Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, wrote the memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. The book tells the story of Obama’s struggle to reconcile his father’s nonexistent legacy with his black identity. This passage struck me based on the real-life experiences of a former president growing up in a world where two races are divided and tensions are high between them. The realization of his race at the young age of 12 particularly struck me as he was mature enough to realize the looks and judgments from Black and White people is something he will have to deal with for the rest of his life. He hid his mother’s race in order to avoid trying to erase the background in which his ancestors came from. Obama knew the importance of his Black heritage and to not hide himself from the world. However, he would be stripped of his right to speak about the experiences of the Black man in America due to the fact that he did not come from an underprivileged neighborhood. With this he would find a struggle in where he falls in the race narrative. Is he truly black because of his skin or is he white because of his upbringing? Even Someone as powerful as the president struggled with self-identity and their place in the world.

“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. ” This sentence from chapter one remained with me because Barack Obama soon realizes that the things presented about his father by the adults in his life were illusions that reflected how they wanted the world to be rather than how it actually was. This comment is one of Obama’s numerous attempts to reconcile the gap between his ambitions and truth.