I would occasionally pick up the paper [Louis Farrakhan’s “The Final Call”] from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL). Inside the front cover, one found reprints of the minister’s [Farrakhan’s] speeches, as well as stories that could have been picked straight off the AP news wire were it not for certain editorial embelleshments (”Jewish Senator Metzenbaum announced today…”).Barack Obama, “Dreams From My Father,” p. 201It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions–between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I’d discovered that I couldn’t escape it if I tried. And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.
If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq. “Dreams From My Father,” pp. 199-200
That was the problem with people like Joyce [a college classmate of Italian, African-American, Native American, and French ethnicity]. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounced real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. …The truth was that I understood [Joyce], her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again. …To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
“Dreams From My Father,” pages 99-100
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