Paving the Way for President Obama: Constructing American Citizenship through the Narrative Disruption of Binaries in The Souls of Black Folk

Abstract

Media coverage of Barack Obama during his presidential campaign reveals the extent to which the historical debates over who is an American and what it means to be acknowledged as an American are deeply racialized as well as structured along the lines of a black/white binary. This questioning of Obama's Americanness and insistence upon identifying him only as black rather than as biracial demonstrate the validity of Walter Benn Michaels's claim that American citizenship is something that cannot be achieved but can only be inherited through the right parentage, which is determined according to the binary of black and white; according to Michaels's model of citizenship, Obama, seen as the son of his black Keynan father, inherited the impossibility of achieving American citizenship from his foreign and black father, and by being identified as black, had the possible inheritance of citizenship from his white American mother negated. However, W. E. B. Du Bois shows us the possibilities of disrupting that binary and of writing oneself into American citizenship, thus providing the next step in Michaels's model and paving the way for Americans like Barack Obama to not only write his story as a quintessential American story but also be elected as president. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois examines American binaries as a way of understanding how America is constructed while also attempting to break those binaries through the gaps, silences, and absences that become apparent for the reader in his narrative of twoness, as well as through his multidimensional role as narrator. Thus, Du Bois not only explodes the main American binary of black and white through his narrative, but he also writes himself into American citizenship by the very act of writing his narrative, which becomes American through the breakdown of binaries that had hitherto excluded his narrative from being an American one, and which makes it possible for Americans like Obama to represent the new multiracial and multicultural face of American citizenship that not only can acknowledge but also celebrate diversity and hybridity.