Barack Obama: Search for identity - Los Angeles Times

One afternoon he found himself being dissed by a friend for reading "a racist tract," Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," an acclaimed novella about colonial Africa, and he pushed back.

"See. The book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. . . . So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. . . . That's the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it."

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