Dreams from My Father

by

Barack Obama

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Chapter 1 Quotes

According to her, racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”

She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Toot (speaker), Gramps
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Toot, Ann
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase. Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Ann, Ray
Page Number: 80-81
Explanation and Analysis:

At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Ray, Jeff, Scott
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”

Related Characters: Frank (speaker), Barack Obama, Gramps, Toot, Ann
Page Number: 80-81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to?

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Joyce
Page Number: 100
Explanation and Analysis:

Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color?

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Regina, Reggie
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me [...] that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker)
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

One thing I noticed, though. The woman so concerned with the cruder habits of her neighbors had a picture of Harold in her kitchen, right next to the sampler of the Twenty-third Psalm. So did the young man who lived in the crumbling apartment a few blocks away [...]. As it had for the men in Smitty’s barbershop, the election had given both these people a new idea of themselves. Or maybe it was an old idea, born of a simpler time. Harold was something they still held in common: Like my idea of organizing, he held out an offer of collective redemption.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Harold Washington, Smitty
Page Number: 158
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with [...]

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Deacon Will Milton, Angela
Related Symbols: The Life Photograph
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Auma
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Asante, Johnnie
Page Number: 261
Explanation and Analysis:

“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, David
Page Number: 266
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. [...] I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.

That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before [...]

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 276-77
Explanation and Analysis:

That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Ann, Lolo
Page Number: 278
Explanation and Analysis:

By widening its doors to allow all who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained inseparably bound, that an intelligible “us” still remained.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Reverend Wright
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

I let my eyes wander over the scene—the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Auma, Bernard, Zeituni, Aunt Jane, Kezia
Page Number: 318
Explanation and Analysis:

“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 322
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; [...] It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Auma, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 330-31
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” She said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Hussein Onyango Obama
Page Number: 371
Explanation and Analysis:

“Let me tell you, your father, he was a very great man. I was closer to him than to my own father. If I was in trouble, it was my Uncle Barack that I went to first. And, Roy, you would also go to my father, I believe.”

“The men in our family were very good to other people’s children,” Roy said quietly. “With their own, they didn’t want to look weak.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Billy (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 385-86
Explanation and Analysis:

“But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also he is writing Kenya’s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn’t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he’d grown up with.”

Related Characters: Sayid (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Bernard
Page Number: 390
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

I knew that, as I had been listening to the story of our grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had always been of an autocratic man—a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule. [...] What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Hussein Onyango Obama, Granny
Page Number: 406
Explanation and Analysis:

I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 430
Explanation and Analysis:
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