Ralph ellison biography video of barack obama

David Samuels, one of America’s finest working nonfiction writers, has a compelling and challenging piece about Barack Obama in the latest New Republic.

It is at once a book review, a comparative literature exercise, a rumination on race, a candidate profile, and a magazine feature. Its central idea is that Barack Obama has internalized the thesis of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, Invisible Man, which Samuels summarizes as the notion 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.”

To that end, Obama has offered himself to the nation as a blank slate, which is both not who he really is, and exactly who everyone wants him to be.

Ralph ellison biography video of barack obama speech today

All presidential candidates do this, of course. As the saying goes, they try to be all things to all people. But the Obama phenomenon in this regard has nonetheless been remarkable, and I have never seen it as clearly picked a