Page 99 of Dreams of My Father: "I didn’t have the luxury, I suppose, the certainty of the tribe. Grow up in Compton and survival becomes a revolutionary act...I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs...You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren’t defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals.

That’s how Joyce liked to talk. She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was, with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips...all the brothers were after her. One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students’ Association meeting. She looked at me funny and then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon.

“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No–it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am...”

They, they, they. That’s the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.”(Dreams of My Father page 99)

There are many reasons why some mixed race people try to avoid blacks and even blacks try to avoid blacks for many reasons. Sometimes certain blacks make life difficult for others. Obama grew up without having a strong connection to African Americans culturally because he was raised by his white mother and her white family.

He did not have his black father from Kenya, Africa there to introduce him to black Kenya culture. Obama did not grow up among large numbers of African Americans either, so he was white culturally and yearned to be a part of African American culture or some type of black culture.