He grew up near water and surrounded by mountains in a pleasant place relatively free of overt racial animus toward dark-skinned people. His status as a college-bound student put him in the company of the sons and daughters of the local rich and the powerful, a social access much advantaged by having a parent whose pigment and features were white. The ease with which he managed to wear his mixed racial heritage began to fray, however, in the senior year of high school, as the decision about college impended. Leaving the relaxed racial environment of home, he wrote of the need to find a fixed identity in the much sharper Black-and-white divisions he would encounter at college and in the larger society. He was beset by a crippling indeterminacy, a fear, he said, of “forever remain[ing] an outsider with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.” Although there was some brief wavering between the poles of whiteness and Blackness, he gradually embraced his African roots at a small liberal arts college. Indeed, he became, as he was pleased to say of his college experience, “quite willing to be a Negro and to work with the Negro group.” Then came the professional training at Harvard, where his academic distinctions were unprecedented. Another autobiographical passage confessed the need for a community where he “could put down stakes and test my commitments.” Fair to say, the young man claimed that his identity was in some sense the exercise of an option, an existential commitment made not because he had to be a Black man—a person born immutably Black—but because he decided to embrace the culture and aspirations of Black Americans.
Many readers will have guessed the identity of this racially ambiguous young man as one Barack Hussein Obama. You have guessed correctly. If you guessed that the subject was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, your choice would be equally correct, for what you have read is the result of the splicing together of strikingly similar biographical profiles and the interweaving of likeminded quotations taken from Du Bois’s autobiography, Dusk of Dawn (1940), and Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). The objective of this biographical license is to explore the significance of the largely unsuspected parallelism in the racial coming of age of two of the most influential American men of the past 100 years. Du Bois, born in February 153 years ago in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Obama, announcing his presidential campaign on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, 14 Februaries ago.