Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up.
[snip]
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century.
No kidding. I’d like to note, by the way – and, indirectly, contra Smith – I’ve never been one of those “conservative critics [who] have, since the beginnings of [Obama’s] time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait at face value.” In fact, the phrase that I’ve used to describe the fellow is “a clueless Harvard liberal who is as about as authentically African-American as I am.” No reason for bringing it up, except that it mildly annoys me whenever people try to pretend that something is a staggeringly new insight, instead of being a commonplace observation that’s been obvious for years…
Via @ewerickson.
