Patterns of Prejudice · 2011 · 19 citations · 0 references
EthnicityCritical Race TheoryAbstract Barack ObamaEducationRacial StudyUnited StatesAfrican American HistoryBlack ExperienceSocial SciencesRaceFirst AutobiographyContemporary RacismWhite SupremacyAfrican American StudiesCivil RightsEthnic StudiesIntersectionalityHistory Of EducationCritical PedagogyAfrican American MemoryBlack PoliticsSociologyAfrican American SlaverySocial Science EducationCritical Black StudiesRace RelationSocial Justice
ABSTRACT Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.