Dreams from my mother
We’re snowed in here in Washington DC. The government will shut down tomorrow for a second consecutive day. Tomorrow night, we’re expecting another storm.
One of the nice things about being shut in is the chance to read, and I’ve finally started on Dreams From My Father. In a word, it’s superb. It would be a great book if Barack Obama were still just a lawyer in Chicago.
Of course, it’s really not unusual for a Republican to praise the book. Three years ago, at the beginning of campaign season, the Weekly Standard gave the book a glowing review (while dismissing The Audacity of Hope as a trite and disappointing follow-on, from an author who can clearly write much more candidly and compellingly).
Right now, I’m 250 pages into Dreams, with another 150 to go. One comment that really sticks out in my mind is actually from the preface to the 2004 edition, written after Obama won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Illinois. He recalls that his mother passed away shortly after the first edition of the book was published in 1995.
I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book–less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. (Page xii)
It really is striking how Obama’s mother remains present but undeciphered, while Obama searches desperately to understand the father he never knew. Even Obama’s Indonesian step-father, with whom he lived with briefly as a child, comes across much more vividly than his mother.
As Obama explains, understanding his father was so important because he believed that through his father he could understand what it means to be a black man. Even when his father isn’t the subject, the book focuses intently on Obama’s struggle to understand — and become comfortable with — being black in America.
Very few words in the book are spent on figuring out what it means to be white in a racially-conscious America. Nor does Obama explore his mother’s extraordinary decision to marry a black man in the 1960s. Perhaps this is because Obama never seemed to struggle in white surroundings. He thrived in his first years at one of Hawaii’s elite prep schools. He barely mentions his time as a student at Columbia. In his brief career as a financial analyst, he was well-liked and rapidly promoted.
Why was Obama so determined to think of himself as black rather than both white and black? In a telling passage, he describes his dismissive attitude (at the time) toward a friend from college who described herself as multiracial:
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people…
Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives — although that’s what we tell ourselves — but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. (Pages. 99-100)
Obama wrote his memoir before launching his career as a politician. Did he expect that, someday, his natural bond with white voters would be as important, or more important, this his bond with black ones? It’s hard to say. But it certainly seems his mother played a crucial role in helping him become truly multiracial.