African-American

At the risk of offending any African-American readers of this blog, I am compelled to admit that I have always been discomfited by that term. Growing up in the sixties, during the gestation and maturation of the Civil Rights Movement, I came to understand that the accepted nomenclature for a member of the Negroid race had evolved from the rather shameful "colored person" to the more dignified "black," which neatly counterbalanced "white" with no inferior connotation.

Then, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, an official cadre of social scientists and human relation experts (or whoever is invested with the authority to make these decisions) deemed it fashionable and politically correct to identify Americans of diverse ethnicity by their national or ancestral origins. Hence, Indians became Native-Americans; Mexicans became Hispanic-Americans; Japanese became Asian-Americans; and blacks became African-Americans. (Thankfully, this epidemic of hyphenation has passed over the synagogue and spared us Jewish-Americans, who remain Jews.)

This delicate subject surfaced in my consciousness after I finished reading Barack Obama's eloquent memoir, "Dreams from My Father." After all, Obama, the son of a white woman and the black Kenyan student whom she met and married while attending the University of Hawaii, is a bona fide African-American; raised by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii, he could just as easily, under slightly different circumstances, have grown up in Kenya, under the watchful eye of his father. In fact, Obama's exploration of race dynamics and his own racial identity is the underlying theme of his narrative.

Barack Obama's life experience is atypical of Blacks of his generation. Not only was he the offspring of a 1960's interracial couple -- one of whom was African and thus not a descendant of slaves -- his grandparents, who helped raise him, were uncommonly liberal in their racial attitudes. The family's migration to Hawaii was driven in part by his grandfather's natural wanderlust, but also by a nagging discomfort with racism, grounded in his own painful, neglected youth. Obama writes of his grandmother's being denounced by a co-worker at a Texas bank for calling a black janitor "Mister" and of his twelve-year-old mother being taunted for befriending a black girl.

When Obama's father leaves his wife and young son, first, to accept a scholarship at Harvard and, afterwards, to return to Kenya, his mother divorces him, remarries an Indonesian, and moves with her second husband and her son to Jakarta. Unable to afford the International School which most foreign children attend, she sends Obama to public school and supplements his education with a correspondence course, waking him at four every morning to teach him English lessons.

"Her message," writes Obama, "was to embrace black people generally. She would come home with books on civil rights movements, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King . . . To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to know."

Obama gets an inkling of those burdens -- and the hidden enemy, bigotry -- when he comes across the photograph of a horribly-disfigured man on the cover of a Life magazine. Like thousands of other black men and women, the man had undergone a chemical treatment to lighten his complexion and gain entrance into a much happier white world.

When the correspondence course runs out, Obama's mother sends him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, who enroll him in the famous Punahou prepatory school. In a white household, in the company of only three other black students, Obama sees himself in a quandary. He writes: "I was trying to raise myself as a black man in America, and, beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant" -- except for Ray, a senior transfer from Los Angeles, who tries to impress upon Obama the realities of black-white relationships, warning him that "we are always playing on the white man's court, by the white man's rules." While Obama studies Malcolm X, Ray exclaims, "I don't need no books to tell me how to be black."

Like Malcolm X, Obama pines for simple racial purity. He writes: "One line in his book stayed with me. He spoke of his own wish that the white blood that ran through him might be expunged . . . I knew that traveling down my own road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into abstraction."

Enrolling at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama resists the temptation to assimilate into the majority white culture, to follow sheepishly other blacks who, unlike him, are eager to escape the urban malaise of Compton or Watts, or even suburban blacks, who crave an individualism not defined by their skin color. Instead, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout," Obama chooses for friends the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." When a friend describes her childhood growing up on the south side of Chicago -- "a vision of black life in all its possibility" -- which fills Obama with longing, and he expresses his envy, she ironically responds, "Isn't life something? All this time I was wishing I had grown up in Hawaii."

She also plants a seed -- that resolving his identity crisis means moving beyond having to choose between his black father and his white mother. He writes: "You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim in how it is shaped. You still have resposibilities." Obama reflects that his "identity might begin with the fact of his race, but it didn't, couldn't end there."

Seeking a place to put down roots and test his commitments, a place to anchor his self-image as a Black American, Obama transfers to Columbia. While he finds no more black students there than at Occidental, he is consoled by having landed "in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in true proximity," although, in fact, he is disturbed by their instability, their faultlines, their race and class problems.

Obama graduates from Columbia, works for a Wall Street consulting firm for a year, resigns that job, and, after six months of unemployment and sending off resumes, becomes a community organizer. He writes: "Communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. They had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens . . . Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned . . . I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life."

Ultimately, Obama's organizing efforts produce frustration and disillusionment. Trying to put together a meeting of churches to discuss a gang shooting, he is told by one minister, "The last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems." A $500,000 grant to a suburban university to set up a job bank in the Altgeld public housing project in Southside Chicago is squandered, leaving unemployment in this -- and many other -- black neighborhoods endemic, widespread, and persistent, and its citizens cynical and resigned.

In such an environment, Obama flirts with Black Nationalism; its twin strands of black affirmation are seductively attractive: on the one hand, solidarity, self-reliance, discipline, and communal responsibility; on the other, a blanket indictment of whites as responsible for the ills of the black community and the despair of its psyche. But both unravel when put to closer scrutiny.

The first founders on economic realities, which prevent blacks from withdrawing completely from the controlling business interests. Obama imagines a black worker saying, "The white folks I work with ain't so bad, and even if they were, I can't be quitting my job. Who's gonna pay my rent tomorrow or feed my children?" The second contradicts his mother's staunch belief in the morality of a white society populated by many individuals of good will. Obama concludes that, "Notions of purity -- of race or of culture -- could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American's self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness (and his) would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we inherited."

The politics of the day prove to be ineffective at improving the conditions of blacks or ameliorating racial polarization. Even the election of black Mayor Harold Washington raises expectations which turn out to be illusory. "Many blacks," writes Obama, "have given up the hope that politics could actually change their lives." The Mayor makes city services more equitable only at the margins. He appoints a few more blacks to important administrative positions, but upsets his base of support by making deals to consolidate his power, failing to tackle poverty in any meaningful way, and ultimately changing nothing as far as the despondent residents of Altgeld are concerned. Nevertheless, his sudden death while in office leaves Chicago blacks "dazed, confused, uncertain of direction, frightened of the future."

Obama's one great success is an emblematic Pyrrhic victory. When a handful of Altgeld residents unite for a bus trip to the Chicago Housing Authority Director's Office to protest the presence of asbestos in their apartments and the lack of basic services, Obama is encouraged by their growing empowerment. His enthusiasm collapses, however, when, at the meeting, the director is challenged to answer questions directly, refuses, and then angrily stalks off the stage in the ensuing pandemonium. Nothing is accomplished. A month later, when the same group meets with a HUD representative to lobby for the Housing Authority's one-billion dollar request to fund repairs on projects throughout the city, it is told, "The Chicago Housing Authority has no chance of getting even half the appropriation it has requested. You can get the asbestos removed. Or you can have new plumbing and roofing where it's needed. But you can't have both."

Determined to find a way to bring about real change, Obama applies to law school, "to learn power's currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised him before coming to Chicago but that he can now bring back to where it is needed." He is not embarrassed to leave; none of his clients begrudges him his success. Having immersed himself in the black community, his color sufficient criterion for membership, he knows now "that most black folks aren't like the father of his dreams, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment" but "practical people who know life is too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals."

Besides simple acceptance, there is another meaning to community. Obama writes, "You could be black and still not give a damn about what happened in Altgeld . . . But to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more . . . It required faith." A faith beyond a faith in one's self. A Christian faith. A commitment to God and the Church and, with them as facilitators, to "the black family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and self-respect."

Although drawn to the Church, Obama remains a "reluctant skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won." Before he can make this leap of faith, he decides he must learn more about his now-deceased father and his African heritage. He goes to Kenya.

Obama has lived in many places -- Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago -- but something happens to him thousands of miles from home that has never happened before; an airline official helping him locate a lost bag recognizes his name. He writes: "My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not understand" -- the progeny, so to speak, of his father's polygamous marriages, the rival children and wives of which are engaged in a five-year-old lawsuit over the remains of a meager estate.

"His family seems to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets, and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama Senior's long-lost son." But along with this joyful connection to his extended family comes tension and doubt--the same kind of "survivor's guilt" he might feel when his own financial success is set against black poverty and powerlessness, whether in Kenya or Southside Chicago.

Naively, Obama has envisioned Kenya as a single, harmonious whole -- in which his own complexities can be sorted out -- only to discover a discordant, divided society permeated with resentment against foreigners who own businesses, vestiges of colonialism (like the patronizing of white tourists), and ancient but fierce tribal prejudices and loyalties.

Narratives about his grandfather Onyango and his father Barack -- constructed by family members, particularly his "Granny" -- reveal personalities as conflicted as his own.

Onyango was a curious, restless young man who, hearing of the arrival of the white man at a nearby town, went off to see these strange people for himself. When he returned, he was shunned by his own father and other members of his village for wearing white man's clothes. He moved to Nairobi and went to work for the white man, learning his language, his system of paper records, his dining habits, his household organization. He respected the white man for his power, his machines, his weapons, and the way he was always improving himself -- although he never believed the white man superior to the African. For Onyango, knowledge and the ability to work together -- as opposed to the black man's tribalism -- were the sources of the white man's power; he wanted his son Barack Sr. to be as educated as any white man.

But when that son married a white woman, he vehemently disapproved. "He didn't want Obama blood sullied by a white woman." Onyango threatened to have his son's visa revoked. Eventually, Barack Sr. returned to Kenya without his wife and son.

Barack Sr. was also a man of contradictions. He was rebellious, proud, impetuous, and independent -- qualities which estranged him from his father Onyango. When he returned to Kenya after getting his degree from Harvard, he entered government service and enjoyed a successful career -- until his idealism got the better of him. A member of the minority Luo tribe, he began to speak out against tribalism, the majority Kikuyu government, and its president, Jomo Kenyatta -- ignoring the warnings of his friends and associates. He was banished from the government and blacklisted; no ministries or foreign companies would give him work. He began to drink; he had to borrow money from relatives just for food. His friends stopped coming to visit him because it was dangerous to be seen with him -- but he refused to apologize or change his attitude.

Later, after Kenyatta died, Barack Sr. was restored to government favor, went back to work, and regained some of his money and influence.

In spite of his arrogance, Barack Sr. had a generous heart. He would give to anyone who asked; he couldn't say no. And he never held a grudge, even when his luck changed, he lost everything, and the people whom he had helped forgot him and laughed at him. When he was rehabilitated and doing well again, he went back to helping the same people who had betrayed him.

Standing at his father's grave, Obama weeps as he reflects on his father's tragic flaw. He was a man who, while embracing the instruments of modernity with "polish and panache," abandoned too much of the past: "The laughter in Granny's voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalties that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts -- the quick mind, the power of concentration, the charm -- you could never forge yourself into a true man while leaving those things behind."

Africa is bound to disappoint Black Americans -- like Obama -- who come looking for the authentic, says historian Rukia Odero as the two of them enjoy an African meal -- fish cooked in Indonesian spices -- and drink British tea. They consider whether "there is anything left that is truly African. " Dr. Odero has, in fact, resigned herself to a daughter whose first language is English, with bits and pieces of others thrown in. She tells Obama, "I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself."

Having already observed that his aunt's Nairobi home "was just like the apartments in Altgeld -- the same chain of mothers and daughters and children, the same absence of men," Obama somberly concludes that "on this earth one place is not so different from another."

From Hawaii to Chicago to Africa, Obama's journey has raised more questions about his place and purpose in the world than it has offered answers. Other readers have suggested two paths by which Obama ultimately resolves his inner conflicts and discovers his "authentic self."

First, he embraces Christianity. Before leaving on his African trip, he attends Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ and hears him preach a sermon entitled "The Audacity of Hope." Reverend Wright describes a painting, "Hope." Hope is embodied in a harpist bruised and battered sitting on a mountaintop towering above a world "groaning under the same strife and deprivation, rejection and despair" that members of his congregation face every day. But the harpist gazes upwards, and dares to hope, to praise God, to make music on the one string she has left. Faith in Jesus Christ gives even the most downtrodden the audacity to hope. Obama is deeply moved. At the end of his memoir, when he returns to Chicago after graduating from law school, he joins the church.

Secondly, he enters politics. Instead of repressing his bi-racial bloodlines, he will present himself symbolically and actively as a force for change and unity, breaching racial, socio-economic, and partisan barriers. And he will leverage his experience as an organizer to inspire and empower diverse communities to take control of their own destinies.

I would submit a third path, the act of artistic creation, and argue that it was the writing and publishing of this book -- during which he literally exorcised the racial demons which haunted his self-consciousness -- which enabled Barack Obama to assume a truly comfortable identity. In the introduction, he acknowledges that he intended to write a book about race relations, but found "his mind drawn to rockier shores," and what emerged was "a record of a personal interior journey -- a boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a Black American." The fact that he struggled to finish and eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife Michelle suggests some degree of inner turmoil.

Obama has admitted his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue, and events out of chronological order. Some critics have been quick to point out factual errors: conversations about race that never happened; a Life magazine photograph that doesn't exist; intimations of perceived discrimination that are disputed. But these shouldn't detract from the sincere coming-of-age story of a biracial man growing up in a variety of venues, and grappling with issues of racism, prejudice, civil rights, self-esteem, poverty, and family relationships -- a work of self-discovery that by its very existence answers the troubling question it poses: Who am I.

Obama's memoir has become uniquely intertwined with his political career; each has enhanced the other in his meteoric rise to prominence. Both languished in obscurity until his electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, after which a re-released edition of the book started flying off the shelves. "Dreams from My Father" and its sequel "The Audacity of Hope" continue to rank high on best-seller lists and are as much a part of his persona as his admittedly thin resume. With three million copies in print, his life story has become an "incredibly lucrative franchise," (Scott, New York Times, May 18, 2008) and made him a wealthy man, a celebrity, and quite possibly the next President of the United States.