Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

This is a coming of age account by a man who grew up between cultures and racial groups wondering how to understand himself. He just happens to be our president now but I don't believe that achieving that office was in his five year plan when the book went to print even though I think he did intend to advance politically through various elected offices. I'm a few years older than the president and I grew up in a WASP family in New York City very aware of the Civil Rights Movement, racial discord, riots, assassinations and flower power juxtaposing with black power but not having to deal with it directly. Like Obama, I lived and even briefly (for my senior year of high school) went to school abroad - not in a madrasa but in a British boarding school that served the children of politicians from all over the Commonwealth. My room-mate, from Nigeria, plied me with questions that I was unable to answer about the African American experience. Later, a college student in St. Louis, I lived in a blighted African American neighborhood within walking distance from the university because the rents were low. Years later still I taught in the St. Louis inner city public school system where I discovered the lack of parity that is so often defined as the achievement gap between black and white students in America. That was when I became the most engaged with the heart of the issues that Obama describes in his book - fear, anger, inequality, and in general a lack of hope that often masquerades as bravado. The book is written as well as the man speaks - it exposes his own journey with its discomforts probably made worse by the fact that so much of the truth was unexplained and interpreted within the framework of a child's, adolescent's, newly emerged adult's shifting perspectives. It echoes the struggle for a sense of personal-cultural identity that I have heard many missionary kids whose first encounter with their home culture starts when they are sent to college but who grew up fluent and friends in a very different cultural context. I find the book an authentic, honest attempt to narrate his experiences against America's racial backdrop. Interestingly, the person who insisted I read it isn't even an American.

Obama, Barack. Dreams From My Father. c. 1995. Three Rivers Press. NY