Somebody Else Finally Gets It About Obama's "Dreams from My Father"

David Samuels New Republic article on Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father says, very well, what I've been saying for two years now:

... 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.

It's an excellent article. (Besides making the same overall argument, lots of supporting details in Samuels' article appeared earlier in this blog.)