Biracial, but not like me

In search of his identity, Barack Obama took the opposite path that I did. But we arrived at the same place -- and I'm voting for him.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: African-Americans, Race, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Feb. 5, 2008 | I've been leaning toward Barack Obama ever since the presidential race began. But until recently, I haven't been ready to make a final decision. I admit that I was initially drawn to him primarily because of his race: As a black man offering racial peace, he promised a kind of national healing, a chance to both symbolically and literally affirm that America can overcome its greatest divide.

But I wasn't going to vote for Obama just because he was black, or because he had the gift of appealing to people across the spectrum. I agreed with his staunchly liberal positions on the issues (if I hadn't, I never would have considered voting for him), but there was a fuzziness about some of them that was a little troubling to me. He seemed stronger on the high intellectual and spiritual themes than on the nuts and bolts of governance. And I had some ambivalent feelings about his political leitmotif, his call for national reconciliation. God knows we need it. But after the devastation wrought by the Bush presidency, it would take a truly extraordinary politician, and person, to bring the country together. Was he that person?

To try to find out, I went out and got Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." And after reading it, I've made up my mind: I'm voting for him.

Part of the reason, I admit, is that he's a superb writer. Most books written by politicians have titles like "Reclaiming America's Future" or "Return to Greatness" or "Tales of Ordinary Heroism" or "We Are the People" (actually, that one was the campaign slogan in "Taxi Driver"). They are books full of inspiring anecdotes about decent, unassuming Americans, paeans to the core values that make our country a shining experiment in democracy, stories of the author's lifelong commitment to making this great nation even greater, etc., etc. Books composed of 100 percent recycled plastic bromides. Books you'd rather go blind than be forced to read.

"Dreams From My Father" isn't one of these. It may be one of the best books ever written by a politician. It is a real book by a real writer. Its theme is at once intimate and profound. Its sentences move with grace and power, its chapters have an architectural logic, and it builds toward an inspiring conclusion.

Obama's prose alone was almost enough to make me vote for him. But what tipped the scales was the portrait that emerged -- of a man who has been tested and found true, who has proved he's ready to assume the most important job in the world. For the question he answered was the hardest one of all: Who am I?

Of all the qualities a president needs, self-knowledge may be the most important: It's the foundation of everything else. And Obama's self-knowledge is all the more impressive because he had to work so hard to gain it. "Dreams From My Father" is the story of Obama's personal evolution from parochialism to a universal humanism. It's also the story of how a man blessed with a powerful analytical mind developed emotional intelligence along the way. Obama's tortured interior quest forced him to stare down all the demons in his, and America's, racial closet.

It isn't the racial quest that I expected, or one that I can easily relate to. But for me, that makes his achievement even more impressive.

Like Obama, I am biracial. My father is Japanese-American, my mother of Scottish and English descent. I'm nine years older than Obama. Like him, I grew up in a racially relaxed environment (Berkeley, Calif., in my case, Hawaii in his), where as a child I didn't consider my racial identity noteworthy, let alone a problem. And also like him, I am wary of labels, and believe that what unites human beings is much greater than what divides them.

But that's where our similarities end. For we took completely different paths to get to the same post-racial destination. I took the easy road to colorblindness. I regarded all attempts to label me as meaningless, refused to regard myself as either exclusively "white" or "Asian," and never gave my mixed-race identity a second thought. And before reading his book, I foolishly assumed that Obama had done more or less the same thing.

Next page: Obama is carving out a new racial terrain in America