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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

In August 1981, when he was 20 years old, Barack arrived in New York to study political science and international relations at Columbia as a ju- nior transfer student. After finding a place to live, he acclimated himself to the city, finding it a far different place from Los Angeles and certainly poles apart from Honolulu. New York City dazzled him; the beauty and the ugliness, the excess and the noise, the wealth and poverty all amazed him. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack writes of the city’s allure and its power to corrupt. With the stock boom of the 1980s, he noticed that men and women barely out of their twenties were already

32 BARACK OBAMA

enjoying great wealth. Uncertain of his ability for self-control and to lead

a moderate lifestyle, and fearful of falling into old habits of drugs and al- cohol, he saw temptation everywhere. What he saw happening was remi- niscent of the poverty he saw in Indonesia and the violent mood of the young people in Los Angeles. Whether it was because of the high density of people in New York or the very scale of the city, he began to grasp the problems of race and class in the United States. He had hoped to find refuge in the black community in New York. But instead of finding a satisfactory life for himself—a vocation, family, and a home—he noticed that, for the most part, blacks working in the offices were the messengers and the clerks, not the occupants of the high-rise offices. Discussing what

he found with friends and associates, he tried to determine his future in

a place that seemed out of control, a place where obvious divisions were natural. With money, he found he could have a middle-class life and orga- nize his life around friends, favorite places to hang out, and political affili- ations. But he knew that if he stayed in Manhattan, living a middle-class life like his black friends, at some point his choices couldn’t be changed. Unwilling to do this, he spent a year observing what the city had to offer, looking for a place he could enter and remain. 3

Barack immersed himself in his studies, determined to buckle down and work hard. During his first summer in New York, Barack’s mother and sister Maya came to visit him. While he worked full-time on a construc- tion site during the day, they went sightseeing, and they would all meet for dinner and talk about what they had seen or done that day. Noticing an envelope he had addressed to his father, Barack’s mother asked if they were arranging a visit and that it would be wonderful for them to get to know each other. She said she realized it might have been difficult for a 10-year-old to understand his father, but now that he was older, it was a good time for them to meet again. She hoped he didn’t feel resentful, and she began to tell Barack that it wasn’t his father’s fault that he left, but that she had divorced him. She said her parents weren’t happy about the marriage in the first place, but they had agreed, and that Barack’s grand- father didn’t approve of the marriage either. She said the three of them were to go to Kenya after Barack Sr. finished his studies. He chose to go to Harvard—despite receiving only enough money from the school for tuition and not enough to support a family—because he had to prove he was the best, and going to Harvard was the way to do it.

She told Barack that when his father came to Hawaii to visit, he wanted them to return to Kenya with him, but she was still married to Lolo, and it wasn’t possible. Barack heard in his mother’s stories about his distant, absent father and about the love between them, a black man and a white

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 33 woman, and she was trying to help her son see his father in the same way.

A few months later, Barack’s father died. Instead of traveling to Africa for his father’s funeral, he wrote to his father’s family to express his condo- lences. He wrote in his memoir that he felt no pain at his father’s passing, only a vague sense of a lost opportunity. Later, he wrote, he dreamed about his father and afterward dug out the letters he had received over the years. Remembering his father’s visit so long ago, he realized how, even in his absence, his father’s strong image gave him structure, something to live up to or to disappoint. 4

Barack graduated from Columbia University in 1983. In his profile in

a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, Barack recalled his college years as “an intense period of study,” saying, “I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” 5

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