The Issue: Self-Discovery?

"What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet into European shoes. Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn't know. He shook his big, hoary head.

'Well' he said, 'that's the problem, isn't it? You don't know. You're just like the rest of these young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you're supposed to do. And the people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college -- they're just so happy to see you in there that they won't tell you the truth. The real price of admission.'

'And what's that?'

'Leaving your race at the door', he said. 'Leaving your people behind.' He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. 'Understand something, boy. You're not going to college to get educated You're going there to get trained. They'll train you to want what you don't need. They'll train you to manipulate words so they don't mean anything anymore. They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They'll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you're a nigger just the same.'

'So what is it you're telling me -- that I shouldn't be going to college?'

Frank's shoulders slumped, and he fell back in his chair with a sigh. 'No. I didn't say that. You've got to go. I'm just telling you to keep your eyes open. Stay awake.'

This is a biographical memoir, complete with dialogue. A casting of the mind back to what can be recalled and creating a vivid dialogue that would have taken place through his recollection, but synthesized and invariably shaped by the thought and memory of the individual who experienced it, dredging it up from where it had been filed deep within the consciousness of someone seeking validation for what he feels from how he has experienced life.

The young man who had completed secondary education and was headed for university took the advice he was given seriously enough. He was under no illusions. He had experienced what all other young blacks did, growing up in the United States. The sharp spurs of racist bigotry digging into his flanks. The society in which he lived still harboured, after long soul-searching and a gradual turn-away from its mutual soul-searing culture of racial superiority to try to transform itself into an inclusive, mutually-accepting culture.

Easy enough for whites to do, thought the young man. They hadn't suffered. Different by far for blacks to surrender themselves to the hopeful trust that everything would be different. They would be seen as equals, as well endowed with all of nature's fine character attributes and potentials to enable them to meet civil society's expectations as much as anyone else. Their potential could be unleashed without fear of being hammered back down into its underdog's place by racist hold-outs. But it just simply didn't seem to materialize. And young blacks remain haunted by the past, seeing its ghosts in their present.

"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 -- Micky, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it. Maybe he was just cold; we were standing in a meat freezer in the back of the deli where he worked, and it couldn't have been more than twenty degrees in there. But he didn't look like he was shaking from the cold Looked more like he was sweating, his face shiny and tight. He had pulled out the needle and the tubing, and I'd looked at him standing there, surrounded by big slabs of salami and roast beef, and right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shiny and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart....

Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. Nobody asked you whether your father was a fat-cat executive who cheated on his wife or some laid-off joe who slapped you around whenever he bothered to come home. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism."

How's that for an introspective dose of sullen cynicism? With the crack of a realization that there is nothing all that much separating the angst of a young man from his destiny, regardless of whether he is black or white. In the case of this very particular young man, he had experienced through his early life a dose of both black and white. As a biracial child his maternal grandparents had accepted their daughter's choice of a black Kenyan mate resulting in a child inheriting the genes of both black and white. It was his white grandparents who had primarily opened their racially uncorrupted hearts to the boy that he was, loving him as only grandparents could, aiding him in his journey toward maturity.

Racist bigotry is not confined to one side alone in a two-sided morality play. Every ethnic or racialized culture believes its own lifestyle, values, beliefs, politics, religion, to be vastly superior to that of others. It represents the purpose for which biology and nature has designed the human psyche; a need to belong, to feel represented, to be part of something larger than one single, lonely soul. It's an integral part of the imperative of survival. Belonging, being a part of a group offers consolation in an otherwise-lonely world of confusing messages and circumstances beyond control. But as in all manners of human behaviour, all too often what is assumed is not the entire story.

"'I hope you don't feel resentful towards him.'

'Why would I?'

'It wasn't your father's fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When the two of us got married, your grandparents weren't happy with the idea. But they said okay -- they probably couldn't have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Then Barack's father -- your grandfather Hussein -- wrote Gramps this long, nasty letter saying that he didn't approve of the marriage. He didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how Gramps reacted to that And then there was a problem with your father's first wife ... he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce...'"

Torn between cultures, between heritage and the barriers that people establish to keep themselves firmly separated from possible contamination from one another. But on the other hand, opportunities beckon, and sometimes fortune plays out a really amazing hand. And the conflicted, unhappy and confused young man finds experiences that broaden him, and help him to become quite a unique character. Certainly unique enough to convince a needed majority of American voters that he could be trusted to advantage the country and them personally.

Becoming the United States of America's first black president. Calling on his genetic inheritance, his academic and streetwise social training to try his hand at solving not only the groaning problems confronting his country, but those as well that plague the world at large. On his journey to his future and that in a very real sense, that of the globe, he has achieved some notable firsts. At the time that he wrote his book Dreams From My Father, he had been the first African-American to achieve the considerable scholarly status of being elected president of the Harvard Law Review. At the time that he wrote the manuscript for the book he had also won the Democratic nomination as U.S. senator from Illinois.

Going on, famously, to become a Nobel Laureate once he became President of the United States. The jury is out, and it will be out for quite a long time. History will write the final chapter. President Barack Hussein Obama has his defenders and his detractors. He has taken the United States in directions different from his predecessors. Not radically different, but in directions painted in the shades of his social agenda, both internally and externally. Only time will tell how successful his initiatives will be in the long run - or not.