Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
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No Matter What...They'll Call This Book Racist: How our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us AllIn the Age of Obama, the ugly charge of racism is more prevalent than ever. Why? Because telling the truth about racial profiling, crime, the social fallout of single parent homes, and the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice would mean facing up to the soul-destroying pathologies of urban black culture. Instead, black leaders and their guilty white allies focus tirelessly on historic oppression and the supposed need for more government aid, and demonize those who challenge their shopworn views aswhat else?racist.In No Matter What . . . They’ll Call This Book Racist, Harry Stein attacks the rigid prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about race, not to offend or shock (though they certainly will) but to provoke the serious thinking that liberal enforcers have until now rendered impossible. Stein examines the ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sown division, corruption, and resentment in this country. He pays special attention to the stifling falsehood that it is racism that continues to mire millions of underclass blacks in physical and spiritual poverty. by far the greater problem, says Stein, is the culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.
For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half century, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. All of usand especially black peoplefor too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and InheritanceNine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego. Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.
Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.
Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.
A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.
Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage)The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a new kind of politics—a politics that builds upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans. Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.
The Black Power MixtapeDuring the rise of The Black Power Movement in the 60s and 70s, Swedish Television journalists documented the unfolding cultural revolution for their audience back home, having been granted unprecedented access to prominent leaders such as Angela Davis, the SNCC's Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panthers founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Now, after more than 30 years in storage, this never-before-seen footage spanning nearly a decade of Black Power is finally available. Director Goran Hugo Olsson presents this mixtape, highlighting the key figures and events in the movement, as seen in a light completely different than the narrative of the American media at the time. Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Abiodun Oyewole, John Forte, and Robin Kelley are among the many important voices providing narration and commentary, adding modern perspective to this essential time capsule of African-American history.
The God-Science Of Black PowerAn Elijah Muhammad Speech During The Second Day of The Nation of Islam Saviour's Day Convention in 1967. It aims chiefly at the politically shallow 60's version of Black power by introducing "Real Black Power" as it relates to how God and all life originally came out of total black space. A profound example of Elijah Muhammad's comprehensive lecture is demonstrated when he asked, "If the scripture said that in the beginning God said 'Let there be light,' then He couldn't have been in the light when he said that. He Himself had to have come from Blackness; thus ORIGINAL BLACK POWER!
