I've come away from the experience of reading U.S. President Barack Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father with the distinct impression that anyone interested in human relations, sociology, history and politics who fails to read the book, is short-changing themselves. What comes across from what this man has written is the profound psychological, social-emotional trauma that overtook his life as a boy and then a young man with the burden of emotional confusion that results from a background surfeit with injustice and misery.

It explains why this man whose total upbringing, his emotional comforts, his physical needs and psycho-social security was with his white mother and his white grandparents, was in the end more profoundly affected by his black father's African roots than his upbringing as a bi-racial child in conflicted America. His introduction to his father was at a young age and very briefly. There was no joy in their meeting, mostly suspicion on the part of the young boy in the company of a complete stranger, just visiting from Kenya at the home of mother and grandparents and child in Hawaii.

The shock and disbelief that because of the colour of his skin he was considered inferior in the society he lived among set up an inner struggle within him that would colour the rest of his life.

Without reading this book it would not be possible to become aware of the depth of the psychological hold that race, tribe, clan and family have on this man. Heritage, tradition and the condition of humanity as it pertains directly to Africans inform his values and his direction. Without occluding his recognition of the universality of human nature. He describes as much racial and social bigotry within the black community as exists within the white community.

But it has always been the white community that had power, and power over those that are born of colour informed the baser instincts of superiority of whites of European stock who felt completely justified in enslaving the sub-humanity as they believed it, of the world. They were not alone; the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa also were slave traders and practised human slavery. Among them now, in Mauritania and Sudan, that belief still holds sway.

Emancipation of slaves began in Britain and spread to its colonies -- thanks to the enlightenment of a puritan-type religion that was never-mainstream -- however reluctantly. The United States of America partially fought an excruciatingly painful and deadly civil over slavery. The prejudice that once existed at the most elemental level within American society has now subsided, with outcroppings that still remain resistant.

The wonder of ironies that often glaringly exhibit the stupidity of humankind allow us occasionally to laugh at the absurdity of our existence. But perhaps the tidiest irony of all was the mass acceptance that truncated the existence of a mass psychosis resulting in the democratic election of a man who represented the most obvious example of a oppressed underclass rising to prominence and world power remains the story of President Barack Obama.

From slavery to consorting with royalty for they have themselves become royalty.

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