Second SA Inquiry Question Response

Second SA Inquiry Question Response

SA Inquiry Question 1: What really difficult or complex things are happening in the text?

            “Dreams from My Father” by President Barack Obama is a memoir written by the president about his passed and his origins. So far I’ve read the section of the book titled, Origins, yet still there have been so many very large, deep things going on in the book, which makes sense for President Obama’s very complex story.  President Obama was born to a woman from Kansas and her Kenyan husband; for the time period you can already tell where the problems may have occurred. Obama’s father left him and his mother at an early age and she soon left their home in Hawaii with Barack’s grandparents to live with her next husband in Indonesia. Barack had to adapt to living there and to have a new father-like figure in his life. President Barack Obama’s story is very rich and deep and can teach you so many important morals, showing the way life has changed and how bad things were and still are.

            One major difficult idea in the story that is repeated again and again is racial inequality. President Obama brings up stories and memories of his family facing and living in a time when racial inequality was at an all-time high. Here’s an example of this, “The truth is that, like most white Americans at the time, they had never really given black people much thought.” As you can see and as the President goes on to say, African Americans were considered as being not a choice, odd and were displaced from society. From this quote in the book you can tell that Barack Obama’s mother and grandparents lived in a society where blacks were still not as good, people were still yet to get the idea that blacks didn’t had the same rights as whites. In fact the Civil Rights movement hadn’t been sparked until Barack was a young boy, living in Indonesia. Even when he came back to the US and went to school he wasn’t treated equally by his peers, he was one of only black children at his school. He says that he remembers only one black girl around his age. An example of this is, “‘Barack is such a beautiful name. Your grandfather tells me your father is Kenyan. I used to live in Kenya…Do you know what tribe your father is from?’ her question brought on more giggles… When I finally said ‘Luo’, a sandy-haired boy behind me repeated the word in a loud hoot, like the sound of a monkey.”  If his misplacement in society hadn’t been enough, when his peers knew that his father was from Kenya they often mocked him but only because it was a country, they had learned from the adults that teach them, of people that lived like animals. Even when the boy made the sound like a monkey, he meant it intentionally to make Barack feel like he was an animal who lived in a tribe. But going back to the time period of his mother and grandparents, African Americans were treated even worse. Recalling an old story his grandmother, Toot, told him, “While the two of them chatted in the hallway one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and hissed that Toot should never, ever, ‘call no nigger Mister.’” This just shows that racism went so far in Obama’s origins, as his grandparents lived in a time period where blacks were really segregated, and I felt that this was a really extreme example. Toot had chosen to call the man Mister and if she thought that it was okay I’d think it was okay, and that’s still very rude as she should have been calling the older man Mister anyways, but it seems that the people of the time period wouldn’t even allow others to treat blacks the way they wanted. It was a time period where blacks were not respected, period. I thought that was really sad and I think that it’s what Obama intended to make you feel after reading it. Obama says that, “Gramps would insist that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort of such racism”, when I read this I notice that you need to realize that this is before they married their daughter to an African American, if you didn’t agree with the way blacks were treated you either stayed and lived with it or you left to where things were better, you had no choice, people wouldn’t change their minds in the idea that blacks were equal. To add on to this, Obama says that his grandmother used to tell him that the word racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. I interpreted this part as saying that racism wasn’t something that was wrong at the time and was never used to say that racism was happening because racism wasn’t wrong so that people would even bring it up. Today the word is used when people of different races are treated a certain way, it’s a form of injustice and back then racism wasn’t unjust so there was no need for the word.  There hadn’t been anything against slavery. In the book Barack says “The condition of the black race”, by this he refers to the way they’re being treated, “, their pain and their wounds”, and with this he wants to show that it was really tough on the blacks in society, he speaks so much about how the whites treated blacks and with this he wants to remind the reader of how life actually was for those being treated unfairly. Barack Obama recalls a time when he was roaming through a magazine and saw a picture of a man who looked very sick and thought it was just a disease but after reading the attached text he learned that the man was an African American that had undergone a surgery to lighten his complexion. This shows the measures taken by people because they really had no rights, they couldn’t do anything when all they wanted was to be able to do the things that a white person could. It would make such a difference that they would try to lighten their complexion just so that they can get the rights that they originally deserve. With the topic, racial inequality Barack Obama’s message is that we live in a country, where only a few decades ago, racism was super high. What we believe today is a disgusting way to think was normal back then and was the way people lived and thought. African Americans were treated as people that weren’t a choice and that were odd. It’s very sad the way people thought and the way society was split.

            Another large, complex thing in “Dreams from My Father” is interracial marriage. As most of us know, and as I previously mentioned, Barack Obama’s mother was a white girl from Kansas and his father a Kenyan man. As you would tell from the time period and the racial inequality that was placed in society, interracial marriage caused a problem for Barack, his parents and mostly his grandparents. A man once told Toot’s father, “You best talk to your daughter, Mr.Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.” Although it may seem crazy, since today there is less of this idea, many thought it was a sin for a white girl to marry a black man, even today people don’t like the mixing of races. Barack said, “Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his daughter with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart.” What Barack meant with this was that when others would see that his grandfather’s daughter (his mother) with a black man, because of the way people lived with racial inequality, people would immediately judge him and as I previously mentioned, if you did believe that blacks deserved rights like whites, you either had to change the way you thought or leave. So because his white daughter married a black man people often didn’t interact with Gramps and thought he was bad. When the family left Texas for Hawaii they left because of the racism and because Hawaii had a large racial stock, with people of many races and so there were fewer problems for Gramps and Toot as well as Barack’s parents. So, in the end the problem and issue is that so that you could get married and be treated fairly you needed to leave your home, in the end that’s wrong in my view. For being married to a black man, Barack’s mother often found herself in trouble as well, often being called names by girls as well as others, like “nigger lover”. Again an example of interracial marriage, Obama says that his grandparents thought that black people were like everybody else but often found themselves asking themselves, “But will they let their daughter marry one?” They had to consider the way they would be treated before agreeing to let their daughter marry a black man. Barack Obama’s message when talking about the issue of interracial marriage is that it really caused trouble for those involved ad still does because you don’t know what the people around you think of the topic and that can often be scary, not knowing if since people don’t like interracial marriage, they might treat you unfairly, give you less opportunities, or not like you in general. He also wants to say that especially because of the racism of the time period a white girl marrying a black man seemed in a sense to the people of the time period, a joke. He tries to sort of ask the reader, can you imagine? Because he tries to say that today interracial is more normal and happens more frequently than the times of his mother.

            Another really large and complex thing that goes on in the text is living without a father, as Barack had. He only really brings the topic up once with a significant example but he brings it up very deeply and tells us how it is to live without a father and continues to talk about it throughout the story. The way this one time he writes about it is a complex thing in the whole text is because it really affected him emotionally. He says, “I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him,” with this Obama shows that there is sentimental value in the article. He goes on to say, “I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents. I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race.” In the next times he brings up his father he mostly writes by saying “I wonder”, like he does hear or “it seems”. This really touched me because Barack Obama was left to guess about his father and his past. He had no memories of his father, nothing to look back and remember him by, each story he does has comes from somebody else and there is not one picture he has in his mind of his father, and this is sad because there is one thing to be told a story and another to experience the story or have stories of your own. Even when he found himself with a very father-like figure in his life when his mother married her second husband, he was really treated like a son but still there was a feeling that this wasn't his real father. Overall, Barack Obama’s message about the topic of living without a father is that it’s really tough and if you ever go through it you’ll find yourself trying to convince yourself that you’re not hurt but truthfully you’re tor inside because there is nothing you can do to forget that you don’t have a father. He tries to say that there is nobody that can make up for your father and that life would have been way easier for him if he had grown up between his father’s eyes. He often found himself as a small child asking himself questions about why all the other boys at school had a father and he didn't. The simplest way to put it is that it’s tough but it’s way more complex than that.

             A fourth complex and difficult topic in Dreams From my Father, is that of the outside world and how life is different outside of the United States. On page 28 of the book, Barack Obama describes, in detail, the way he saw Indonesia as a young boy arriving from Hawaii. In his description, he includes “boys hawking gum and loose cigarettes”, you immediately get the image that Indonesian boys are not focused on school, and the idea of loose cigarettes with children is just very disturbing and it shows that laws and regulations aren't the same outside of the United States. Another detail was, “a motor scooter carrying a whole family of bandits”, this also sparked an image in my brain, a poor family that could only afford a motor scooter and it was as he later mentions for five. I start to think what he meant by bandits and after thinking about it I think what Barack means by bandits is that since they’re poor the children will end up like the ways of their parents, as thieves in an isolated, lawless area. The picture I get from Barack’s entire description is that this other country, Indonesia, is a more foreign, filthy, busy and even uncivilized place than the United States. This connects to Barack’s larger message, that outside of the US, even today, life isn’t as civilized as it is in the US. In the US we've reached points and have achieved many things that many countries still haven’t. He wants to inform and even remind the reader that we live in a country that is way more stable and civilized than other places, many of which have corrupt societal, economic and political issues.

            Overall, all of the complex issues that Barack Obama brings up are connected, as all throughout his life and especially through his origins, each and every one of the complex issues and topics played a role in his life and the making of who he is today. Life was really tough for Barack Obama as he faced all of these problems. He hadn't grown up, hearing stories and experiencing a lot of racism and segregation, he saw the problems that arise from interracial marriage firsthand, he grew up without his father and he was constantly moving to live outside of the United States, where life was very different. Many of these complex topics are also issues that many people face today and I thought that they were a very unique combination of difficult issues. Everyone has their problems, and I thought that Barack’s stories were very strong and deep topics. I highly recommend reading the book.