In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2010), Dinesh D’Souza takes seriously Obama’s autobiography (significantly titled Dreams from My Father), seeking to understand him as both a man and a president in accord with it.  Though politically conservative D’Souza (born and reared in India) rather rejoiced in seeing an African American elected president and never joined “the conservative chorus bashing” him (p. 4).  In time, however, he became alarmed at the policies Obama both espoused and implemented, fearing that:  “If Obama serves two terms, he will likely leave America a very different country than it is now.  This is certainly his objective; he has set himself the task, as he put it in his inauguration address, of ‘remaking America’” (p. 18).  Amazingly enough, D’Souza has concluded that:  “We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father.  How do I know this?  Because Obama says so himself.  Reflect for a moment on the title of his book:  it’s not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father.  In other words, Obama is not writing a book about his father’s dreams; he is writing a book about the dreams that he got from his father” (p. 198). 

"'We are today living out the script for America and the world that was dreamt up not by Obama but by Obama’s father.  How do I know this?  Because Obama says so himself.'"

When I first read Obama’s autobiography two years ago, I took it to be an inner journey of self-understanding, largely defined by his utterly absent but desperately desired father, Barack Obama, Sr., and his determination to self-identify as African-American.  Thus, as Obama, Jr. acknowledged, there is a dreamlike, fictional dimension to the book—individuals’ names are changed and at times seem to be a composite of several persons.  He devotes one-third of the book to his “origins,” one third to his community organizing efforts in Chicago, and one third to a trip to Kenya that is (I’ve learned from other sources) actually a fusion of two trips.  He tells the story of his birth in Honolulu to an American woman and Kenyan man who met at the University of Hawaii.  Given the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree in economics at Harvard University, his father soon abandoned his wife and son and moved to Boston.  Then his mother married an Indonesian who’d come to the University of Hawaii, and they moved to Jakarta, where Obama attended both Catholic and Muslim elementary schools.  That marriage also floundered, and Barack, his mother and half-sister, returned to Honolulu, where she resumed her studies in anthropology.  When she finished her studies, she determined to continue her anthropological work by returning to Indonesia, but she wanted her son to get his education in Honolulu.  He then spent his adolescence living with her parents, who were in many ways the only stable parents he’d ever know.   His generally unemployed grandfather, who seemed to have failed at most everything he attempted while moving about the country, offered a rather constant criticism of the “system” that had failed him.  But his grandmother became a highly successful woman who rose to a significant position in a Honolulu bank and provided the income for the family. 

"'All my life,' he says, 'I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own'"

Graduating from Honolulu’s elite Punahau high school, Obama went to Los Angeles, where he attended another prestigious institution, Occidental College.  Here his main concerns were still extracurricular, especially racial discussions and protest meetings.  He then finished his university studies in New York, graduating from Columbia University.  While there he “decided to become a community organizer” so as to “organize black folks.  At the grass roots.  For change” (p. 133).  After working a couple of years in New York, in 1985 he moved to Chicago and became a “community organizer” as an employee of a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization trying to enlist black churches in social justice endeavors.  Here Obama mastered the “change” rhetoric of Alinsky and became acquainted with Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who led one of the large churches Obama needed to support his activism.  Disillusioned with his glaring lack of success as a “community organizer,” thinking he could do more as an attorney, Obama set off for Harvard Law School, though he says nothing of those years.   More important than Harvard Law was his deceased father!  Throughout the book he seeks to identity himself as his father’s son.  “All my life,” he says, “I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own” (p. 220). 

"D’Souza found that he, as a nonwhite native of India with similarly elite educational experiences in America, enjoys a unique perspective.  He also recognizes the 'rich melange' of anti-colonial 'political and intellectual figures' who shape Obama’s (and his father’s) world."

So Obama’s dreams come neither from America’s founders (Washington or Lincoln) nor from Civil Rights leaders (Booker T. Washington or Martin Luther King) but from his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.  The younger Obama himself is intriguing enigmatic— certainly the most obscure man to vault into the White House—and the “political mystery of his agenda is compounded by the psychological mystery of the man” (p. 2).  In an effort to understand and explain the man, D’Souza found that he, as a nonwhite native of India with similarly elite educational experiences in America, enjoys a unique perspective.  He also recognizes the “rich melange” of anti-colonial “political and intellectual figures” who shape Obama’s (and his father’s) world (p. 13).  “Fortunately for me, this is intellectual terrain that I know well.  Steeped as I am in the politics and history of the Third World, these are figures whom I have studied” (p. 14). 

At this point D’Souza rather shares Shelby Steele’s probing analysis of understanding of the man.  Steele has longed pondered questions of race in America and written some fine books, including The Content of Our Character and White Guilt:  How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. In A Bound Man(New York:  Free Press, c. 2008), he sympathetically identified with Obama inasmuch as he too has a black father and white mother (though his parents preserved an intact family in Chicago).  Like Obama, he went through an intense struggle as a young man, aching to racially define himself.  He too espoused radical views in his college years and invested several years thereafter to “community organizing.”  So he’s deeply sympathetic with Obama and openly admires the candidate’s “remarkable political talent” as well as the fact he is “elegant as well as eloquent” (p. 12).  But Steele finally finds Obama a deeply flawed man who ought not to have been trusted with this nation’s leadership.

To evaluate him, Steele insisted we must take seriously Obama’s personal quest for his father, an obsession that permeates his autobiographical Dreams from My Father.  This has been, Steele notes, the “lifelong preoccupation for Obama” (p. 17) that explains his “determination to be black, as if blackness were more an achievement than a birthright” (p. 18).  Hungry for a heroic sire, his youthful fantasies began to crumble in his 20s when he met his half-sister, the daughter of his father’s first wife, who shattered his dreams.  He was forced to admit that “the man Barack had always pictured as a formidable patriarch” was in fact “a figure of pathos, a man of some talent beset by petty weaknesses and the sort of arrogance that covers an inner faithlessness” (p. 22). 

Yet he would not detach himself from his father’s blackness—he wanted to don his racial identity, and that meant embracing his Kenyan ancestry.  But it also meant, strangely enough, mingling an African identity with one crafted by African American writers such as Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois.  Steele understands Obama’s hunger.  “For racially mixed blacks, the search for ‘authentic’ blackness is also a search for personal credibility and legitimacy” (p. 28).  Still more:  it’s a hunger to belong to a people, a  community, that grants worth and purpose to one’s existence.  “The ache at the center of Dreams from My Father is this seemingly permanent ache of not belonging” (p. 34). 

Finding his identity in his blackness, rather than relying on his own abilities, Barack Obama fell into trap, a double bind that makes him, Steele says, a “bound man” (p. 38).  He could (like Tiger Woods) have developed his skills and entered the mainstream of American society.  He had that option.  But “Obama’s racial quest springs from a personal angst, not from an oppression in society” (p. 44).  This was markedly evident when he attended Occidental College, where he carefully chose to associate with black activists, “‘Marxist professors and structural feminists’” (p. 45).  He particularly dissociated from “blacks like himself—blacks from integrated backgrounds and good preparatory schools who are at ease in the American mainstream” (p. 47).  Indeed, he spoke harshly of a fellow student who chose assimilation rather than segregation.  Obama “needs to ‘be black’” (p. 52).    Thus in Chicago he joined “a South Side black church with a ‘Black Value System,’ focused on ‘Black freedom,’ the ‘black community,’ and the ‘black family.’  In this church, the adjective ‘black’ is a more consistent theme than any of the nouns it modifies.  It is invoked as an atavism, a God-given specialness that is thought meaningful in itself” (p. 53). 

"Though Steele and D’Souza differ in certain aspects, they both insist on the singular importance of Obama’s father.  In his effort to “distill the essence of the man,” D’Souza insists that Obama “is his father’s son, and his dreams are derived from his father’s aspirations and failures. "

Though Steele and D’Souza differ in certain aspects, they both insist on the singular importance of Obama’s father.  In his effort to “distill the essence of the man,” D’Souza insists that Obama “is his father’s son, and his dreams are derived from his father’s aspirations and failures.  Everyone who knows Obama well says this about him.  His ‘granny’ Sarah Obama—not his actual grandmother but one of his grandfather’s other wives—told Newsweek, ‘I look at him and I see all the same things—he has taken everything from his father.  The son is realizing everything the father wanted.  The dreams of the father are still alive in the son’” (p. 26).  This reality Obama’s autobiography makes clear, for “his whole book is an elaboration of how he internalized his father’s dreams and goals.  Obama calls his memoir ‘the record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.’  And again, ‘It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself’” (p. 26). 

This explains Obama’s decision, following his father’s death, to begin calling himself “Barack” instead of “Barry.” (His father, Barack Sr., beginning his studies in Hawaii, had adopted the American name “Barry” and his son was called the same).  This name shift, D’Souza says, “was a very big deal.  He didn’t just take his father’s identity; he self-consciously rejected his father’s American name in favor of the senior Obama’s African identity.  He obviously “identified with his father more than anyone else, and undertook an intense psychological and ultimately actual journey to Africa in order to discover his dad and in the process to find himself.  Unable to find his father, he did the next best thing:  he embraced his father’s ideals and decided to live out the script of his father’s unfulfilled life” (p. 27).  Though forced to acknowledge his father’s many flaws and failures, he could still maintain that his dad “had great vision, great ideals, a great plan of reform” and he could live out his “heroic mission.  In changing the world into the image of his father, he would complete the task that his father couldn’t, and thus he would become worthy of his father, a real African and a real man” (p. 27). 

His father, from most every standpoint, seems unworthy of emulation! Before coming to Hawaii he’d married a Kenyan woman and “had two children with her.  Before the second child was born, he abandoned his family to come to America. There he met Obama’s mother Ann, got her pregnant, and then married her, but without telling her he was already married.  When Obama was two, his father abandoned him and his mother to go to Harvard; there he moved in with a teacher, Ruth Nidesand.  Eventually he took Nidesand back to Africa, married her, and had two children with her.  But he also rejoined his African wife, Kezia, and had two more children with her.  Later in life he took up with still another woman, Jael Otieno, and impregnated her.  The two of them planned to get married after the child was born, but the marriage never took place.  But the time he was done, Barack Sr. managed a grand total of three wives, one wife-to-be, and eight children.  He was a terrible husband and a worse father” (pp. 64-65). 

"What gave dignity and depth, however, to Barack Obama Sr. was that he was part of a much larger movement—the movement to build a free and independent Africa in the aftermath of colonial rule.  We know that this history made an impact on young Obama because he tells us so."

So what’s to admire about him?  He was, by all accounts, quite intelligent and charming, easily impressed people and had striking rhetorical gifts.  “He had a slight British accent and called himself “Doctor Obama,” even though was neither a medical doctor nor the holder of an academic doctorate” (p. 65).  He drank heavily and died when he crashed his car driving drunk.  Very little for a son to admire in his father!  And the son has certainly taken a different course in his personal life.  “What gave dignity and depth, however, to Barack Obama Sr. was that he was part of a much larger movement—the movement to build a free and independent Africa in the aftermath of colonial rule.  We know that this history made an impact on young Obama because he tells us so” (p. 66).  And, subsequently, “This philandering, inebriated African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son” (p. 198). 

This became clear in a pivotal moment when Obama visited his father’s grave in rural Kenya.  While sitting there watching some hyenas devouring a wildebeest in the distance, he concluded:  “This is what Creation looked like.  The same stillness, the same crunching of bone” (p. 121).   Awash with  emotion,  he fell to the ground and wept.  Finally, “‘I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin.  The pain that I felt was my father’s pain’” (p. 125).   To D’Souza this event signifies Obama’s “own death and rebirth” (p. 122).  Still more:  though he’d earlier “resolved to imbibe his father’s personality, his magnetic charm, his persuasiveness” it was here that “Obama receives something more fundamental.  In Obama’s own words, ‘I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.’  . . . .  It is here that Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his father’s body but by embracing his father’s cause.  And so he makes his decision.  Where Obama Sr. failed, Obama Jr. will succeed, and he will succeed calmly, strategically, using the panache and persuasiveness that he also got from his father.  Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; Obama Sr.’s failed attempt to set the right becomes Obama Jr.’s objective for the future.  As Obama himself puts it, the dreams of the father forge the dreams of the son, and through a kind of sacramental experience at the family grave, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright” (p. 126). 

" Anti-colonialism explains the president’s continual criticism of and apology for America’s past behavior.  It explains why a president would offend the British by rudely returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office for years.  Such behavior appears inexplicable.  “But with his anti-colonial background, Obama probably remembers Churchill as an imperialist who soldiered for empire in India and Africa."

Accordingly, D’Souza sets forth a theory—a hypothesis—rooted in Obama’s own words, to help explain him.  “My argument in this book is that it is the anti-colonial ideology of his African father that Barack Obama took to heart” (p. 34).  Obama’s dreams are the anti-colonial dreams of his father, and his “anti-colonialism is deeply felt, and it suffuses his writings and speeches” (p. 35).  Anti-colonialism explains the president’s continual criticism of and apology for America’s past behavior.  It explains why a president would offend the British by rudely returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office for years.  Such behavior appears inexplicable.  “But with his anti-colonial background, Obama probably remembers Churchill as an imperialist who soldiered for empire in India and Africa” (p. 42).  Still more:  “In the 1950s, Churchill was prime minister during Britain’s fight against he Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the native country of Obama’s father.  So when we apply the anti-colonial hypothesis, we find that the inexplicable Churchill incident suddenly makes sense” (p. 42).  D’Souza’s “anti-colonial hypothesis explains both Obama’s economic and his foreign policy” (p. 199). 

Anti-colonialism can certainly explain Obama’s continual commitment to “spreading the wealth,” redistributing income from the haves to the have-nots, for he considers the United States a “neocolonial giant eating up more than its share of the world’s resources” (p. 48).  As an anti-colonist (following the positions his father set forth in a pivotal 1965 essay wherein even a 100% tax rate was justified) he “believes that the rich have become rich at the expense of the poor; the wealth of the rich have become rich at the expense of the poor; the wealth of the rich doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just” (p. 167).   He sponsored, as a senator, “the Global Poverty Act that would have committed the United States to spending over $800 billion over a decade or so to eradicate poverty in the Third World and also to enable Third World countries to follow Western environmental standards” (p. 156).  He supports legislative initiatives such as “cap and trade” less because of any environmental concern but because it affords an opportunity to equalize the world’s wealth.  “Obama’s basic assumption is that America and the West are using up too much of the planet’s resources.  This is a huge theme with Obama; he never stops talking about it” (p. 157). 

Anti-colonialism underlay Barack Obama’s decision to strongly identify with his African father rather than his American mother.  In part this was a political decision, for he “seems to have recognized that race was now a source of power in American society” (p. 97).  Obama attended Honolulu’s elite high school, Punahau, but he says little about his classes.  On his own, however, he read (rather voraciously) writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, whose radicalism shaped his budding race-consciousness.  Though he seems to have encountered little actual race discrimination (the minor incidents he mentions are quite trivial), his reading fueled a “black rage” that seemed to become part of his self-identification as an oppressed African-American (though his Kenyan father was neither American nor in the remotest sense affected by this nation’s history of slavery).  He was also quite taken by an elderly friend (and drinking buddy) of his grandfather’s, a black poet identified only as Frank (in fact Frank Marshall Davis, who was well-know for his advocacy of radical, often overtly Communist causes). 

Obama’s formal studies also seem to have buttressed his father’s anti-colonial understanding of the world.  He no doubt soaked in the postmodern, multicultural, anti-Western biases of his educational institutions.  At Columbia University he studied under Edward Said, the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and a vigorous champion of the Palestinian cause.   “He seems to have had a lasting influence on Obama:  some of Obama’s writings are highly resonant with Said’s themes and arguments” (p. 94).  At Harvard Law School he impressed professors such as Laurence Tribe, but “his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Ungar.  Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and a German father, Unger is perhaps the leading anti-colonial scholar in the field of legal studies” (p. 97).  He espoused a “total criticism” approach that employs the law to attain political ends.  Though Obama never refers to Unger, the two have stayed in touch, “all the way up to the presidential campaign” (p. 98). 

Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial pastor of Trinity Church in Chicago who routinely celebrated African themes, further contributed to Obama’s anti-colonial convictions.  “The Audacity of Hope,” the first sermon Obama heard Wright preach (and the message the provided the title for the second of Obama’s books), was filled with angry references to suffering peoples around the world—all victims of the white man’s ways.  Moved to tears by the message, Obama decided to join the church, wherein he would be married and have his children baptized.  (Years later, Wright’s notorious sermon following 9/11, assailed American activities, past and present, for killing and exploiting Japanese and Iraqis and American Indians and Palestinians.  The true terrorists, to Wright, are not Muslim killers but American leaders.)  “The anti-colonial themes,” in Wright’s sermons, D’Souza notes, “are obvious here:  North versus South; rich, white Europeans versus the poor, dark-skinned people of Africa and the Caribbean.  These were the themes of Obama’s life, and he was drawn in from the start” (p. 197). 

"Though he has no sympathy with Islamic Jihadists, Obama shares their critique of America’s foreign  policy, holding “that America is the neocolonial aggressor and that the best way to promote peace and security in the world is to curb America’s power and influence” (p. 178).  He wanted, when he entered the U.S. Senate, to immediately withdraw American troops from Iraq; he opposed General David Petraeus’s “surge” strategy; and he now sets time tables for withdrawing from Afghanistan because he sees them both as lingering colonial efforts to occupy third world nations. "

Though he has no sympathy with Islamic Jihadists, Obama shares their critique of America’s foreign  policy, holding “that America is the neocolonial aggressor and that the best way to promote peace and security in the world is to curb America’s power and influence” (p. 178).  He wanted, when he entered the U.S. Senate, to immediately withdraw American troops from Iraq; he opposed General David Petraeus’s “surge” strategy; and he now sets time tables for withdrawing from Afghanistan because he sees them both as lingering colonial efforts to occupy third world nations.   One of his first decisions as president was to “reduce the size and resources of the U.S. armed forces” (p. 178).  He regularly apologizes for his nation’s sins.  He supports the Palestinians rather than the Israelis because it jibes with his anti-colonial ideology.  He’s activated by any chance to reduce America’s nuclear weapons but unmoved by efforts by Iran or North Korea to develop them. 

President Obama’s anti-colonial stance shapes his foreign and domestic policies but he appears to D’Souza as “the last anti-colonial.”  Most of the world has moved on while Obama remains mired down in his father’s antiquated worldview.  The roaring success of Indian and Chinese free trade economies have “refuted the anti-colonial economics of the 1950s, the economics that shaped the mind of a whole generation of Asian, South America, and African thinkers, including Obama’s father” (p. 206).  “The blunt truth is that anti-colonialism is dead; no one in today’s world cares about it—except the man in the White House.  He is the last anti-colonial” (p. 215).  Sadly enough, the president seems mired down in his father’s world, raging against exploitation and entrenched wealth and empires.  His “warped ideology,” D’Souza concludes, “really scares me.  His vision for America may be therapeutic for his psyche, but it is a ridiculous one for America in the twenty-first century” (p. 218). 

This is a thought-provoking treatise.  D’Souza has carefully read President Obama’s published works and provides an interpretative hypothesis that does in fact help explain the man and his policies.  His footnotes are accurate, and he persuasively demonstrates his conclusions.  While anti-colonialism cannot explain everything about the man, if one takes seriously his autobiography many of D’Souza’s insights ring true. 

Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books--The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue--as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.