"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 neocolonialism, 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 conventions. 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 tolerant. 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."
"Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure".
"That hate hadn't gone away; it formed a counter narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people--some cruel, some ignorant"
I was a poor child but I could be happy with a sharp stick and the screams of small suffering animals
My first sexual experience was with a monkey. It was no big deal. Everyone did it!
Once a week I took a bath in cow's piss. It made me feel alive, and so I touched myself in a bad way.
I never ate cats, I just strangled them for fun.
On my 10th birthday I became a man and I don't mean to brag, but that old chicken walked funny for the rest of its life.
I ceased to advertise my mother's race at age 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating whites to myself.
All of these quotes (many of which I grew tired of using quotations on) are from Dreams from my Father written by Barack Obama in 1995.
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