January 6th, 2011
Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has an incisive review of David Remnick’s Obama book over at the always excellent Claremont Review of Books. It’s really not to be missed. The thrust of Caldwell’s essay is examining how (and why) Obama self-consciously built a black identity for himself. You will not often see this subject discussed. Samples:
As an American boy growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Obama was in a confusing position. He looked black, but he didn’t know any blacks. He was descended from slave owners but not from slaves. Most disorientingly, Hawaii—where he was brought up by his white grandparents—lacked even those lingering remnants of racism, the exposure and expunging of which was, by the 1970s, the main preoccupation of the burgeoning establishment that had grown out of the civil rights movement.
In a way that strikes Remnick as both “touching” and “awkward,” Obama began “giving himself instruction on how to be black.” . . .
Obama is, racially speaking, a self-made man. If there were a citizenship examination for blackness, he’d have passed it. Remnick hints that Ann Dunham’s idealization of black people may have rubbed off on Obama, and that it may be responsible for the immodesty that is his besetting flaw. Remnick sees that blackness can, in some circumstances, be deployed to great effect on the political stage—and that the 2008 presidential election was one of those circumstances. . . .
At root, though, Remnick is without a drop of cynicism as to why Obama, as both a youth and a middle-aged man, might consider a confident blackness of a politicized kind to be something worthy of aspiring to. The struggle for racial equality appears in these pages as a moral lodestar, the only real litmus test of contemporary political morality. Mastering the history and rhetoric of civil rights, reading the rest of American history through it, rendering one’s personality acceptable to those who speak in its name—to Remnick, all of this is so self-evidently admirable as to need no explanation.
I won’t tease you with more. Go read the whole thing.
-
In other words: Obama was trying to answer the question that Schooly D posed: (as a part of the immortal Walken movie King of New York’s soundtrack) Am I black enough?
-
what a superb article. can’t wait for Caldwell’s next essay (and yours!) in the Standard.
-
[…] is the part about him I’m most amused by – he’s horrifically unauthentic by any standard you care to apply. But that leaves […]
Jason O. January 6, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Actually, here’s the Schooly D tune that was actually in KoNY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v40ainAHkRo
Maybe Fishburne’s greatest line:
“Nobody rides for free, Mothafucka!!!!”