The Day When Obama Became Black

On November 4, only Americans will vote, but the entire planet will tremble. Everything has been written on the stakes of this historic duel between Barack Obama and John McCain. Every instant in the life of these candidates has been weighed by the media, eager to discover a hidden episode that could destroy everything. Barack Obama had, if one could say it, moved ahead by publishing his autobiography, “Dreams from my Father,” in 1995. Thirteen years later, accompanied by a previously unedited preface, “Dreams from my Father, a Story of of Black and White Heritage” appeared in the collection “Points.”

From the red soil of Kenya to Indonesian landscapes, Chicago ghettos to Harvard University, one discovers within this book the extraordinary story of a man who may become the first mixed-race President of the United States. Once again, Obama appeared to be what one had predicted in reading his magnificent text “On Race in America” – a true writer.

“I don’t have the necessary talent to describe that day [9/11], and those that followed,” he demurs. “Airplanes, like ghosts, disappearing into steel and glass, the slow movement of the towers collapsing, one after the other, people covered in ash wandering the streets, the anguish and the terror…My possibilities for empathy, my capacity for understanding the other, does not help me to understand the empty faces of those who kill innocents with an abstract, serene satisfaction. All I know is that history made itself known that day louder than ever; that in reality, as Faulkner reminded is, the past is never dead and buried – in face it is not the past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my stories.”

Later, Obama remembers the day when he realized he was different. His mother never stopped idealizing the present, extolling the virtues of the “great” blacks – Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier. She often told him, “Harry Belafonte is the most handsome man on the planet.” To her, the white woman, he owed his fine eyebrows, almost invisible. To his father, the black man, his brain, his character.

And then one day, in “Life” magazine, Obama came upon a photo of a black man who had tried to change the color of his skin. “I know,” he wrote, “that reading this article was, for me, like an ambush….There was an enemy hidden somewhere, an enemy that could reach me without anyone, including me, knowing it.” He continued, “When I got home, I went into the bathroom and planted myself in front of the mirror. Everything was there, in place, intact. I was the same as usual. Was there something abnormal about me? But if I was normal, the other possibility did not make me less afraid, the perspective that the adults around me lived in a world of fools…My outlook on the world had been modified, and that, in a definitive way.”

On television, he remarked, “Cosby never got the girl in ‘I Spy,’ the black man in ‘Mission Impossible’ spent his time underground, and Santa Claus was white.”

In reading this moving book, one understands better the crazy hope that permeates the world, worthy of the crisis that menaces it.