ourbrainhurts

David Samuels’ “Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison explains Barack Obama” in The New Republic is a fascinating exploration of Barack Obama as portrayed in Dreams of my Father:

Obama’s decision to identify with the lineage of his black Kenyan father to the exclusion of his white U.S.-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and her parents allows him a measure of release from the cruel racial logic that binds Ellison’s narrator—he comes from outside American society, and therefore he is not entirely bound by the overdetermined racial logic that unites the children of slaves and masters. Yet, while Obama’s rejection of his “white blood” may seem familiar from the writings of African American authors like Malcolm X, it is actually much stranger; Obama’s partial “whiteness” is not the product of an ancient rape by an anonymous slave-master but is instead the color of the mother who raised him. Obama’s embrace of authenticity separates him from Ellison’s profoundly modernist consciousness, and prevents him from seeing the serial absurdities of his own story. Where Invisible Man bubbles with fiery, absurdist humor, the narrator of Dreams rarely cracks a smile. One can only imagine what Ellison would have done with Obama’s straight-faced account of his futile career as a community organizer in Chicago, or with the incredibly juicy character of Dr. Jeremiah Wright—a religious con man who spread racist and anti-Semitic poison while having an alleged sexual affair with a white church secretary and milking his congregation for millions of dollars and a house in a gated community whose residents are overwhelmingly rich and white.