In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama describes growing up in Hawaii as well as relocating to the mainland first on the West Coast for college and then to the Midwest for work. Throughout his story, he emphasizes the role of race in his life as a biracial man. Aspects of the way Obama internalizes race are illuminated in Chapter 5 of Yancey and Lewis’s Interracial Families, a section of their book focused on the perception of identity in multiracial persons. Yancey and Lewis suggest that the social setting surrounding an individual can significantly influence how they interact with their race, and also that people who are partially black identify in disproportionally high percentages with their black identity (Yancey and Lewis 88). Furthermore, Yancey and Lewis acknowledge the unique way that Hawaii perceives and tolerates race (95). In his memoir, Obama clearly tries to identify as black, but through obstacles related to the different social settings surrounding him as a boy and college student, he struggles to develop his black identity before beginning to truly fit into a racial community in Chicago.
As a consequence of the people and island that raised him, Obama never had a true conception of race as a young child. Though the son of a Kenyan father and American mother, Obama only has memories of his mother and her side of the family because by age three his father had left the family (Obama 9). In his father’s absence, the boy grew up with the ideology of his grandparents (which his mother also adopted), which was surprisingly tolerant with regards to race given their Kansas roots and even their distant bloodline connection to the confederacy. Obama’s grandmother and grandfather operated on the Midwestern principles of “respectability” as a basis of judgement as opposed to aspects like race (Obama 12-13), and furthermore they grew up in a Kansas where Jim Crow principals hadn’t really penetrated and people “never really gave black people much thought” (Obama 18). While Obama did have another father figure in his Indonesian step-dad Lolo, he too did not instill a strong perception of race in his step-son during the time they lived together abroad. While in Indonesia, Obama came to realize that what truly made his and his mother’s acculturation into Lolo’s community difficult was not their difference in skin color, but a “chasm” created by nationality in which identifying as black did not matter as much as being American (Obama 47).
Hawaii’s unusually high tolerance of race also masked for many years Obama’s realization of racial inequality. On the pacific island, the “rigid caste system” (Obama 23) maintained throughout much of the contiguous United States does not exist because of the multitude of races found on Hawaii and because racial influence is distributed. Also, discrimination against blacks is uncommon because they make up a very small percentage of the island’s population (Obama 23-24). As a result, Hawaii is uncharacteristically tolerant racially compared to the rest of the country (Yancey and Lewis 95); this notion is evident in the way Obama describes the locals’, and his own grandparents’, hostile attitudes towards vacationers who make racist remarks (Obama 25).
Obama eventually does come to see race, though, and as an adolescent searching for what it means to be black, he realizes that despite his mother’s efforts and his own attempts to assimilate into black culture, he is ultimately alone in this pursuit in Hawaii. Obama’s first real encounter with race comes while reading an article from Life Magazine, in which a black man had undergone treatment to lighten his complexion and essentially convert to white. In realizing that this man’s reasons for “changing” race was that being white was more desirable than being black, Obama is overcome by a sudden and indescribable fear. This emotion and confusion is something he feels he cannot share with his family, with whom the boy had never discussed race, as he even questions whether his mom is aware of the issue (Obama 30). Ultimately Obama begins to feel like this newfound issue of race has and “reached [him]” (Obama 51) without anyone knowing it, in large part due to the way his childhood was void of the topic (51).
In response to his realization, Obama tries to adopt his black identity with the aid of his mother. In the years leading up to high school, Obama’s mother Ann begins to emphasize to her son the culture and history of African-Americans: giving Obama speeches to read from civil rights leaders and telling stories of black men and women who succeeded in America. Ann made it so that to her son, “every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Pointier; every black woman Fannie Low Hamer” (Obama 51), and further told Obama how he inherited a strong racial culture and history which began with his father (Obama 54). Two obvious issues with his mother’s teachings for Obama, though, were first off there were so few blacks in Hawaii to take example from, and second that relating his history to his father meant little because he was such a distant figure in the boy’s life (Obama 50). Obama supplements what his mother offers with his own attempts at finding his place in the black community: listening to black artists on the radio, supporting the University of Hawaii’s all black basketball team, reading Malcom X and taking in his ideology (Obama 78,86). In lieu of his efforts though, there is an inevitable alienation for the young man in Hawaii surrounded by white relatives, to the point where even with his accepting grandparents, Obama “arrived at a silent pact… [that he] would keep his trouble out of sight” (Obama 75) with regards to his struggle to find his racial identity.
Despite relocating to Southern California and a large black community for college, the self-conceptions Obama carries with him from his past in Hawaii nonetheless still alienate him from the peer groups he desperately wants to be a part of. Upon arriving at Occidental College, Obama recounts how he feared being “Mistaken as a sellout” (Obama 100) because of his youth largely void of racial tension or activism, and consequentially chooses to align himself with politically active black students and professors as well as adopt a certain style of dress (Obama 100). Towards this effort, Obama goes so far as to tell one friend Regina that he envied her experience as a girl in Chicago’s south side, that despite the poverty she grew up in and lack of a father, the interactions she had with black family members and neighbors to him represented a “black life in all its possibility” (Obama 104). Obama’s desire to fit in to Occidental’s black community, stemming from a “crippling fear that [he] didn’t belong somehow, that unless [he] dodged and hid and pretended to be something [he] wasn’t [he] would forever remain an outsider” (Obama 111), has negative effects. In one instance, he is called out by black friends because he is so focused on pushing a group’s activist agenda that Obama seems to let go of his values. In the words of one fiend, he had lost his way, and even Obama admits himself that his first year in California he was living a lie of sorts (Obama 102, 109-110).
Ultimately, Obama encounters a social setting in Chicago’s political activism scene where he can successfully explore his identity and feel accepted by the black community. Shortly after leaving Occidental, Obama expresses a need to find a community that would go beyond the superficiality he had in college (Obama 115)-as he looks for work, the young graduate is drawn to what he hears about the authenticity of the black Chicago community rallying around their new mayor. Elected as the first black mayor of Chicago, Obama noticed immediately how the name Harold Washington was talked about with a “fervor… that seemed to go beyond politics” (Obama 148) and how his election had given Washington’s black constituents “a new idea of themselves” (Obama 158). On the advice of a campaign manager, Obama decides to become involved himself with organizing in the Chicago area, and what he discovers is that much like Washington’s campaign, Obama’s organizing offered a “collective redemption” (Obama 158)- or in other words a form of community- to black Chicagoans. To Obama personally, this community means at last a sense of acceptance- through talking to the people he solicits, he discovers the similarities between their struggles and his own (Obama 134). Here, people would listen to Obama’s story of growing up black in Hawaii and would often themselves “offer a story to match or confound [Obama’s]” (Obama 190), relating to being fatherless or internally conflicted about who they were. Unlike Hawaii, in Chicago Obama is surrounded by people with similar racial experiences and identities, and unlike in college, he no longer feels like he must conform to a specific type of personality or ideology.