Obama and Powers

A fun blog post on Nick's Cafe Canadien comparing Time of Our Singing with Obama's candidacy:

I thought of a book on Tuesday night: the Richard Powers novel The Time of Our Singing, published in 2003. In a roundabout way, it is about Barack Obama.

Nick, in turn, points to an interview with Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Band, in which he draws a similar line:

One last thing — I think we have to slowly stop talking about people as “black” and “white” as if this were a black-and-white (no pun intended) distinction. Barack Obama is a perfect example. Why is he any more black than he is white? It’s just a convention. When you see him in that photo sitting between his mother’s parents when he was a student at Columbia, you can see that he has as much whiteness in him as he has blackness. The “venerable” old tradition, or convention, of labeling a person “black” if they have even the slightest trace of African “blood” in them is an absurdity that comes straight out of slavery, and we should just drop it. Why is Tiger Woods called “black” rather than “Thai”? We have a lot of collective growing-up to do in our society in this regard. A very powerful book I read in which this idea was a central theme was Richard Powers’ novel “The Time of Our Singing”.