Barack Obama, The Invisible Man

The New Republic: How Ralph Ellison Explains Barack Obama

(The New Republic)  This story was written by David Samuels:

On my way to Denver for what is being billed as the political speech of my lifetime, I am doing my best to open up a lotus-like space inside my head in which I can enjoy the pleasurable sensation that comes to lucky Ivy League meritocrats of a certain age, when friends from college and graduate school are on the verge of really running things in America. On any given Sunday, you stand a better-than-even chance of knowing Barack Obama's speechwriters, his economic advisers, the New York Times correspondent covering his campaign, or someone who played basketball last Tuesday with the candidate. While I don't know the candidate personally, I feel as if I do, in part because he was at Harvard Law School when I was at Harvard, and he lived a few blocks away from me in a "transitional neighborhood" in Manhattan where rich people brought their dogs to poop. I know where the candidate is coming from, I am thinking, as I watch the fluffy white clouds float by my airplane window in a sea of antidepressant Obama blue.

It is hard not to like the idea of a writer becoming president, even if most writers I know would run for cover when confronted with the collapse of the financial system or the threat of Iranian nukes. I enjoy reading Barack Obama the writer for his particular mix of personal empathy and isolation, his abstract sentimentality and carefully modulated personal bitterness about his father, who appears as much more of a monster than the gauzy title of Obama's first memoir might alone suggest. Open on the gray plastic tray table in front of me is my heavily marked-up first edition of Dreams from My Father, which I found in a used bookstore in Manhattan and bought and read with pleasure without the slightest inkling that the author might someday run for public office, and which I am bringing with me to Denver in something of a continuing state of shock that Obama is likely to be elected president. How wonderful and strange it would be if our creaky American empire were to be governed by poets! It is true that Barack Obama isn't Shakespeare or Cervantes, or even John Ashbery, and that most writers would make lousy presidents, especially in America, where literature and politics have learned to keep the other at arm's length. Still, it is hard to argue with the fact that Dreams is a terrific book--an insightful, well-written, cunningly organized black male bildungsroman that also serves as a kind of autobiographical rejoinder to one of my favorite American novels, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Obama cites Invisible Man as a major influence on his personal evolution along with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, two classic first-person narratives in the African American literary canon that can properly be thought of as novels with strong autobiographical components. (Malcolm X is ostensibly based on a series of taped interviews with the ex-Black Muslim leader and was written after Malcolm's death by Alex Haley, who also wrote Roots.)

What's even more remarkable about Dreams from My Father is the fact that it was written by a man who has since decided to run for president by disowning the most striking parts of his own voice and transforming himself into a blank screen for the fantasy-projection of the electorate. It is hard to overemphasize how utterly remarkable it is that Dreams exists at all--not the usual nest of position papers and tape-recorder talk, but a real book by a real writer who has both the inclination and the literary tools to give an indelible account of himself, and who also happens to be running for president. In which connection, it seems right to mention that the Barack Obama who appears in Dreams, and, one presumes, in his own continuing interior life, is not a comforting multiracial or post-racial figure like Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter who prefers to be looked at through a kaleidoscope. Though there are many structural parallels between Dreams and Invisible Man, Obama believes in the old-fashioned, unabashedly romantic, and, in the end, quite weird idea of racial authenticity that Ellison rejected. He embraces his racial identity despite his mixed parentage through a kind of Kierkegaardian leap into blackness, through which he hopes to become a whole, untroubled person.

My own belief is that Barack Obama has the makings of an unusual and unusually effective president, because he might combine a writer's sense of the dramatic moment, and of how language helps to shape reality, with the brain--and perhaps the soul--of a Harvard-educated technocrat. At the same time, I find it hard not to wonder about how President Obama will see the world, and what the major fault lines in his personality might be. The fact that the talking heads and the voters alike are unable to see him plain is an optic effect that Obama anticipates in his first book. It is no accident that the literary model for Obama's narrative of self is Ellison's Invisible Man, just as it is no accident that liberals and conservatives alike seem to be talking about five or six wildly different people when they talk about Obama, none of whom bears all that much resemblance to the narrator of Dreams.

Dreams from My Father is a story about the consequences of a fiction created by a white mother and well-meaning white grandparents in order to give a fatherless black child a sustaining myth by which to live. It is one of the more interesting facts about Obama the writer that the father he chooses to represent, and whose legacy he chooses to embrace, is a bona fide monster--a scary polygamist who abused his wives and children and drank away his intellectual promise and his career, then crippled himself in a car accident that left him with iron legs, and finally wrapped his car around a tree in a second accident that luckily proved fatal to no one other than himself. Dreams is a book about Obama coming to terms with this troubling monster and creating a workable self out of the ruins of his father's life.

Obama's distanced and writerly view of a self as something that is summoned through a creative act of will is at odds with the author's hand-me-down ideas about racial authenticity; the tension between the created self and the given self animates Obama's writing, but is not resolved in any satisfactory way. Filled with striking, well-disciplined sentences and observations, Dreams is also shot through with the vanity of a young man trying on borrowed clothing in front of a mirror as he attempts to figure out exactly what kind of black man he will be, a process that tells us that the narrator comes from a privileged place in society. The structure loosely but deliberately mirrors the structure of Ellison's novel--a picaresque, which shows an intelligent and bookish young black man's struggle with internal and external definitions of self as he moves through a series of institutional settings and self-defining impulses cloaked in the garb of communal politics or culture: the campus anti-apartheid movement, black and anti-colonialist literature, community organizing, the black church.

Where Obama's narrator provides the reader with a model consciousness, sensitive, responsible, and aware, who moves from triumph to triumph along the road to successfully embracing the fullness of his black identity, Ellison's story ends badly. The Ellisonian collision between the individualist consciousness and the realities of the color line in America produces a kind of fatal and indigestible dark matter that is aware of itself yet can never claim a full share of humanity. Ellison's protagonist is invisible because the symbolic radiance of his black skin queers the efforts of others to relate to him as an individual, and makes him prey to the manipulations of whites and blacks alike who utilize the brutal and absurd dynamics of the color line to satisfy private lusts for power and domination. The tragic thrust of Ellison's novel is often reduced to the banality that black people are invisible to white people. Ellison's deeper point is that the symbolic and actual baggage of race makes it difficult if not impossible for a black man to ever realize his full humanity in the eyes of anyone--white, black, communist, capitalist, or himself. A lone atom aware of his fate but powerless to change it, Ellison's narrator winds up in an underground room in a whites-only building in Manhattan lit up by 1,369 light bulbs powered by stolen electricity, listening to the startlingly original recordings of the young Louis Armstrong--completely illuminated and yet totally invisible.

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.

The fact that Obama is hip to Ellison's rather depressing take on what race might mean for his career in American politics comes through in occasional moments of brutal honesty in his later writing, like his analysis of the basis of his political appeal in The Audacity of Hope: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Here, Obama seems to agree with Ellison about the effect of the racial baggage that people bring to his public performance as a politician. The black candidate is rendered invisible to his white audience, a fact that would appear to leave him with little choice but to use that blindness in a strategic way if he wishes to lead.

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama's story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison's invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election. Crazy right-wing charges that Obama shares the loonier opinions of Dr. Wright or that he is a secret Muslim blend seamlessly into reports of his calls for immediately beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or his promise to sit down with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions, or the fact that he began his political career at Bill Ayers's house in Chicago, or that his financial backer Tony Rezko was a scummy slumlord who paid for the Obamas to have a new backyard. None of it sticks, because Obama is not that kind of candidate. The campaign uses the Ellisonian condition of invisibility to its advantage while also exerting a powerful form of mental jujitsu on guilty white liberals, a species that Obama knows well: Attacks on the candidate are simply projections of the (racist) mentality of his accusers. As they erase the weirder and more specific points of his sensibility in a blizzard of superlatives, whites create an image of a black superman as a kind of photo-negative image of liberal guilt.

On the copy of Time that I take with me to Denver, Obama emerges on the cover from some weird murk that makes it look like he was photographed from the head up while naked in a hyperbaric chamber. This being Time's seventh Obama cover in the last year, it seems fair to observe that his face is looking a little fleshier than usual. Whereas he once seemed to channel Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X circa 1963, he now looks more like a man who is tired from the physical ordeal of the campaign. The most striking thing about this week's Obama photograph is his mouth, which is a little bit hard, with upturned corners giving a suggestion of a smile. He's a political Mona Lisa. "He hears America singing--and griping, fretting, seething, conniving, hoping, despairing. He can deliver a pitch-perfect expression of the racial anger of many American blacks," writes David von Drehle, "and, just as smoothly, unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many whites."

Yet, however much the candidate is adored, and no matter how powerful the Democratic Party's mojo seems this year, it is hard to imagine that the Ellisonian premise of black invisibility can survive the premise of a modern presidential campaign, which is that the candidate should make himself known to the voters. Obama's failure thus far to construct a convincing public story about who he is and where he comes from is not an accident, but rather a product of the strategy that won him the Democratic nomination, and which informs his larger take on the realities of race in America. Of course, Barack Obama has already spelled out a convincing story of who he is and where he is coming from in Dreams from My Father--a story that has real literary merit but does not accord in every place with the usual pieties about race in America. Obama's put-downs of peers with mixed racial backgrounds who define themselves in a more ambivalent way seem at odds with the author's self-proclaimed talent for empathy. "That was the problem with people like Joyce," he writes of a female classmate who was not interested in campus activism. "They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people."

For an Ivy league guy, you have just written one hell of a convoluted essay. Your professors would despair. Simply because you have a title of "the invisible man", you have in twisting and turning, contorted in every which way to fit your essay to the title.

What is so invisible about a man who has written two excellent books explaining in as vivid a manner as one can do about his origins and past and of his mental and social develepment? 99.99 per cent of American politicians have done less, often hiding as politicians generally do, as many things as they can about their past; warts and all.

If after all your research, reading and scholarship, you cannot understanding a simple narrative of a man and his history, then you are like most Americans, suffering from the myopic world view typical of an anglo-saxon white guy. This is what Obama has been saying; you live in a complacent world brought about by hundreds of years of exploitation of others by your forefathers. Like the British aristocracy, enriched by 500 years of theft, robbery and plunder of its colonies, your world too will end. Americans, especially, the whites, are in majority, too stupid and complacent to compete because of years of undeserved affluence. This allows the clever and conniving among you, to make fools of the American populace who are at this moment suffering greatly, because of the dastardly conspiracy of the rich and connected, to exploit them.

[redfromla]

magnetrack

Did you actually READ THE BOOK YOURSELF or are you another mindless drone who parrots what other people think because thinking for yourself is difficult for you? Because if you read the book you would know why those passages are there.

[magnetrack]

It''s too bad you did all that work, just to find out that Ayers wrote the book...
http://www.cashill.com/articles_all/recent.htm

[specialty8]

I am glad he can write a good book about himself and what goes on in his life. Everyone talks about voter fraud,is this not what happened to Hillary? She by all rights should have been the Democratic choice by popular vote.Not a Clinton fan but whats right is right.

[newslink]

I don''t think some people would understand sound reasoning. Nevertheless "Who is Obama? There are small-minded bigots that would prefer to hide behind computers. And name call and speak backwards.

[razor253]

I really enjoyed reading "Dreams", as he is a wonderful writer, and it is a literary work of significance. But we have to remember it was written 13 years ago, when he was right out of law school, before he got involved in politics. In the back and forth of the campaign battles, we have not reflected on the implications of a President with vast writing skills, and sharp attention to details. I think he is under contract for 2 books, but the ones that he will organize and write during his Presidency will be be both historical and literary masterpieces!

[mt_guy]

"...Obama grabs the talking head from Delaware and clutches him like a security blanket." - now THIS I disagree with. Biden speaks his mind. His experience and background in the Senate is deep. He is skilled on International Foreign Policy. But he is not a ''yes'' man, and that''s why Obama picked him. At least he knew his weakness could be succumbing to the voices in his head telling him how smart and how right he was. Obama picked Biden to be his conscience in the Oval Office.

Hopefully, we''ll get to see how that works out.

[bragova]

Some of the people leaving comments clearly haven''t read the article.

[mel130nygirl]

Posted by OneAmerican7 at 12:34 PM : Oct 10, 2008

Voter FRAUD is committed by REPUBICANS everyday!!!! They sold the election in 2000 from Gore and the Repuks will do and SAY anything to try and suppress POOR AMERICAN CITIZENS FROM VOTING ON NOVEMBER 4TH!!!!

[mel130nygirl]

Gov. Sarah Palin%u2019s husband, Todd Palin, was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party for 7 years from 1995 to 2002. The party was officially recognized in 1984. The Alaskan Independence Party was formed with the ultimate goal of seceding from the U.S. Its current short-term goal is winning a vote on whether to secede from the United States.
LA Times reported:
But back home, she has cheered the work of a tiny party that long has pushed for a statewide vote on whether Alaska should secede from those same United States. And her husband, Todd, was a member of the party for seven years.
%u201CKeep up the good work,%u201D Sarah Palin told members of the Alaskan Independence Party in a videotaped speech to their convention six months ago in Fairbanks. She wished the party luck on what she called its %u201Cinspiring convention.%u201D
The AIP initially claimed Palin was also a member in the past, but has since said she was not. The Associated Press reported: %u201CVoter registration records show Sarah Palin registered in May 1982 as a member of the Republican Party and has not changed her affiliation.%u201D

[mel130nygirl]

The "Black Baby" smear (Primary Presidential Campaign 2000)

Before the South Carolina primary in 2000, for example, phone calls were made to voters in which the callers claimed to be taking a poll, asking: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" McCain had done no such thing. He and his wife had adopted their daughter Bridget, who has dark skin, as a baby from Mother Theresa''s orphanage in Bangladesh. A professor at Bob Jones University also had sent an e-mail message telling South Carolinians that McCain had %u201Cchosen to sire children without marriage,%u201D which wasn''t true. McCain lost the 2000 primary, and the Republican nomination, to George W. Bush.

Such attacks usually can be disproved with less effort than it takes to forward them to others. The statement that Snopes endorsed the false claim that Obama is a Muslim radical is an example. So we find it disappointing that they continue to circulate. But we expect to see more of them as the election year wears on, and we''ll do our best to expose them when readers bring them to our attention.

And what is really sad is McCain hired the SAME BUSH campaign TEAM that smeared him in 2000 to run his smearing campaign against Obama NOW!!!!

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_obama.html

[betterthanob]

Oh and not to mention the fact that if he (OB) gets into office, what we thought as reverse discrimination now as being bad, just wait...it WILL get worse.

And I''m sorry, NONE of us living have ever owned a slave and owe the black people anything. It''s time for them to stop making babies, get off their butts, quit dealing drugs and apply for that college loan, yes Obama - there are such things as college loans for us, the poorer folk in this country.

I am not saying this because I live in a dream world, all of the abve events occur in my neighborhood every day. And I am sorry, for OB to encourage more women to get pregnant more often to recieve that tax credit is WRONG...you''ll be seeing more 18 yo''s popping them out like gumballs....it''s a disgrace.

[betterthanob]

I would just like all of the OB supporters to ask this man where is his orginal birth certificate, why doesn''t the Hawaii hospital have his birth on record?

Second, don''t any of you idiots realise that this "man" is eanting to create his OWN socialist country? Have ypu even read colony14.net? If you do, maybe that will make you stop and THINK who this man really is and what he REALLY stands for.

[tx4obama]

No I didn''''t. His name is Obama Bin Biden and he himself has said in his books he was embarrassed of his white mother. awww. poor little baby. His mother should have left him in Kenya with his wonderful father.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by proisrael at 12:36 PM : Oct 10, 2008


Aha, thank you for admitting you are interested in "That One" and read his book.

Perhaps his mother should had left him over there in his father country. I bet if she did, he also would had been that country''s leader right now.

It''s God''s will, and I am glad that Barack Obama is here, in his birth country and exercing his rights.

The fate of this country is also in God''s hands and remember he does not like ugly.

[skysoldier75]

What exactly is a maverick?

Not a follower, but not a leader either. If people followed him, he would, by definition, be a leader, not a maverick.

A maverick is somebody who just doesn''t really fit in anywhere -- someone who''s off all on their own somewhere.

It took Bush 8 years to become a politically isolated loner -- McCain is determined to be an isolated loner from day one.

It''s going to take an enormous amount of bipartisan support to fix all of our nation''s current problems. McCain doesn''t even seem to have the support of his own party, let alone within the opposition party.

Being a maverick during such tough political times really doesn''t sound like a big plus to me. It sounds a lot more like serious trouble down the road.

[tx4obama]

Compassion for everyone except his own brother in Kenya living on $1 a month. He threw his mother under the bus because she is white. Obama Bin Biden is a racist pig.
Posted by proisrael at 11:18 AM : Oct 10, 2008


If your fact is true, do you know how much $1 worth in that part of the world? Obviously not.

Hmmmmm...... I thought his mother died of ovarian cancer.... Hmmmm...... Where is your fact?

And in your anger, you forgot his name. It''s Barack Obama, who has spoken many times to Americans (the last time at the last victory debate with McCain) that he wants to find Osama Bin Laden and kill him.
But between me and you, the Bush family will prevent that, why? Because the Bush and Bin Laden are close friends, that''s why.

[old300d]

I wonder what he thinks of L.F. getting that award at his church.

Many believe that L.F. was involved in the murder of M.X. including M.X.''s daughter and wife.

Rev. Wright honored L.F.

Obama has a strange past.

[rjs1955]

Irrespective of any differences I may have with Mr. Samuels, it is refreshing and reassuring to be able for once to spend my lunch hour reading this wonderfully-thought, intelligent and enlightening article...and on CBSNews no less... unbelievable.

Isn''t it amazing how much circumlocution a writer can indulge in about an invisible man. If Obama had been any more invisible there might not have been any space left for comments.

[tx4obama]

What amazed me is that some American people still can not accept the fact a United States citizen, who happened to be half Black half White, could very well be their next President. They can not see beyond his dark skin, to see his brilliant mind, to see his warm heart filled with love for the poor children, his compassion for the under dog middle class, his vision to turn our country around and to bring America back to be the greatest country in the world.

What a shame that people can pay good money to go to a pro football or basketball game and cheer for black men on their favorite team, or work side by side 8 hours daily with some black co-workers on a project for their office, or serving on a same non-profit board with some black members for a good cause (the list can go on and on....), but still can not vote for a decent Black man to lead this country right now.

How much longer do we have to live in this racist society? I hope to God not much longer.