year to inform her of his father's death.

Obama postpones his trip to Kenya once his father dies. He fails to grieve for his father for a year, and then only after having a dream in which he visits his father, who is in a prison cell. When Obama opens the cell and tries to convince his father to leave with him, his father says it might be better if his son leaves him behind. When Obama wakes up, he cries and realizes that even though his father was not physically present for much of his life, Obama Sr.'s "strong image had given [him] some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint" (132). Now that his father is dead, Obama realizes he will have to search for some other basis of identity.