Word: backgrounder
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...Obama's life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic...
...issue of race, so nicely contained and deactivated in the Barack Obama political persona, is still very much alive within the man himself. Today's black identity has been nearly a life-long preoccupation for Obama. By the surface facts of his life--mixed-race background, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia--it would be easy to assume that he might be indifferent to the whole business of race and identity. Many Americans want to believe that there are people on whom race sits very lightly, people whose very hybridism suggests the possibility of transcending race...
...Obama's interracial background puts him at cross purposes. It gives him a racelessness that is politically appealing to whites, but it also draws him toward precisely the kind of self-conscious black identity that alienates whites. For nearly two decades Barack Obama has attended a black church on the South Side of Chicago that his own mother could never have felt comfortable in. It subscribes to a "Black Value System" in which "black" was always the operative word--"black family," "black community," "black freedom," etc. But it was not a black value system that accounted for Obama's success...
After Darnton gave some brief historical background for each song, Delavault—“specially imported from Paris” as Darnton put it—revived the old tunes, accompanied by pianist and history and literature teaching fellow George H. Blaustein...
...judge give speeches on the finer points of constitutional law. Few understood the arcane legalese he used to describe his cases against extra-judiciary detentions or suspicious privatization schemes. But they did understand that Chaudhry was standing up for a system aspiring to treat all Pakistanis equally, irrespective of background or status, that it wasn't who Chaudhry was but what he represented - a society rooted in enduring institutions rather than capricious personalities...