Party at Ray’s
In this scene, Obama is at a high school party. He did not like Kurt because he thought he was making fun of him and his friends. Ray tries to tell him that he’s overthinking and that he shouldn’t be worried. Obama starts to view the world from a different perspective, in a negative way. He realizes that whites had all the power. They could do whatever and get away with whatever.
“We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules.” This quote is significant because this is when Obama realizes that black people didn’t have as much power as white people. In fact, colored people had no power at all compared to them. Whites had all the rights in the world and no matter what they did, good or bad, they can get away with it because they are the ones in control. Everything a black person had, the whites had it first.
Obama learns that his race identifies his life. Whites are constantly judging colored people, controlling them.
