Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood."

As an adult, Barack Obama eventually comes to understand that the stories the adults in his life told about his father were ones that were in many ways myths that accorded with the way they wanted the world to be as opposed to the reality, which is that Obama's father was not present in his life. This quote represents one of Obama's many attempts to come to terms with the difference between these dreams and the reality.

"[F]or the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been." 

Obama inscribes himself here as a placeholder for his family's dreams, particularly those of his father. The painful nature of this identity explains to a large degree why Obama's relationship with his father was such a difficult one and why Obama is only able to mature once he decides for himself who and what he wants to be.

"The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." 

This moment, which takes place in the library of the American embassy in Djakarta (where Ann works), represents Obama's first inkling that racism and internalized racism exist.