You can't take just a one line quote from that book. You are completely misrepresenting the work. Obama often used 7-9 pages to describe and discuss his incidents. This is just absolutely ****ing ridiculous to just pull quotes like that. He would often make statements such as these, and then go on to discuss it, or mention an alternative, etc.
For example:
Now lets play the chop up a quote game: "These are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of 'em. White. Asian--shot, these Asians worse than the whites."
Now read it in context.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>"I mean it this time," he was saying to me now. "These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of 'em. White girls. Asian girls---shoot, these Asians worse than the whites. Think we got a disease or something."
"maybe they're looking at that big butt of yours. Man, I thought you were in training."
"Get your hands out of my fries. You ain't my bitch, ******...buy your own damn fries. Now what was I talking about?"
"Just cause a girl don't go out with you doesn't make her racist."
Don't be thick, all right? I'm not just talking about one time. Look, I ask Monica out, she says no. I say okay...your shit's not so hot anyway." RRay stopped to check my reaction, then smiled. "All right, maybe I don't actually say all that. I just tell her okay, Monica, you know we still tight. Next thing I know, she's hooked up with Steve 'No Neck' Yamaguchi, the two of 'em all holding hands and shit, like a couple of lovebirds. So fine---I figure there's more fish in the sea. I go ask Pamela out. She tells me she ain't going to the dance. I say cool. Get to the dance, guess who's standing there, got her arms around Rick Cook. 'Hi, Ray,' she says, like she don't know what's going down. Rick Cook! Now you know that guy ain't shit. Sorry-assed motherfucker got nothing on me, right? Nothing."
He stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth. "It ain't just me, by the way. I don't see you doing any better in the booty department."
Because I'm shy, I thought to myself; but I would never admit that to him. Ray pressed the advantage.
"So what happens when we go out to a party with some sisters, huh? What happens? I tell you what happens. Blam! They on us like there's no tomorrow. High school chicks, university chicks--it don't matter. They acting sweet, all smiles. 'Sure you can have my number baby.' Bet."
"Well..."
"Well what? Listen, why don't you get more playing time on the basketball team, hugh? At least two guys ahead of you ain't nothing and you know it, and they know it. I seen you ter 'em up on the playground, no contest. Why wasn't I starting on the football squad this season, no matter howm any passes the other guy dropped? Tell me we wouldn't be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or ****ing Eskimo."
"That's not what I'm saying."
"So what are you saying?"
"All right, here's what I'm saying. I'm saying, yeah, it's harder to get dates because there aren't any black girls around here. But that don't make the girls that are here all racist. Maybe they just want somebody that looks like their daddy, or their brother, or whatever, and we ain't it. I'm saying yeah, I might not get the breaks on the team that some guys get, but they play like white boys do, and that's the style the coach likes to play, and they're winning the way they play. I don't play that way.
"As for your greasy-mouthed self," I added, reaching for the last of his fries, "I'm saying the coaches may not like you 'cause you're a smart-assed black man, but it might help if you stopped eating all them fries you eat, making you look six months pregnant. That's what I'm saying."
"Man, I don't know why you making excuses for these folks." Ray got up and crumpled his trash into a tight ball. "Let's get out of here. Your shit's getting way too complicating for me."</div>
But then again, there is no need to play such games...lets just look at the facts. There is a reason those quotes didn't seem familiar to me.
From Factcheck.org
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_...ould_stand.html
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Q:
Did Obama write that he would "stand with the Muslims" and that he nurses a "pervasive sense of grievance and animosity" toward whites?
Can you guys provide some context to this e-mail. Not sure if you have already but thought I would pass it along. Thanks.
Misleading Obama E-mail:
"In His Own Words"
The last quote tells all we need to know! Be sure and read that one!
This guy wants to be our President and control our government. Pay close attention to the last comment!! Below are a few lines from Obama's books " his words:
From Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
From Dreams of My Father : "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race."
From Dreams of My Father : "There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."
From Dreams of My Father : ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
From Dreams of My Father : "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela."
From Audacity of Hope: "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
A:
No. A widely circulated e-mail fabricates some quotes from Obama's books and twists others.
Anyone looking for Barack Obama's real sentiments about whites, blacks and Muslims won't find them in this scurrilous collection of falsified, doctored and context-free "quotations." The e-mail claims to feature words taken from Obama's books, "The Audacity of Hope" (2006) and "Dreams from My Father" (1995, republished in 2004). But we found that two of the quotes are false, and others have been manipulated or taken out of context.
We have received many inquiries about this from readers whose suspicions were aroused, with good reason. Aside from the fact that the e-mail incorrectly cites the title of Obama's book as "Dreams of My Father," rather than "Dreams from My Father," you may have noticed that none of the quotes in this e-mail contain page references. This should be a sign to any reader that the author is trying to pull a fast one, betting that you won't take the time to read through all 806 pages of Obama's books to get to the facts.
False Quotes
We'll take these supposed Obama quotes one at a time, starting with the ones that are simply false. The first has Obama confessing to a "sense of grievance" and "animosity" toward whites.
Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father : "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father": Nothing like this quote appears in Obama's books.
The Obama campaign states that this quote does not appear in Obama's book "Dreams from My Father." We carefully looked through that book, as well as "The Audacity of Hope," and found nothing similar. The popular urban legends reference site Snopes.com comes to the same conclusion. Snopes also notes that a similar quote does appear in an unfavorable review of "Dreams from My Father" that was published in the March 2007 issue of The American Conservative. But the words are those of the reviewer, Steve Sailer, not Obama.
Steve Sailer: He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.
We find that this e-mail takes the personal opinion of a conservative author and falsely presents it as a confession by Obama.
A second false quote has Obama saying he would "stand with the Muslims," words that don't appear in his book. What he actually said is that he would stand with American immigrants from Pakistan or Arab countries should they be faced with something like the forced detention of Japanese-American families in World War II:
Misleading e-mail: From Audacity of Hope: "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
Actual quote from "The Audacity of Hope" [pg. 261]: Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
Obama did not say he would side with "the Muslims," which could easily be read as meaning he would side with the world's Muslim population even if it meant working outside the best interests of the United States. He said he would side with "them," referring back to his mention of immigrant communities and specifically to "Arab and Pakistani Americans." Furthermore, he was speaking of an "ugly direction" like the mass internment of Japanese Americans.
This false quote goes hand in hand with the equally false rumor that Obama is a Muslim.
Doctored Quotes
We next turn to a quote that is manipulated to make it sound as though Obama is saying he would "never emulate" a white man, when he was actually describing a personal struggle to come to terms with his own mixed-race ancestry, and the failings of blacks and whites alike.
Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father: "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. 220]: Yes, I'd seen weakness in other men - Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew - Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq - fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own - my father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!
The e-mail cuts out important words, changing the quote's meaning. Gone is the notion that he "might love" white or brown men. Gone also is that Obama was speaking not of white or brown men generally, but specifically about "these men," his white, maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham and his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro. The doctored quote makes it appear as though Obama said he would never emulate any white or brown man, based on their race.
Gone as well is Obama's admission that his black friends sometimes "fell short of [the] lofty standards" of black role models like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
Another doctored quote is trimmed to make Obama sound as though he is wary of working for a white man because of his race, when Obama actually wrote that the "problem" of race had been raised by the man himself.
Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father: "There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pgs. 141-142]: 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 - he'd said himself that that was a problem.
The e-mail's edited quote makes it appear as if Obama is left with an unfavorable opinion of someone based on race. The full quote shows that Obama's mention of Marty Kaufman's race is made only after Kaufman raises it as a potential problem in light of his consideration to hire Obama for a job on a community organizing drive.
Obama took the job. "Kaufman" is actually a pseudonym. Obama told Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet that the man's real name was Gerald Kellman, who was Obama's boss at his first job in Chicago as a community organizer at the Calumet Community Religious Conference. Obama worked for him for three years before going on to law school. Kellman has said of Obama: "One of the remarkable things is how well he listens to people who are opposed to him."
Context, Please
Other quotes in the e-mail are offered without their full context, which we offer here.
Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. xv]: When people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose - the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife's six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it's on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down...well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I'm trying to hide from myself.
On its own, the quote can be interpreted as Obama rejecting his white heritage and, by extension, the entire white population. But, in full context, the statement is part of Obama's assessment of "black or white" individuals' first impressions of him as a person of mixed race.
And finally ...
Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father : ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. 100-101]: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed necolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.
On its own, the quote makes Obama appear racially militant. Whereas, in full context, the quote illustrates Obama's confusion over his race and cultural heritage. This is emphasized in the preceding paragraph, where Obama describes himself as someone compensating for insecurity in his "racial credentials."</div>
