In “Dreams from My Father — A Story of Race and Inheritance” by Barack Obama the reader gains a deeper understanding to Obama’s past and the difficulties he went through being a black man in America. In the first chapter, the reader learns a lot about Obama’s family and early childhood. Obama was raised by his mother and his grandparents, his father left the picture when he was a little boy. Throughout the chapter, we go on to hear much about his father. His father in that chapter is portrayed as a man with integrity, pride, gracefulness, and honesty. His mother liked to describe him with a “gentle portrait”. “She would tell the story of when he arrived to accept his Phi Beta Kappa key in his favorite outfit-jeans and an old knit shirt with a leopard-print pattern. “Nobody told him it was this big honor, so he walked in and found everyone standing around this elegant room dressed in tuxedos. The only time I ever saw him embarrassed.” And Gramps, suddenly thoughtful, would start nodding to himself “It’s a fact, Bar,” he would say. “Your dad could handle just about any situation, and that made everybody like him.”” (Obama 9) We can see through this quote just how is father perfectly fit his description mentioned before. As the chapter moves on, the reader learns more and more about Obama’s father. Although learning all these great things about his father, such as the honors he received, scholarships he earned, and even being the first black student at the University of Hawaii, the one thing he failed at was being Barack’s father. This shows one of the messages Obama is trying to get across in this chapter, never judge someone based on what they show the outside world. Although on paper his father seemed like the perfect man, he was nearly close, he abandoned his family and never looked back.  One passage that really struck out to me was “In the end, I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.” This excerpt stood out to me because Obama says that the stories of his father haunted him and his family but still finds a way to make the stories essential to his life. He describes that the stories were not meant for Obama to learn more about his father in particular but rather to teach Obama about the times that his father had grown up in and what happened during those time periods. He makes it seem as though they were never meant to cherish the memory of his father.