“Anatole Broyard climbed out of the box that society wanted to stick him in and his daughter tries for 500-plus pages to stuff him back in. ”
“Eventually, on our march to a “more perfect union,” Americans will get beyond our divisive, destructive obsession with race.”
These two statements contradict each other’s moral purposes. According to the story Jacobs tells, Anatole did not “climb out of the box imposed upon him by society”. He managed to shift unobtrusively from one box into another, that is all. He exchanged the box of blackness for the box of whiteness. And he did it because he could, due to the fluke of having white enough skin to “pass”.
His daughter knows that this is no real human progress, but a defeat by succumbing to the racial paradigm that creates this “divisive, destructive obsession with race.”
Obama in no way fits into these narratives that Jacobs tells us about. He is a man pretty comfortable in his own skin. He is authentic in his outsiderness, differentness.
It is possible that unwittingly, and by maybe going along with his wife’s wishes, he painted himself into a corner staying with that church and that pastor. Sometimes when you stand too close, you can’t quite see clearly. And Obama missed the irony of the contrast between what he clearly saw wrong in Imus (“He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America.”) and what he did not see as clearly in Wright.
From a simple human relations point of view, he owes Wright some loyalty, even when he sees him clearly now, that he spends less time in that church. It would go against his basic sense of decency to completely shun a person who had been a friend to him. There is something to be said about loyalty to friends.
What emerges from this kerfuffle is simple: Obama is still a man in search of his own identity, his politics, his worldview. These have yet to form in a way that is fully coherent so that Americans can make an informed decision about whether they want him for a president or not..
