Barack Obama, The Invisible Man

The New Republic: How Ralph Ellison Explains Barack Obama

(The New Republic) 
The uniqueness of Obama's campaign rhetoric about race has been identified by seemingly grateful (white) commentators as a profound ability to identify with both races that is assumed to be a product of his mixed racial heritage. The assumption that Obama racially identifies to some strong extent with his white mother and grandparents comes naturally to white people, but it is contradicted by the evidence of his work. A reader conditioned by the dynamics of modernist writing, in which personal identity trumps allegiance to the group, keeps waiting for the author to become equally disenchanted with his black family and emerge at the end as a radically isolated but purified hero, beholden to no one, aware of the larger absurdity of the human condition. But Obama's reading of Ellison tells him that the modernist ending is a trap that should be avoided at all costs. Dreams from My Father does not end with the expected discovery that we are all radically alone in the world, but rather with the discovery that he is a member of a strong and loving black African family--even if the father he identified with as a child is a myth created by guilty white liberals. Throughout his narrative, Obama's evolving "blackness" requires a deliberate and increasing degree of mental and physical alienation from the white relatives who cared for him as a child. Frank Davis, the black communist poet who plays Obi Wan Kenobi to Obama's Luke Skywalker, explains to Obama that his grandfather--Davis's friend--is a kind of closet racist, because he is unaware of how much power he wields by virtue of being white: "That's why he can come over here and drink my whiskey and fall asleep in that chair you are sitting in right now. Sleep like a baby. See, that's something I can never do in his house."

What's interesting about the above passage is that Obama quotes Davis's sentiments without a shadow of dissent: The logic of the narrative gives the author permission to show his white family members in a bad light because, as Davis suggests, he is more closely related to other black people than he is to the white-skinned members of his family. Obama's uncharitable treatment of his white family serves the additional function of explaining why his father left. Speaking of his grandfather's love for the black singer Nat King Cole, Obama summons up a scene of his African father coming to dinner at his white family's house, and then turns his gentle, liberal-minded white grandparent into a bigot: "I imagine him asking my father if he can sing, not understanding the mortified look on my mother's face." Did this embarrassing scene actually happen? The language of Obama's book suggests that it did not. The more immediate function of the imagined scene is to distract the reader's attention from a more likely cause of his grandfather's concern--the fact that his 18-year-old mother was being courted by a mature man in his mid-twenties whose family lived in another country.

Yet there is also a catch to this easy black-white dichotomy, namely the fact that the princely African father that Obama imagined as a child was in large part a gift from the same white people whose naivete the author belittles. Even on her death bed, Obama's mother, Stanley, who joined her son in the task of inventing his father, read draft after draft of his first memoir, helping her son finish the job of destroying the father-image of his childhood and becoming a man--while presumably ignoring the parts of his book that are dismissive of or insulting to her. The price of this kind of psychologically difficult work for both mother and son can only be wondered at.

One of the great themes of Dreams is the author's extreme isolation as a child and as a young man and his dislike for the company of other people--a familiar theme in the lives of writers but an unusual element in the biography of an American politician. Living on 94th Street between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue while he attends Columbia, Obama describes the student poverty of his surroundings, and explains that "[n]one of this concerned me much, for I didn't get many visitors. I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions."

The one person with whom he feels a sense of common purpose is an old man who lived next door and seemed to share the author's disposition: "He lived alone, a gaunt, stooped figure who wore a heavy black overcoat and a misshapen fedora on those rare occasions when he left his apartment." One day, the young student returned to find that his neighbor was dead, adding a perfect isolate's touch--$1,000 rolled up and stuffed in the refrigerator. "I felt as if an understanding had been broken between us--as if, in that barren room, the old man was whispering an untold history, telling me things I preferred not to hear. " It's a freaky scene, which begs the question of what exactly the author is getting at.

The image of the old man living alone in a room in New York, "whispering an untold history, telling me things I preferred not to hear," carries an unmistakable echo of the high-wattage opening of Invisible Man. The Obama at the beginning of Dreams is the Invisible Man Jr., a role that the author alternately embraces and resents. He identifies with the lonely old man next door, but makes no effort to befriend him. He wants the old man to stay locked up inside his room. The old man's death is immediately followed in the narrative by a telephone call informing Obama of the death of his father. The fact that these two deaths are so intimately conjoined suggests that the lonely old man is in some ways a psychologically safe version of Obama's own father--a silent, neutered version of the violent, alcoholic, polygamous African man who threatens his son's emerging sense of self. The darkness of his father's actual life stands in sharp contrast to the invented character who was present throughout Obama's childhood and adolescence--a man who was universally liked, brilliant, strong, athletic, a great dancer, who never backed down from a chance to stand up for the universal rights of man; a figure so perfect and yet so troubling in his absence that it is easy to see how the young writer would need to uncover his failings in a public way.

Obama's father, whose lessons about the paramount importance of self-confidence were transmitted to his eager son through the agency of Gramps, in one of the few lines of actual instruction that he ever gives, can also be read in light of another memorable character from Ellison's novel, the black school principal, Dr. Bledsoe, who undermines the young narrator's career and his sense of self and also offers a memorable disquisition on the nature of power: "Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it you know it." Invisibility, Bledsoe instructs, can be a source and an instrument of power, not just a sign of weakness--a lesson that Obama the politician seems to have taken to heart.

The character of Dr. Bledsoe also shadows the figure of Jeremiah Wright, who tried his best to destroy his protege's political career by traveling to Washington and making racially incendiary remarks at the National Press Club just to show that his previous remarks had not been misreported by the press. The fact that Obama can't wrap his mind around the shabbiness of his chosen mentor comes through quite clearly in his soft-minded portrait of the preacher and his relationship with his flock. Contrary to the feverish claims of his right-wing critics, Obama's decades-long attachment to Wright doesn't seem to reveal the candidate's secret belief that the CIA sells crack and spreads AIDS in black communities. Rather, it shows the depths of the author's longing for a suitable father. Obama's susceptibility to an older man who peddles nonsense seems like the product of his need to assume a clear and definite personal identity that will serve as a bulwark against childhood feelings of abandonment and vulnerability--a constellation of traits that eerily seems to mirror the fatal cracks in the personality of our current president, whose own father was largely absent.

The self-sacrifice involved by the Dunhams in raising their grandson is one of the most admirable parts of Obama's story, and there is every sign that Obama is fully aware of how hard his mother and his grandparents worked in order to help him find a place in the world. But in the end, they can't. Ann Dunham was taunted as a nigger-lover at the age of eleven, when she lay on her front lawn in Texas with a black schoolmate--and yet her dark-skinned son is quick to dismiss her as a silly, naive dreamer, "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism," whose liking for Marcel Camus's film Black Orpheus is physically embarrassing and uncomfortable because it uncovers the childlike and sentimental basis of her erotic attraction to black men.

At the same time, his distaste for his mother is also a product of her own belief that there is something superior about identifying with dark-skinned people, and he empathizes with her personal sufferings and loneliness in the way of a sensitive, dutiful son. "She wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath," he says, pointing out in one of the relatively few passages about large-scale world-historical events that, the year before he and his mother arrived, Indonesia had undergone a bloody U.S.- backed coup followed by massacres of up to half a million Indonesian communists. At least part of Obama's rejection of his "whiteness" can be understood in light of the fact that the author was abandoned not only by his father but also by his mother, whose attraction to another dark-skinned man had led her to Indonesia, where she chose to stay by herself after sending her son back to Hawaii.

It is in Indonesia as much as any place else that Obama discovers the global dimensions of the color line. If Obama's narrative is Invisible Man with a happy ending, it is important to remember that he defines himself as the son of a Kenyan, and that his actual understanding of race owes as much or more to critics of European colonialism as it does to Ellison or Malcolm X. There is a much-commented-upon scene in Dreams in which Obama is sitting in the library of the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia and discovers a photo in Life of a black man who burned his skin off trying to become white. Right-wing critics like Jerome Corsi, who adds the honorific "Ph.D." after his name in order to make the contents of his book Obama Nation seem less shabby, have denied that any such picture ever appeared in Life or any other popular magazine and point out that another picture that Obama describes, of a Japanese woman holding her physically disfigured daughter in a bathtub, which is most likely one of a series of photographs published in Life of Japanese children who were damaged by atomic fallout, only appeared in print after Obama moved back to the United States. What this politically motivated nit-picking obscures is the revealing way that colonialist racism and the suffering of dark-skinned people are conjoined in Obama's narrative. The picture of the Japanese woman and her disfigured daughter follows an image of happy French children laughing and playing, and leads directly into the image of the black man whose skin is burned off, and whom Obama initially perceives as a victim of radiation sickness. (The idea that the Hiroshima bomb and murderous anti-black racism were two sides of the same coin is a theme of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's sermon, "The Audacity of Hope," which Obama describes at length later in Dreams, and which would be the title of his second book.) Colonialist powers like France and the United States, the conjunction of these images suggests, destroy the lives of dark-skinned people overseas just as white racism causes black people to destroy themselves at home. "There were thousands of people like him, "Obama writes, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." Since no such picture ever appeared in Life, Ebony, or any other major U.S. magazine during the author's sojourn in Indonesia, it seems fair to see Obama's reading of the photograph as a reflection of his own understanding of the impulse to "become white" as a powerful and disfiguring product of a racist white society.

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.