When Barack Obama interviewed for a job in 1985, he found himself instinctively distrustful of the man who would become his employer — in part because of the man’s skin color.
“There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama recalled in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”
Obama’s self-described “racial obsessions” have been largely overlooked in the Democratic primary campaign, but they figure to get closer examination after his wide-ranging speech on race relations Tuesday.
Descended from a white mother and black father, “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,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” which was published in 1995, a decade before he started plotting his presidential quest.
“One of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
Obama wrote that in high school, he and a black friend would speak disparagingly “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.” Heconcluded that “certain whites could be excluded from the general category of our distrust.”
Nonetheless, Obama went on to describe the white race as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”
“That hate hadn’t gone away,” he lamented, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.” Although Obama disapproved of what he called fellow “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks, he once fell in love with a white woman whom he dated for a year. But he eventually concluded that the relationship was doomed by their racial differences.
“I pushed her away,” Obama recalled. “The emotion between the races could never be pure.”
Obama was drawn to the rhetoric of black nationalists such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers. Although he now criticizes his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a black nationalist who rants against white America, Obama wrote in “Dreams” that he sympathized with African-Americans who viewed blacks as morally superior to whites.
“In talking to self-professed nationalists,” Obama wrote, “I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything white served a central function in their message of uplift.”
Obama’s writings suggest he has long understood why figures such as Wright — who once exhorted his flock, “God damn America!” — rely on incendiary rhetoric.
“Black politicians,” Obama wrote, “discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: That race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations.”
