A review of ‘Dreams From My Father’, Barack Obama – Issue XXII
Obama can tell a story, but he does so with just the ordinary competence of an educated man and the ordinary prejudices of any other man.
This is an excerpt of an article that features in our 22nd print issue.
A teacher in a run-down black school in the most run-down part of black Chicago, tells him what a real black education would be:
"Just think what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community... But for the black child, everything's turned upside down. From day one what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity... So that's what we're dealing with here. Where I can, I try to fill the void. I expose students to African history, geography, artistic traditions... It's about giving these young people a base for themselves. Unless they're rooted in their own traditions, they won't ever be able to appreciate what other cultures have to offer." (pp 258-9)
It's understandable that someone who's black, feeling himself to live in a world dominated by whites, should be drawn to the fallacy, but that doesn't make it any less a fallacy, and snare. If it were true that the court is so completely the white man's that everything, including the very words in which you might say so, are his, and not your own, then you can't say so and can't know it to be so. What you say is self-refuting. And there's an obvious sense in which to be educated you've got to leave your race at the door. You can't learn arithmetic – or to read and write – as a black, or white, man. There's no black, or white, Chemistry; and there's no black, or white or women-only, literary criticism. And Mr Obama shows us what it is to not to leave your race at the door, when he writes about Heart of Darkness.
"The way Conrad sees it, Africa's the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection... the book teaches me things. 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 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." (p 102)
Is it possible to believe he has read the novel? His report of what he has found in it is just too hard to credit. He might, perhaps, have read a well-known (but stupid) essay by Chinua Achebe on it but I doubt even that. I think he must be relying on what someone has told him the essay says the novel means. If such a misrepresentation of Conrad's novel doesn't count as 'racism', what said or written could?
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