Barack Obama’s Story of Race & Inheritance

AS the US presidential race gains momentum, some interesting changes are taking place in the battle for the Democratic nomination. There is now a real contest. Hillary Clinton is no longer seen as unbeatable and Barack Obama is steadily rising ahead in the polls. The first black president seems a more momentous option than the first woman president. But who is Barack Obama?

The senator became known for the remarkable keynote speech he gave at the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2004. Just a few months before — and after a difficult race — he won the Democratic nomination for a seat as US senator from Illinois. He earned a majority of votes in white as well as black areas. This triggered genuine hope that his victory indicated a shift in American’s racial politics.

The media frenzy and publicity surrounding this political success prompted the re-publication of Barack Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance.” In the author’s words, the book is 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 author acknowledges that the opportunity to write this book came after he was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review: “I went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity, the leaps through time, the collisions of cultures, that mark our modern life.”

The story begins in New York, where the 21 year-old Barack Obama learns that his father has died in a traffic accident. This sudden loss marks the beginning of a cathartic journey searching for his paternal roots.

The son of a Kenyan father and a white mother, his parents divorced soon after he was born in Hawaii. After his father’s return to Kenya and until his tragic death, Barack Obama sees his father only once at the age of 10. Although he hardly remembers anything of the visit, years later he realizes that despite his father’s absence, “His strong image had given me some bulkwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint”.

In this captivating memoir, one not only gets an insight into Barack Obama’s early life in Indonesia and Hawaii but one also participates in the quest for his African roots and his struggle to enable American black citizens to live the American Dream. The truth, according to the writer, is that black communities believe the past determines their world with a force infinitely more real than any notion of class solidarity and that explains why so few blacks have been able to climb up the ladder and enter the American dream.

When Obama finally decides to get acquainted with his paternal family in Kenya, he admits that Africa has become an idea more than an actual place. At the end of his visit to Kenya, he realizes “the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here, as in the kampongs outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece, remained essentially intact: The insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth.”

Throughout his quest, Obama is driven by hope, a notion he has never abandoned. His recent book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” will appeal to Americans who are longing for a different kind of politics, politics seen as a mission and not as a business. Senator Obama presents himself as a candidate of hope offering Americans a chance to heal their racial and political divisions.

Moreover, his understanding of Islam (his paternal grandfather converted to Islam and he was educated in Indonesia) which no other presidential candidate has, can also help bridge the gap between Christian and Muslim nations. Obama is offering American people a chance to bring their country and the world together, a positive perspective which is attracting growing interest.

This moving journey of self-discovery gives us the opportunity to discover the inner side of one of America’s most talented politicians. In this honest account of his life Obama reveals the truths of his father’s life and is finally able to reconcile himself with his divided inheritance.