“”During the purge, all students studying abroad had to be summoned without explanation, their passports revoked…Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished. “You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin repeated. “Such times are best forgotten.”
My mother left the cousin’s house in a daze… She began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses and wrought-iron gates. She saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering through an open gate…One of the men shouted for the woman to leave. Another man dug in his pocket and threw out a handful of coins. The woman ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them to her bosom.
Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were, you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting. Just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company…
She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”
He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet filled with a sudden panic.
Power was taking her son.
…She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.
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In America, it…remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface…spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned…
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“…We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge that your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony; should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors they would have name for that too, a name that would cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.
In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed to deflect…
Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”
from Barack Obama’s book ‘Dreams of My Father‘.
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