Racial Identity In Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father

INTRODUCTION

Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" is a memoir written by Barack Obama first published in 1995.This moving memoir is a picture of a young black American (Barack Obama) in search of his identity, a belonging, in a white American community. His journey is about himself as he painlessly takes his readers with him to find that identity. Obama was born in 1961 to a white mid-western American woman and a black Kenyan student who came to the US to study. He was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents as his father left the family to pursue further studies back to Africa. As a youth, although not lonely, Obama experienced that voyage to racial awareness, school tensions, along with his lessons in black literature

This gives the very first glimpse of the racial discrimination and racial issues faced by Barack Obama right from the age of 12 or 13. Obama still had the thrive to continue and achieve everything that he aimed for.

"There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white". This is during the time when he describes a job interview with a man in Chicago. It seemed that race had been a part of their discussion as the white had a certain air about himself seeing Obama being a black, but instead of getting de motivated and upset about the behavior from the white Obama took it as an opportunity and showed what his true talent was. And at the end he was able to win the person, which was one of his many passions.

"It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." Obama discusses this part of his life when he talks about his childhood and his schooldays in Hawaii. Though having a white mother Obama faced too much racial discrimination in his school days, which made him vulnerable to the

As such, it provides a multifaceted perspective on the role of education and its limitations with regard to “the American Dream.” As a child, Barack was raised by his single mother in the Southeast Asian archipelago nation of Indonesia. Indonesia today exhibited enormous gaps between the haves and have-nots, with the latter representing a large percentage of the country’s population, especially as one moves farther away from the capitol, Jakarta. Forty years ago, the gap was even worse, far worse, and the wide-scale poverty endemic in much of Indonesia was clearly visible to this young man and his mother. It was in this context that Obama learned the importance of education, describing in Chapter Two his mother’s efforts at inculcating in her son an appreciation for academics “She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and