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Book Review: Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Part 2: Chicago pp. 131-295

By Barack Obama (Autobiography)

Copyright 1995 Three Rivers Press: New York

Part 2: Chicago of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father chronicles Obama’s time in the Midwest after his graduation from Columbia University. The accounts reveal a more hardened and savvy Obama than in Part 1.

It is in Chicago that Obama begins his efforts as a community organizer. Working in the predominantly black and impoverished south side, Barack learns what he considers the limitations of Black Nationalism. He questions whether it could exist independent of white resentment:

It was [the] unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program . . . [T]he descent from such unifying fervor to the practical choices blacks confronted every day was steep (Dreams From my Father, pg 202).

In Part 2 we meet the now-infamous Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a person Obama appears ambivalent toward. I believe Obama’s accounts support the notion that he had respect for the reverend, but their bond was not inalienable. It is true that his second book The Audacity of Hope is titled after a sermon Wright gave. However, it is also true that Obama felt Wright’s sermons were prosaic at times. Hence, Obama’s 2008 withdrawal from the Trinity United Church of Christ was not completely a political move. He reveals that he is not incredibly attached to religion. On faith, Obama admits he has issues distinguishing “between faith and simple endurance” and “having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won (pg 287).”

Auma Obama, Barack’s sister, sheds light on the mystery that surrounds their father. At one time, Barack Sr. was the figure that Obama revered. But his uncompromising political views eventually betrayed the Kenyan president, which resulted in his blacklist from the high paying positions in government. To keep up the charade of the great Dr. Obama, he gave charities priority over buying food for the family. The intelligent man Obama grew up seeking approval from was reduced to a drunken façade. This aggrandized reality exacerbated Obama’s own view of himself. What replaced the fantasy of his father was the fear that he would endure a similar stifled fate. To find more meaning, Obama plans a trip for Kenya.

For a review of Part 1: Origins of Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams From My Father, Click Here