COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN CHICAGO OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

Chapter 3 COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN CHICAGO OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE

In the fall of 1979, as Barack left Hawaii to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles, Jimmy Carter was president, a first-class stamp cost 15 cents, and the average retail price of gasoline was 88 cents per gallon. In November, Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and held

63 Americans hostage for 444 days. For Barack, his new home didn’t look, at least on the outside, much different from his home in Hawaii. It was sunny, there were palm trees, and the Pacific Ocean was nearby. On campus, the other students were friendly and the college instructors were

encouraging; there were enough black students to form friendships—a sort of tribe where issues such as race and common concerns were dis- cussed. However, he also found that many of his black friends in Los Angeles weren’t necessarily concerned with the same complaints as his black friends in Hawaii. Most had the same concerns of white students: continuing with classes and finding a good job after graduation. Barack continued to search for an identity and struggle with his mixed race.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack wrote that growing up in Hawaii instead of the more difficult streets and neighborhoods where many of his friends had lived might have left him without the same feel- ing of needing to “escape.” For him, there was nothing he had to escape except his own inner doubts. He felt more like the black students who had grown up in the safer environment of the suburbs; their parents had al- ready escaped from more difficult circumstances. They, he wrote, weren’t defined by their color; they were individuals, refusing to be categorized.

30 BARACK OBAMA

One friend told Barack that she wasn’t black, but multiracial, born of an Italian father and a mother who was part African, French, and Native American. She didn’t feel she had to choose between them. She added that it wasn’t white people who asked her to choose, but black people who were making everything racial and who were trying to make her

choose. 1 Barack recognized himself in her and others who spoke the same way. And yet it caused him to question his race even more. As a result,

he chose his friends carefully at Occidental, wanting some distance from those like his friend who pronounced herself a multiracial individual. He felt only white people were individuals and that others were confused. It was this confusion that made him keep questioning who he was, and he sought distance to prove to himself and others which side he lived on and where his loyalties were.

While at Occidental College, Barack went from being called Barry to being called Barack. This happened after he met a black student named Regina. He had seen her around campus, usually in the library or organiz- ing black student events. At their first meeting, he was introduced by

a mutual friend as Barack. “I thought your name was Barry,” she said. “Barack’s my given name. My father’s name . . . it means ‘blessed.’ In Ara- bic. My grandfather was a Muslim.” Regina repeated the name a few times and told him it was a beautiful name and asked why everyone called him Barry. He responded that it was habit, that his father had used it when he came to the States, and that it likely was easier to pronounce and helped his father fit in. In Regina’s story, as she explained it the first time they met, he found a vision of the possibility of black life, a history that was fixed and definite. He envied her and her memories of a childhood in Chicago, with an absent father and a struggling mother, with her uncles, cousins, and grandparents laughing around a table. Her response to this was that she envied her new friend, wishing she had grown up in Hawaii like him. As a result of this friendship with Regina, Barack felt stronger and more honest with himself and that a bridge had developed between his past and his future. 2

As a sophomore, Barack became involved with a divestment campaign at Occidental. As his role with the campus group expanded, he found his opinions were being heard, and, as a result, he searched for his own messages and ideas. When asked to give the opening remarks at a rally on campus, he explored his memories of his father’s speech to his class at Punahou Academy and his father’s power to transform words into real changes. At the rally, he was meek at first but then gained confidence as

he looked out at the crowd. With a voice that at first was barely heard,

he began to speak about the struggles, not between blacks and whites, not

C O L L E G E A N D C O M M U N I T Y A C T I V I S M I N C H I C A G O 31 between the rich and the poor, but in fairness, dignity, and injustice and

servitude; between commitment and indifference and between right and wrong. The crowd watched and listened and then began to applaud. He quickly realized a connection had been made. When it was time for him to leave the stage, he was reluctant to do so because he had more to say. However, later, when he was offered congratulations on his speech that others said was delivered from the heart, Barack had already decided it was his last speech. He felt he had no business speaking for black people, deciding instead he had nothing to say; the applause, he thought, only made him feel better, not those about whom he was asked to speak.

His friend Regina told him he was naive to believe he could run away from himself and avoid what he felt. She told him he needed to stop thinking that everything was about him. It wasn’t about him, she told him; it was about people who needed his help, about children everywhere who were struggling, suffering, and who were not interested in his bruised ego. For Barack, this success on the stage and his feeling afterward of finding fault within himself were the result of fear—fear that he didn’t belong, that unless he hid or pretended to be something he wasn’t, he would remain an outsider, away from anyone who stood in judgment of him. He decided his identity might begin with his race, but it didn’t end there. But still, he asked himself where did he belong? He was two years away from college graduation and had no idea of what he would do then. His childhood in Hawaii felt like a dream, and he knew he wouldn’t re- turn to settle there. And he felt that no matter what his father in Kenya might say, he couldn’t claim Africa as his home. What he needed, he determined, was a community, a place where he could put down roots and test his commitments. He decided to take advantage of a transfer program between Occidental College and Columbia University in New York City.