Obama's eulogy for Clementa Pinckney yesterday was, among many other things, a compressed autobiography -- or spiritual autobiography, a review of what life has taught him. It sent me back to the remarkable Chicago chapters of Dreams from My Father.
When I first read that book, in maybe 2007, I wondered, could a man with this experience and orientation really be president of the United States? Six years into that presidency, it seems no less remarkable. Three strands of the experience recorded there struck me as being compressed into yesterday's speech.
First was Obama's ode to empathy, his tribute to the connection that comes from truly listening to people. Second, the extent to which in his engagement with people on Chicago's South Side he'd taken the full measure of the devastation wrought by institutional racism. Third, his discovery of the community of black churches as the most powerful resource for countering those ravages. In each of those themes there were echoes of his personal narrative.
Obama was in a sense speaking about himself, or rather, speaking from personal recognition and memory, in this tribute:
