This paper examines the fourth chapter of Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, focusing on Obama's adolescent experiences at a Hawaiian high school and his evolving understanding of race. Rather than analyzing the differences between Black and white Americans, the paper explores how Obama observed racist attitudes within all racial groups, including his own community. Drawing on specific passages, the essay traces Obama's journey from adopting a race-centric identity to arriving at a more nuanced understanding of universal human xenophobia — and his conclusion that such tendencies, while perhaps natural, need not be accepted or perpetuated.
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Much of the debate concerning race in this country — and indeed around the world — has for centuries consisted of listing and extrapolating on the perceived differences from one race to another. Different theorists, politicians, scientists, and social philosophers, great thinkers and small minds alike, have pointed to various perceived differences between races as reasons why they reasonably could or should be separated, treated differently, or even simply understood differently. The differences asserted by these individuals have ranged from those with a biological or genetic basis, which have been proven largely if not entirely unfounded by today's researchers, to social and cultural differences that certainly exist, though they cannot be said to have a strictly racial basis. In short, many people — perhaps nearly everyone — have insisted on real and persistent differences in racial identity and worldview that affect the interrelationships among races in a diverse society.
This background is what makes the fourth chapter of Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance both so compelling and so ironic. In this chapter, Obama reflects on his adolescent years, growing up as one of the very few Black students at his Hawaiian high school while living with his white grandparents. His observations of the behaviors exhibited by the other Black men around him, particularly his friend Ray, made a strong impression on the now-former President during his teenage years and caused him to examine the nature of the racial divide — not only as it applied to his own identity, but also in its relationship to the general power structure in American society. The main thrust of this chapter, however, is not concerned with the differences between Black and white, but rather with the similar racist attitudes that existed within both groups.
Obama is certainly not the first person — or even the first African American — to suggest that the African American community in general holds many racist beliefs and attitudes toward white people and people of other ethnic backgrounds and skin colors. But the personal telling of this realization, as well as the conclusions he seems to draw from this rather startling epiphany, makes his comments at once more controversial and more profound, especially given his later role as one of the most powerful figures in the world. There is an immediate sense of irony in the chapter as Obama remembers a comment of Ray's concerning girls at their high school: "These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of 'em. White girls. Asian girls — shoot, these Asians worse than the whites" (Obama 73). Ray's inability to see the inherent racism in his own classification and gradation of women based on their race, whether or not his assertions were true, struck the young Obama as amusing — but also obviously caused him to think long and hard about his identity as a mixed-race American and about the issue of race in general.
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