Slouching towards tribalism

Powered by Hate: Racist Content from Dreams from My Father

By William A. Levinson

Numerous urban legends circulated about the content of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father during the 2008 election. The concept of falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all) means that people who read enough proven lies about the book will then not believe the truth. It is therefore important to circulate the truth as widely as possible, and with page numbers for easy verification.

The following quotes are from the paperback edition from Three Rivers Press (New York), ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3. The content is also verifiable from Google Books. It is important to state up front, and reiterate later, that the racist content ofDreams from My Father is 100 percent consistent with Mr. Obama's open association with hate-mongers like Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton.

Pages 99-101 of the book are particularly informative because Barack Obama talks very explicitly of his racial identity politics. He identifies very clearly as an African-American as opposed to a melting pot American, which makes him totally unqualified to be president for Americans of all races and ethnicities. He begins by talking about "problems" with a classmate of multiracial (Caucasian, Native American, and African-American) ancestry, and then talks about showing one's loyalty to "the black masses."

That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. ... To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

... But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

Barack Obama on "Race Mixing"

Mr. Obama next (pages 101-102) provides his opinion of miscegeny, which is also known as "race mixing." The following is quite a statement for a man of biracial origin:

Tim was not a conscious brother. Tim wore argyle sweaters and pressed jeans and talked like Beaver Cleaver. He planned to major in business. His white girlfriend was probably waiting for him up in his room, listening to country music.

Alternatively, as the Saxon warlord (doubtlessly modeled on today's skinheads and other white supremacists) put it in the movie King Arthur, "We don't mix with these people. ... We'll not have our Saxon blood watered down by mixing with them." Mr. Obama's comment about his black classmate's Caucasian girlfriend is consistent with this kind of thinking, along with his statement in the Preface (page xv) that disowns half of his own genetic composition:

I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites[.]

Obama, Black Nationalism, and Racial Identity Politics

Dreams from My Father gets even worse when Obama talks about Black Nationalism and "race loyalty" on pages 199-200.

[Questions as to the adequacy of Black identity politics that suppressed anger toward white people, or that "failed to elevate race loyalty above all else"] contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions-between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. ... Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq.

Barack Obama's problems with Black Nationalism therefore related only to its effectiveness, as opposed to its rightness or morality. His next question to Rafiq was incidentally as to whether the latter could turn out his followers "if a public showdown with the city became necessary." This seems to place the current occupant of the White House at exactly the same moral and intellectual level as, for example, the Stormfront White Nationalist Community: another racial identity organization that assigns more importance to the color of a person's skin than to the content of his or her character.

The Complete and Ugly Picture

The appalling content of Dreams from My Father becomes even worse in the context of the complete picture. This picture includes Mr. Obama's 20-year membership in Jeremiah Wright's racist church, the same church that gave Michael Pfleger astanding ovation when he exulted that Hillary Clinton's defeat left "a whole lot of white people crying." This, along with its social achievement award to Louis Farrakhan, is apparently what Mr. Obama's church calls "Christianity."

Next comes Mr. Obama's open association with the prominent racist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton. A simple Google search on "Sharpton" and "Tawana Brawley" or "Crown Heights" or "Freddy's Fashion Market" will show what Mr. Sharpton thinks of white people in general and Jews in particular. Sharpton personally called the owner of Freddy's a "white interloper," and he has also referred to Jews as "diamond merchants."

This ugly portrait of Barack Obama's racial policies would not be complete, though, without the equally repulsive content of Michelle Obama's senior thesis. On page 2 of this thesis, as hosted on Politico, she makes it unequivocally clear that she is now first lady for only one segment of American society; emphasis is ours.

Earlier in my college career, there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would use all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost. My experiences at Princeton have made me more aware of my "Blackness" than ever before.

The context of this statement is Ms. Obama's belief that some members of the Princeton community may have treated her differently because of her race, and she might well have been right; there are plenty of racists around. She also, however, expressed concerns about assimilation into "a White cultural and social structure," which is an attitude consistent with the views her husband expressed in Dreams from My Father.