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President Barack Obama’s New Book A Promised Land – Review and Book Club

I pre-ordered President Obama’s new book, A Promised Land. When it automatically downloaded to my Kindle at 12 a.m. on the dot this morning, I was super excited. Please feel free to join along with me in reading his 752-page what-is-sure-to-be-a-masterpiece, part I of his presidential memoirs. President Obama’s epigraph includes an African American spiritual that was clearly the inspiration for his book’s title and a Robert Frost quote. The book is broken down into seven parts: “The Bet,” “Yes We Can,” “Renegade,” “The Good Fight,” “The World as It Is,” “In the Barrel,” and “On the High Wire.” President Obama is such a great writer and storyteller. Let’s get started on my reading reflections….

Reflecting on President Obama’s Preface

Reading the opening lines of President Obama’s preface is refreshing because he acknowledges that he may not have accomplished everything that he wanted to as president. For me personally, it’s frustrating that some people who criticize him do not seem to realize that as president, it’s not humanly possible to accomplish all things and that you have to work within the constraints of the office and the supposedly three branches of government along with the politics of a divided government that was explosively divisive after the election of our first Black president.

As a writer myself, it’s supercool that he shared a glimpse of his writing process: “with a pen and yellow pad (I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness)” (p. xiii). My first thought was who will have to type up his notes? lol. As a writing instructor, that is a great line “too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness” (p. xiii). I often remind my students that a con of using word processing software is that we automatically are thrust into the editing process, instead of just letting the words pour onto the page for later revision—that the first draft is rarely (more likely never) the last draft. No matter how much I try to encourage the revision process with multiple drafts, students resist that notion and often turn in final drafts that are really first drafts with a few minor tweaks here and there just because, with no real intentionality.

Friday, November 20, 2020

President Obama wrote that he wanted to do more than give a “historical record of key events” (p. xiii), that he wanted to also give an “account of some of the political, economic, and cultural crosscurrents that helped determine the challenges” (p. xiii) that occurred during his presidential watch. I’m most interested in the cultural crosscurrents and I’m looking forward to reading about his take on the current racial climate in the country. This volume covers his first term so I have to think back to what was going on from 2009 to 2012 (and also 2008 during his presidential campaign).

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Blackness and Racial Identity Formation

Racial identity and racial identity formation are major components of my research interests. When I first started my doctoral process in 2005/2006 I was fascinated with culturally relevant pedagogy and how to foster a positive cultural identity in youth. This train of thought got me  thinking about the becoming process of Blackness, which is called nigrescence (Cross). President Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” is one book I have had on my to do list to apply the nigrescence framework to. Since then, our Forever FLOTUS, Michelle Obama has published a book with that title, Becoming! This was intriguing because her book’s theme fit within my focus on the becoming process.

Another scholar, Parham, extended Cross’s theory of nigrescence to include the life cycles of nigrescence (and not just the phases), while also applying the autobiographies of W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X to the nigrescence theoretical framework. I’m interested in analyzing more contermporary examples as well as a Black woman’s perspective.

Please feel free to join me in my reading and reflection journey documented here in my blog.

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Response to “Chapter One: The Afterlife of Pathogens”

In the introduction to this chapter of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson compares anthrax to the poisonous hatred that has run rampant throughout our society in recent years. I believe, like many others, the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, ripped the bandage off of the hidden-under-a-rock (or behind a white sheet) racism and race hatred of the faux postracial society of the 1990s. She writes that “The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life” (p. 3). She mentions that even though many of us do not want to believe it, America has always been this way even though we feign ignorance and pretend not to recognize it. I say, some of us pretend because our privilege allows us to; others of us pretend so that we can put one foot in front of the other in our daily walk among the minoritized populations who have to keep on keeping on in spite of the collective, cultural trauma of our present circumstances and histories.

Wilkerson goes on to summarize the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, although she does not call them out by name, instead providing easily recognizable details and character traits.

This blog post is part of a series of personal reading responses to contemporary and traditional literature written by Black fiction and nonfiction authors.