Listen to What Obama Actually Says

I wanted to include this as a record of Obama's thoughts and words BEFORE he became President so that I would remember 10, 15 years from now what happened to America. The fact that this man has problems and hangups with his African and white American background and with whites is not worth mentioning if you're going to be a regular citizen, but when you're aspiring to be the president of the most powerful nation on earth, I guess I see problems with that. Don't you?

BARACK OBAMA - IN HIS OWN WORDS

Audacity of Hope: "Lolo (Obama's step father) followed a brand of Islam …." "I looked to Lolo for guidance".

Dreams of my Father: "The person who made me proudest of all, though, was [half brother] Roy .. He converted to Islam."

Dreams of my Father: "In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school"

Dreams of my Father: "I Studied the Koran."

Audacity of Hope: "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

Dreams of My Father: "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race".

Dreams of my Father: "The emotion between the races could never be pure….. the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart."

Dreams of my Father: "Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning."

Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites"

Dreams Of My Father: "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself..".

Dreams of My Father: "That hate hadn't gone away," he wrote, blaming "white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives."

Dreams of My Father: "There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs," he wrote. "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names"

Dreams of my Father: "Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence."

Dreams of my Father: "To avoid being mistaken for a racial sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy."

Dreams of my Father: "there was something about him that made me wary," Obama wrote. "A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."

Dreams of my Father: "the reason black people keep to themselves is that it's easier than spending all your time mad, or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you."

Dreams of my Father: One line in Malcolm X's autobiography "spoke" to Obama "it stayed with me," he says. "He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged."