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Race & Inheritance in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

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Race & Inheritance in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father Race & Inheritance in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father Glenda R. Carpio Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/79/1829897/daed_a_00060.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 There is no getting over race–at least according to the Barack Obama of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). The Obama that emerged during the primaries and through the 2008 presidential election tells a different sto- ry, both because Obama had to change his posi- tion in the decade between the publication of his autobiography and his remarkable rise in politics and because his “hope” mantra has been diluted and taken out of the context in which it ½rst ap- peared. Obama’s now infamous ex-pastor, Jere- miah Wright, is the source of the phrase, “the au- dacity of hope.” In Dreams, the Wright sermon in which Obama ½rst hears the phrase comes at the very end of the long third section, “Chicago,” just after Obama has been accepted to Harvard Law School and before he takes his ½rst trip to Africa to ½nd his paternal family.1 We are nearly three hundred pages into the text at this point, having been presented with plenty of evidence for Oba- ma’s dark view of race relations in America. Only GLENDA R. CARPIO is Professor in this context can one understand why, for Oba- of African and African American ma, it takes audacity to hope that they will change Studies and of English and Amer- for the better. ican Literature and Language at Writing for the National Review, Michael Gledhill Harvard University. She is the au- also notes the difference between the Obama of thor of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Dreams and of the presidential race; however, he Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008) and is working on a new makes a number of facile conclusions. He writes book, tentatively titled Ambiva- that, while “Obama is touted as a post-racial states- lent Alliances: Black and Latina/o man who sees beyond the narrow issue of white Fiction in the Americas. versus black,” in his autobiography he is, “to the © 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Dædalus Winter 2011 79 Race & contrary, obsessed with race: almost all his ½rst wife safely tucked away in far- Inheritance of Dreams is about race and race conflict.” off Africa. in Barack Obama’s The Obama of Dreams does focus on race Obama believes that his mother “Dreams conflict, but this fact should not lead us came to love his father despite the ra- from My Father” to repudiate him as “a racially obsessed cial romanticism that ½rst attracted man who regards most whites as oppres- her to him. But he adds that the love sors,” and “who sees U.S. history as a nar- she had for him, a transformative love row, bitter tale of race and class victim- that allowed her to see Obama’s father ization.”2 Instead, it should allow us a as “everyone hopes at least one other better appreciation of the gravitas of person might see him,” is the kind of Obama’s audacity of hope. love most Americans do not believe really exists “between black and white: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/79/1829897/daed_a_00060.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 In Dreams, Obama presents his life, the love of someone who knows your from his parents’ courtship through life round, a love that will survive dis- to his birth, childhood, adolescence, appointment.” And according to Oba- and young adulthood, in terms of ra- ma, this is because interracial love has cial conflict. He portrays the conflict been tabooed and outlawed so intense- with such intensity that one marvels ly and for so long in the United States at how young Obama not only survived that Americans can hardly be “expect- but also thrived. Of his white mother’s ed” to believe in it.5 Early in the autobi- attraction for his father, an older black, ography Obama frames the interracial African man (she was eighteen and he identity his parents bequeath him in in his mid-twenties when they met), the following terms: Obama writes that it was probably “a Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, reflection of the simple fantasies that ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: had been forbidden to a white middle- like antebellum or octoroon, it evokes im- class girl from Kansas, the promise of ages of another era, a distant world of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, dif- horsewhips and flames, dead magno- 3 These thoughts are prompted ferent.” lias and crumbling porticos. And yet it when, as an adult, Obama accompanies wasn’t until 1967–the year I celebrated his mother to a screening of Black Or- my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix per- pheus and is made uncomfortable by formed at Monterey, three years after the romantic racialism that she reveals Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, in her love of the movie. He turns away a time when America had already begun from her and the screen, concluding to weary of black demands for equality, that the “emotions between races could the problem of discrimination presum- never be pure, even love was tarnished ably resolved–that the Supreme Court by the desire to ½nd in the other some of the United States would get around to element that was missing in ourselves. telling the state of Virginia that its ban Whether we sought out our demons or on interracial marriages violated the Con- salvation, the other race would always stitution.6 remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”4 Obama offers no theory for his The gothic images in this passage, which father’s attraction to his mother but sug- comes after a narrative break and begins gests that he enjoyed the attention and in italics, therefore standing out even kept secret the fact that he was already typographically, emphasize the distort- married when he met his mother, with ing and consuming violence of a racial 80 Dædalus Winter 2011 obsession. Meanwhile, the temporal ture. “tv, movies, the radio; those were Glenda R. shifts highlight the stubborn resistance the places to start,” he writes: Carpio against racial progress: Obama’s birth Pop culture was color-coded, after all, is barely legal (in 1960, when his par- an arcade of images from which you ents were married, “miscegenation still could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style. I described a felony in over half the states couldn’t croon like Marvin Gaye, but I in the Union”), while he celebrates his could learn to dance all of the Soul Train sixth birthday amid a political climate steps. I couldn’t pack a gun like Shaft or in which African Americans are accept- Superfly, but I could sure enough curse ed, even celebrated, at certain registers like Richard Pryor.9 (popular culture, global public space) yet still denied equality in their own Like Gunnar Kaufman, the protagonist Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/79/1829897/daed_a_00060.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 country. (The irony of Dr. King’s receiv- of Paul Beatty’s satirical novel, The White ing the Nobel Peace Prize is particular- Boy Shuffle (1996), Obama must learn to ly piercing in this context.)7 Unlike the be “black,” though apparently he does “post-race” president some tout him to not suffer from Gunnar’s rhythm prob- be, Obama in Dreams is acutely aware of lems (signaled by Beatty’s title) since he not only the long history of racial strife has the aid of Soul Train.10 The connec- in America but also the fact that the gains tion to Beatty is not super½cial, however: resulting from the civil rights movement Obama heightens the satiric subtones of have not rid America of its cancerous the opening chapters in part to mock his racist past. He dryly notes that, instead adolescent trials and tribulations (and of resolving the problem of discrimina- thereby measure the height of his suc- tion, America, at the time of his birth, cess, in the style of Ben Franklin and, “had already begun to weary of black later, Booker T. Washington) but also, demands for equality,” suggesting that like Beatty, to control the rage he feels this weariness is as much a signi½cant against both his particular predicament part of the legacy of the civil rights move- (his fatherless and guideless journey) ment, albeit indirectly, as the legislation and the fact that black life can still be it fought to pass. caged centuries after slavery. Like other Having established the near miracle members of the “post-soul” generation, of his birth–a gesture that could be fault- Obama is keen to the “changing same” ed as histrionic were it not for the fact (to quote LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka) of that Obama grounds it in history and American race relations in the post–civil makes it emblematic of a larger set of rights era, in which essentialist notions experiences–he details the “½tful interi- of race have been questioned, further or struggle” of raising himself “to be a exposing the ½ction of race, but racism black man in America,” without the aid has been increasingly institutionalized of familial models.8 By the time Obama and made less visible, therefore also is a young adolescent, he is living with making it harder to combat.11 his white grandparents, his father hav- Again, like Beatty’s Gunnar, Obama ing gone to Africa, leaving him with only takes up basketball as his ticket into “a poet named Frank,” a nearly eighty- black culture but quickly acknowledges year-old black male friend of his grand- that, in doing so, he “was living out a father, as a guide.
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