Summary

In Chapter 7, Obama narrates his life as he neared graduation from Columbia University. Obama decided that the best way to cement his identification with African Americans was to become a community organizer. In the present, he is able to see that this decision was mostly more evidence of how his choices were bound by ideas about his father and and mother. Under the influence of the idealism with which he was raised, Obama concluded during this period in his life that "because membership was earned—because this community [the African American community] I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life" (135).

His dream of following in the footsteps of the heroes of the...