Barack Obama, The Invisible Man

The New Republic: How Ralph Ellison Explains Barack Obama

(The New Republic) 
Like the British Empire that turned his grandfather into a house servant, the postwar American empire that the young Obama reads about in Life is guilty of systematically devaluing the humanity of dark-skinned people. At the same time, however, it seems clear that Obama himself sees the exercise of power as a necessary and inevitable part of life. Because Obama does not identify as white, he is free to exercise power without being overly troubled by past sins for which he is not guilty--an attitude that separates him from hair-shirt leftists like Jimmy Carter.

One of the more interesting arguments of Dreams is the narrator's suggestion that his dark skin affords him a better shot at understanding power and how to use it. In a scene that owes an obvious debt to Ellison's famous Battle Royal, in which two black boys are made to fight each other in a boxing ring, the narrator is taken out into the backyard of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro's small house in Jakarta and is made to put on gloves and fight. "The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable, and often cruel," he saw. "My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them." Emboldened, Obama asks his stepfather if he ever saw anyone killed, and Lolo says yes.

"Why was the man killed? The one you saw?" the young Obama asks.

"Because he was weak," Lolo answers, instructing his half-American, half-Kenyan stepson in the age-old logic of the world outside sunny Hawaii. Obama's version of the scene ends with a searing recognition that the white part of his family lives in a fantasy world in which the need to learn such ugly lessons simply does not exist. While Obama's Third World-ism carries with it a certain assumption of American historical guilt, it should not be confused with the cult of victimization that is still popular on college campuses. Obama identifies with his father, Lolo, and other post-colonial men because they are strong. Dark-skinned men can understand power in a way that white men like his grandfather can't. If you are not strong, Lolo continues, "be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always."

The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power--a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. "Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse," Obama wrote, of his mother's response to the inequities of Indonesian society. "Guilt is a luxury that only foreigners can afford," her husband Lolo responds. "Like saying whatever pops into your head." What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Obama's identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal. White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author's evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. Yet it is hard not to be haunted by the feeling that Obama's admiration for dark-skinned strength is the mirror image of his personal feelings of weakness and inauthenticity, and that the personality that he has cobbled together out of the historical experience of other men in other times and places is more of an abstraction than an expression of the fullness of the author's humanity. In part, this abstraction is the product of a biography with too many loose ends to fit comfortably anywhere. With a few tweaks here and there, it is easy to imagine the narrator of Dreams as Barack Obama Jr., a rising young American-educated Kenyan politician, or, less likely--but still possible--as Barry Soetoro, a successful Indonesian-American businessman, or as Barry Obama, a mixed-race Hawaiian party boy--each of whom would have had his own identity issues to sort out. Obama the writer may think that he has escaped from his lonely room in Manhattan into the warm embrace of his Kenyan family and his identity as an African American man, but he also has his doubts. His wife, Michelle, worries about him. When he finally journeys to Kenya to meet his father's family, he gets the unvarnished truth from his African relatives about the man who had been presented to him as a paragon of early civil rights-era virtues:

"You know Obama was quite crazy, don't you?" a relative asks. "The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?"

"Only once. When I was ten."

"Well, you were lucky then. It probably explains why you're doing so well."

Irregular lines of fresh-faced, sweaty people at least a mile long snake around the chain-link fences that mark the secure perimeter of Invesco Field. As I stand in the afternoon sunlight, I study a Xeroxed pamphlet titled "Common Sense," which is handed to me by one of the sadly diminished number of lunatics who once flocked to political conventions and are now medicated into some semblance of normalcy. "We have developed an 'empire' which, when opposed, has responded with 'economic seduction,' and or 'black ops' violence," writes the author, Thomas P., who claims to have worked as a psychotherapist in the Denver area before giving himself over to his work as a concerned citizen. "As a counselor, when a client inflicts psychological harm on someone I suggest that they apologize, make amends, and move on. Let's do that internationally," he suggests. "That will help to reestablish the trust of our allies and set an example of spiritual values set by the majority of civilized people."

As the pamphlet indicates, the promise of Barack Obama is that of the global emperor who could make it possible for America to speak in its true voice to the world, and move on. Obama knows that America is an empire because he grew up on a colonial island possession as the son of an African man and a woman who exiled herself from her country. The same qualities that make Obama invisible to America make him visible to the rest of the world. He is as much one of them as he is one of us, and they will see themselves in him, and like us better. Yet what kind of president will he be? For all his obvious intellectual superiority over the fitful and impulsive McCain, Obama has impaled himself on the horns of a painful dilemma. While the identity that he constructed for himself in his autobiography has allowed him to blossom as a man and as a politician, it bears little resemblance to the conventional narratives of white men who run for president--and contains elements that are likely to frighten off large portions of the electorate, before or after November 4. The story of a man who identifies with a foreign father, and with people who are not Americans, and who does so on the basis of the color of their skin, flies in the face of the simplistic racial pieties that white Americans have embraced since the end of Jim Crow. The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.

The police finally show up around 4:30, and, 15 minutes later, I am inside the stadium. The stage set, containing two assemblies of four giant drywall and laminated plywood pillars connected by an arc of smaller pillars topped by a fake Greek frieze, has been an easy target for sniggering Republicans and political reporters all week. From video screens flanking the stage, Obama is telling the crowd, "I will always tell you what I think and where I stand." It's a marriage pitch, but the audience is only half listening, which makes sense considering the fact that half the delegates came here to vote for someone else. After a short break, Stevie Wonder appears on stage and starts talking to himself in that weird, sing-song way he has, to organize the voices inside his head. "I love you," Stevie says. "I love you with every song I sing." Stevie is a blessing. He vamps. "Oh, Bar-ack O-ba-ma," Stevie sings, mining the clattering bass-heavy syllables for any unexpected musicality. "I got to do this one. I got to do this one for the future president of the United States and his wife," he says before launching into "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," the Obamas' wedding song. "I know Barack Obama gonna set this country on fire," he sings, flashing his irresistible thousand-watt smile.

Then there's Joe Biden, whose gleaming white dental work is visible from across the stadium. The spark of genius in the choice of Biden was that it gave the portion of the electorate that makes lame foot-in-mouth jokes about "clean" blacks permission to vote for Obama without feeling like they would have to apologize if they met him in a bar. Other than that, the choice of Biden is clearly wrong. What it signifies is that the candidate is unable to run on his own experience of the world, which would require talking about his African father and Indonesian stepfather, and what it feels like to be a member of the dark-skinned races who live outside our borders, and make up the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. Because he can't, Obama grabs the talking head from Delaware and clutches him like a security blanket. Joe Biden is one more symptom of the candidate's invisibility, which reads like insecurity. A more confident man would have made Hillary Clinton an offer she couldn't refuse before sending her off on a four-year-long vice presidential fact-finding mission to Azerbaijan.

Biden strides off. A light breeze accompanies pictures of baby Barack. "His childhood was like any other," a voice intones. This is utter bullshit. "But it was his mother who saw in him a promise." On the screen are pictures of the elevated train tracks in Chicago, a big city, where Barack Obama arrived as a community organizer. "I loaded up all my belongings in this raggedy old car, and I drove out to Chicago, didn't know a soul at the time," he explains. The line sounds deeply familiar and deeply weird. It's a line from the biography of every writer arriving in the big metropolis: Langston Hughes, Thomas Wolfe, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Barack Obama...

The camera cuts back and forth from the candidate's white grandparents and his white mother to his strong black wife and gorgeous black daughters, in the promise that we can all be members of one big family. There is dead silence in the stadium. Up on screen, Obama tells the story of sitting on his grandfather's shoulders and waving an American flag at the returning astronauts. At 8:11, he walks down a landing strip of blue carpet to the microphone, a skinny guy in a dark suit hoping to close the sale.
Standing alone in front of 84,000 people, he carries with him the hopes and dreams of his chosen race, of everyone who wants the bad news to stop. He is handsome, fluent, at home in language. He doesn't stumble over ordinary words. His presence up there on the wedding-cake podium, flanked by giant video screens, is proof of how far we have come as a nation. He is the heir to John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. But who is he?

"Our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil," says the Invisible Man. And then, angrily, "We are a better country than this," which is clearly the best line of the night--scornful, strong, hopeful. He tilts his chin up to look tough and he looks first to his left and then to his right. "We love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight," he proclaims. The rest of the speech is warmed-over stuffing without much turkey.

Still, there is something moving about the contrast between the strong, declarative tone he strikes and the fact that he is so young and thin. He is the most intimately familiar candidate for president that I have seen, a man who is clearly on the side of the angels, and walks in the light, and all the rest of that. Plus, he is a serious writer, with a sure sense of his own voice and a professional's ear for hypocrisy and cant that will serve him well in the White House.

But there is something missing, which I fear might be fatal to his presidency. I believe that the painful process of self-formation that Barack Obama went through, and his self-awareness about the process, might be good equipment for a president to have, but watching Obama give the most important speech of his lifetime, if not mine, it is easy to conclude that Ralph Ellison knew what he was talking about. Here he is, Barack Obama, the first black man to be nominated for president by a major party, and he can't speak honestly about who he is and what he believes. He can't or he won't--either way, he's invisible.

Yet, perhaps it doesn't really, truly, matter whether Ralph Ellison was right about the price that Americans pay for having black skin, or whether the personality that Barack Obama created to deal with the pain of abandonment has a few notable cracks in it. The truth is that America is in big trouble, and the so-called national dialogue about race long ago became a collective act of masturbatory narcissism for whites and blacks alike. Barack Obama's father was never a slave; he was a Harvard graduate whose countrymen kicked the British out of their country just like we did.

What we need from Obama is a grown-up commitment to smart ideas that reflect the realities of contemporary society and make it better--as when he calls for lifelong education and for health care and pensions that stay with workers no matter how many times they change jobs, or when he warns that "kids will have to turn off the TV sets and put down the video games and start hitting the books," a phrase that echoes his father's complaints about his son's television-watching during his one and only visit to Hawaii. We need a president with a stereoscopic vision of American power who can propitiate the Russians, cut deals with our creditors, and block the emergence of a nuclear Iran. We need the cool-headed chess player who figured out how to win the Democratic primary despite losing every major state except Illinois to Hillary Clinton. We need a smooth-talking, democratic version of a cranky Third World autocrat like Lee Kwan Yew, who understands the world as it is and who doesn't talk crap. Or else we can continue the way that we are, until America actually becomes a Third World country.

"Say it again."

"Yes, sir."

"That's right."

"We cannot walk alone."

After standing alone for 45 minutes, the writer turned politician is joined by his wife Michelle, as Sasha and Malia skip around in the falling confetti. Malia presents her father with a long blue strip of paper and he winks. She will remember that wink for the rest of her lifetime. The stage explodes, as fireworks go off around the stadium, to what sounds like the music from Star Wars.

Yet, apart from his family, Obama is alone. There are no old friends from grade school eager to touch him. There are no senior party leaders. Millions of people admire him, and are moved by the possibility of change and renewal that he represents, but the scene on stage suggests that he has few friends who want to hug him.

"The arc of the moral universe bent a little more towards justice Thursday night," wrote John Aloysius Farrell in The Denver Post. "This is the defining moment of my lifetime," Anthony Graves, 32, told the Rocky Mountain News. It might be more accurate to say that the fantasy of an escape from history never ceases to pull at America even after we have learned how destructive this fantasy can be. The world didn't turn bad because George Bush made mistakes over the last eight years. The world was always bad. Still, living in darkness is not the American way, because America is always elsewhere. It is a fantasy shared by hundreds of millions if not billions of people around the globe, who want to live in the light. Barack Obama understands both sides of the global equation that makes America possible, but he has decided that he can't speak the truth about who he is and what he has seen and what he knows about the world. Obama is the kind of leader we need, which is why it is a shame that he has decided to remain invisible.

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.



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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.