Continuation:
One of the seniors, a stout defensive tackle named Kurt, was there, and he shouted loudly as soon as he saw us. “Hey, Ray! Mah main man! What’s happenin’!” Ray went up and slapped Kurt’s outstretched palm. But when Kurt repeated the gesture to me, I waved him off. “What’s his problem?” I heard Kurt say to Ray as I walked away. A few minutes later, Ray caught up with me and asked me what was wrong. “Man, those folks are just making fun of us,” I said.
“What’re you talking about?”
“All that ‘Yo baby, give me five’ bull****.”
“So who’s Mister Sensitive all of a sudden? Kurt don’t mean nothing.”
“If that’s what you think, then hey . . .”
Ray’s face suddenly glistened with anger. “Look,” he said, “I’m just getting along, all right? Just like I see you getting along, talking your game with the teachers when you need them to do you a favour. All that stuff about ‘Yes, Miss Snooty *****, I just find this novel so engaging, if I can just have one more day for that paper, I’ll kiss your white ass’. It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it. So just get the f*** outta my face.”
By the next day, the heat of our argument had dissipated, and Ray suggested that I invite our friends Jeff and Scott to a party that Ray was throwing out at his house that weekend. I hesitated for a moment – we had never brought white friends to a black party – but Ray insisted, and I couldn’t find a good reason to object. Neither could Jeff or Scott; they both agreed to come so long as I was willing to drive. So that Saturday night, after one of our games, the three of us piled into Gramps’s old Ford Granada and rattled out to Schofield Barracks, maybe 30 miles out of town.
When we arrived the party was well on its way, and we steered ourselves toward the refreshments. The presence of Jeff and Scott seemed to make no waves; Ray introduced them around the room, they made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor. But I could see that the scene had taken my white friends by surprise. They kept smiling a lot. They huddled together in a corner. After maybe an hour, they asked me if I’d be willing to take them home.
“What’s the matter?” Ray shouted over the music when I went to let him know we were leaving. “Things just starting to heat up.”
“They’re not into it, I guess.” Our eyes met, and for a long stretch we just stood there, the noise and laughter pulsing around us.
In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking at once contrite and relieved. “You know, man,” he said, “that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties . . . being the only black guys and all.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Right.” A part of me wanted to punch him right there.
We started down the road toward town, and in the silence, my mind began to rework Ray’s words that day with Kurt, all the discussions we had had before that, the events of that night. And by the time I had dropped my friends off, I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.
In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self – the humour, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap.
Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. ******.
©Barack Obama 2007
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama, published by Canongate Books, £12.99. Available for £11.69 from Times BooksFirst, 0870