Obama's book on race

I just finished reading Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama.

I was expecting a typical book written by a politician --more pontification than actual substance. But those expectations got turned upside down from the very beginning. Maybe it's because when Obama wrote this book, he wasn't a politician yet...maybe it's because he's someone that really can go beyond politics as usual (I'm more cynical about this than most people my age.) I don't know.

What I do know is that Obama was able to deeply probe an extremely complex web of race on a personal, familial, national, and global level...all at the same time. I'm wowed. I finished the book in three days and a little sad it's all over....

Here's a quote from the end of the book

I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your father's before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren't for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramaphones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead -- a faith in other people.