“Everything You Wanted to Know About Barack Obama,” The Root, 8 April 2010.
David Remnick’s exhaustive–and exhausting– biography of Obama is a textbook for the ages.
On the day he had officially proclaimed United States Census Day 2010, President Barack Obama ticked off a box marked “Black, African American or Negro.” Though the form provided space for him to write in the story we know so well by now–Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Hyde Park–he chose the simpler, less divisive route.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, has thoughtfully animated Obama’s journey toward that single checkmark in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, a sprawling and densely reported new biography of the man who has faced such choices at every turn of his brief life.
That The Bridge is compulsively about race is not surprising; the first public iteration of this book came in the days after Obama fulfilled the racial dreams of generations of Americans, black, white, and other. “From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii–and even Alaska–from ‘the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,’ as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made,” wrote Henry Louis Gates Jr., in an essay for The Root on Obama’s election. Remnick, a Washington Post alumnus who has written books on Russia and Muhammad Ali, had been studiously silent throughout the campaign season. Suddenly, two weeks after Obama’s win, a 7,000 word treatise on “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama” sprang, as from the head of Zeus, into an issue whose cover featured a brightly burning Lincoln Memorial.
In the essay, Remnick narrates how Obama “explicitly inserted himself in the time line of American racial politics.” He focuses less on the raw political science of electing a black president, and more on ”the nature of his quest for identity.” According to Remnick, “to be black was, for him, as much a matter of aspiration as of inheritance. It was an identity he had to seek out and master. When Obama shared his adolescent reading with some African-American friends, one told him, “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black.’”
The Bridge picks up the thread begun in that essay, chronicling Obama’s life in the post-civil rights “Joshua Generation,” explaining what Obama discovered that he could not find in books: How one “becomes” black in America. The title of the book is crucial–and essentially about race. In a literal sense it refers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama, where in 1965, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr. and dozens more black activists furthered the cause of voting rights with their blood, and where, in 2007, Obama walked, having made his first use of the biblical formulation that yoked him to the old guard of abolitionists and civil rights pioneers, and to the Old Testament story of liberation embraced by his former pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright. But the bridge is also a symbol of translation, the subtle arithmetic that Obama has consistently performed, adding white liberals, bombastic preachers, black nationalists, lunchbucket Democrats, conspiracy theorists, skeptical conservatives and smitten youth into his “yes we can” coalition.
Barack Obama’s one-day jaunt to Ghana this weekend carries a message for “multiple audiences,” according to the White House. On the heels of a Russian expedition and frustrating climate-change negotiations at the G-8 conference in Italy—all of which were overshadowed by the death of Michael Jackson—the first black president of the United States is arriving on African soil as a hero, but not a stranger. Unlike every other American president who has made an in-office trip to Africa, Obama is no virgin tourist on the continent. In fact, Ghana’s new president described Obama’s visit as a “homecoming”—though in some ways, the media focus on the head of the family is misguided. Obama may be the first African-American president, but it is Michelle Obama for whom Ghana represents a true return.
The story of Michelle and Barack Obama has been drawn as one about black achievement, the triumph of tradition, racial healing and just plain romance. But their story has also, from day one, been a political one. It’s been that way since their first official date 20 years ago, when the couple went to see Spike Lee’s third film, the notoriously political Do the Right Thing. In the depths of summer 1989—after a day of sightseeing in Chicago and before an ice cream cone that would end in a kiss—two young, Harvard-educated lawyers who would one day lead the country strode into a downtown movie theater and the sweltering heat of Lee’s Bed-Stuy pressure cooker.
Just before Barack Obama hit 100 days as president, I wrote a piece asking 
