As a term, "African American" generally refers to American people of African descent, many of whom are the descendants of slaves and survivors of a system of Jim Crow laws that granted African Americans only second-class citizenship decades after their emancipation from slavery. A sense of shared history and suffering are foundational to this particular cultural and social identity. "Black," a more general term, is frequently used to encompass the shared experiences and cultures of people of African descent all over the world, including in America.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama spends much of the time recounted in the book attempting to come to terms with what it means to be black in America and to claim an African-American identity. Obama's struggle to claim a racial identity as an African American is complicated by his multiracial, multicultural origins and his status as the son of a recent immigrant from Kenya. Obama's efforts to claim that identity only meet with success once he becomes grounded in a physical and social community of African Americans.

Although Obama has publicly identified as an African American, his origins as a black person who spent time abroad in Indonesia and who spent his formative years in Hawaii, a multiethnic place that does not adhere to the simple black-white racial mix of many parts of the U.