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The above-quoted e-mail forward reproduces passages taken from Barack Obama's two books — Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope — (2006) with the presumed intent of presenting Obama as a self-declared racist. However, these cherry-picked statements are all presented devoid of context, and some of them are either significantly reworded from the originals or outright fabrications. Below we have identified and reproduced the relevant passages in which these statements appear, with their fuller context: I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction. This statement is a rewording of a passage from page 261 of The Audacity of Hope, in which Barack Obama wrote of the importance of not allowing inflamed public opinion to result in innocent members of immigrant groups being stripped of their rights, denied their due as American citizens, or placed into confinement, as was done with Japanese-American U.S. citizens during World War II. The original contains no specific mention of Muslims — Obama was referring to the importance of standing up for and protecting the rights of all immigrants who have become U.S. citizens, and someone altered the wording of the passage to give it a different meaning: 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. This statement comes from the introduction to Dreams from My Father (p. xv), as part of a passage in which Barack Obama spoke of the difficulties of growing up as the child of mixed-race parents. The statement is actually a portion of a parenthetical remark Obama used to explain that people who did not know him well were often surprised to find that he was the child of mixed-raced parents (because he looked black, and he no longer made a point of gratuitously mentioning that his mother was white): I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race. No such sentence (nor anything close to it) appears anywhere in either Dreams from My Father or The Audacity of Hope. This statement was taken from a March 2007 article about Barack Obama, and they are not Obama's own words but rather those of the article's author (recast in the first person): There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white. This statement comes from page 142 of Dreams from My Father, as part of a passage in which Barack Obama described being interviewed by a man named Marty Kaufman (a pseudonym for Jerry Kellman) for a position as a community organizer in Chicago. Kaufman was specifically looking for a black man to work with him, because he himself was white and needed someone to help him appeal to both sides in a racially polarized city. The statement reproduced above creates a false impression by eliding the ending to the final sentence, in which Obama makes reference (in his expression of misgivings) to Kaufman's whiteness being a problem, because Kaufman himself had said it was a problem: It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. This sentence appears on page 101 of Dreams from My Father, as part of a long passage in which Barack Obama talked about his time at Occidental College in Los Angeles. It was another expression of a theme touched on in many other sections of the book — the difficulties of being expected to associate oneself with a particular racial heritage, especially for those who came from multiracial backgrounds — prompted by the example of a girl named Joyce, one of Obama's classmates: 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. This statement is a rewording (further changing an intended meaning already obscured by a lack of context) of material from page 220 of Dreams from My Father. The material appeared as part of a passage in which Barack Obama described his profound disappointment in learning (from information provided by his half-sister, Auma) that the lofty image he had held all his life of his role model, his biological father (a man he barely knew), was a flawed and idealized one.
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