Barack Obama Fact Sheet: Part I

Obama’s Racial Identity Politics (from Dreams from My Father)

The following quotes are from Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (paperback, Three Rivers Press, ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3, $14.95 U.S.). They suggest that, contrary to popular depictions as a multiracial unifier, Obama’s ideology was formed by Black identity politics. This ties in directly with his membership in a church with a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa” and liberation theology. Suggestion: if you are FOR Obama, buy this book. Obama will get a royalty for the sale even if, after you verify the following for yourself, you decide to vote for someone else.
…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… (page xv)I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though… (page 93) [http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/streetterms/ByAlpha.asp?strTerm=B, “Blow” = “Cocaine; to inhale cocaine; to smoke marijuana; to inject heroin”]That was the problem with people like Joyce [a college classmate of Italian, African-American, Native American, and French ethnicity]. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounced real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. …

The truth was that I understood [Joyce], her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again. …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. (pages 99-100)

“[Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness] teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me just understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.” (page 103)

Pages 195-204: [Obama describes his relationship with Rafiq al-Shabazz, a self-proclaimed Black Nationalist]

The above material is relevant to claims that Barack Obama, as a person of multiracial ancestry, would be a “racial unifier.” Obama’s own statements suggest that, at least during his college years, he resisted integration into mainstream American society while criticizing other students for doing so. This becomes especially significant when placed side by side with his membership in a church with a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa,” whose parent organization, the United Church of Christ, has ties to the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center: an entity whose Web site calls the establishment of Israel a “catastrophe.”

http://husaria.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/anti-obama-viral-email-project/