{"id":11610,"date":"2011-01-19T04:36:05","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T04:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11610"},"modified":"2019-02-03T04:48:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T04:48:47","slug":"dreams-from-my-father-a-story-of-race-and-inheritance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11610","title":{"rendered":"Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Crown an Imprint of Random House<\/a>
\nJuly 1995
\n464 pages
\nHardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-38341-9 (0-307-38341-5)<\/p>\n

Barack Obama<\/a><\/strong>, President of the United States<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nine years before the Senate campaign<\/a> that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times<\/em> bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father<\/em> tells the story of Obama\u2019s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother\u2014a struggle that takes him from the American heartland<\/a> to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Obama opens his story in New York<\/a>, where he hears that his father<\/a>\u2014a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man\u2014has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family\u2019s unusual history: the migration of his mother\u2019s family from small-town Kansas<\/a> to the Hawaiian islands<\/a>; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan<\/a> student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist<\/a> spirit of the early sixties; his father\u2019s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack\u2019s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.<\/p>\n

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father\u2019s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago<\/a> to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.<\/p>\n

Barack\u2019s journey comes full circle in Kenya<\/a>, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father\u2019s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away\u2014and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.<\/p>\n

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father<\/em> might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader\u2014a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Dreams from My Father” tells the story of Obama\u2019s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother\u2014a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,395,63,1245,11,125,8,17,20],"tags":[861],"class_list":["post-11610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-autobiography","category-barack-obama","category-biography","category-books","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-random-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11610"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57474,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11610\/revisions\/57474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}