Slumming and/as Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father

Abstract

This article examines how Barack Obama’s narrative Dreams From My Father functions for a White audience. It argues that the narrative provides potential White readers the opportunity to “slum” alongside Obama in Chicago’s South Side ghettos. More than entertainment, slumming is for many White people an effective means of racial self-making in a process parallel to that undertaken by the narrator. Potential White readers encounter various Black characters as caricatures in the text—for example, the conspiratorial nationalist, the radical preacher—which reinforce their comprehensive generalizations of Blacks (i.e., stereotypes), the primary means by which they comprehend them and also how they understand themselves as White. It argues that the narrative simultaneously interrogates race as a concept and reproduces for potential White readers the dualistic conceptualizations of race that drive racialist thinking and racist behavior.