That is just one of the stupidest comments anybody could make. He was raised by his white relatives and he loved them. On what basis can anybody claim he hates white people??? Let's hear it, you know-it-all???
Dreams of My Father: Introduction: (p. xv)
She was a good looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm room my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her. One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesnt want what it sees on the spoon.
Im not black, Joyce said. Im multiracial. Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. Why should I have to choose between them? she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. Its not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now theyre willing to treat a person. No its black people who always have to make everything racial. Theyre the ones making me choose. Theyre the ones telling me I cant be who I am
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people
Dreams of My Father (Pgs 100-101)
I had all but given up on organizing when I recieved a call from Marty Kaufman. He explained that hed started an organizing drive in Chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. Hed be in New York the following week and suggested that we meet at a coffee shop on Lexington.
His appearance didnt inspire much confidence. He was a white man of medium height wearing a rumple suit over a pudgy frame. His face was heavy with two-day-old whiskers; behind a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes seemed set in a perpetual squint. As he rose from the booth to shake my hand, he spilled some tea on his shirt
He ordered more hot water and told me about himself. He was Jewish, in his late thirties, had been reared in New york. He had started organizing in the sixties with the student protests, and ended up staying with it for fifteen years. Farmers in Nebraska. Blacks in Philadelphia. Mexicans in Chicago. Now he was trying to pull urban blacks and suburban whites together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody black.
He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out. After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man. He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white hed said himself that that was a problem.
Dreams of My Father (pgs. 141-142)
And from his book "Audacity of Hope":
"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere
Thats the world! On which hope sits!"
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away, and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society."
"It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: (White) People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."
