The Democrats' prime-time messaging marathon two weeks ago culminated in a short film designed to highlight Barack Obama's putative guy-next-door-ness (read: the white half of his heritage), and lay to rest any lingering concerns about his "otherness."

We might have all been spared this latest piece of stagecraft if last March the presidential primaries weren't engulfed by the controversy of Obama's pastor, the Reverend Dr Jeremiah Wright, who burst onto the national scene with an incendiary brand of rhetoric about a racist and fallen America. YouTube clips of Wright, wearing exotic African garb and declaring that the "chickens had come home to roost" drew both shrill condemnations and shrugs of weary agreement. For some white people, it was all they needed to tar Wright as an Elijah Mohammed, and Obama as his charismatic Malcolm X, even though the former is an evangelical preacher and the latter a mere parishioner.

The unspoken accusation that Obama was a stalking horse for the spectre of black liberation theology appeared to underlie the mostly white commentary and analysis of the political controversy. To understand what Obama was going through here, the most instructive commentary isn't to be found on MSNBC, but rather in looking back at James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953).

Baldwin's autobiographical novel tells the story of a young, black teenager coming of age in Harlem under a tyrannical father who preaches a fire-and-brimstone form of Christianity in answer to the virulent racism in America. The similarities between Obama's oft-repeated biography and that of Baldwin's are illuminating.

Like Obama, Baldwin himself was raised by a single mother during his formative years, and like his adolescent protagonist, Baldwin had to navigate a world largely unprepared or unwilling to accept his existence, even among his own race, being both black and homosexual. Obama also straddles two identities, being half white and half black; he was born in America, but has foreign ties; he worked as a community organizer in Chicago's South Side, but is better educated and far wealthier than the majority of American blacks. Baldwin, too, stood out as a scholar and became a rising star in the black establishment, only to find himself at odds with it by the end of the 1960s. This rift began with his fallout with Richard Wright, a fellow author, and extended to his life as an expatriate in Paris.

Obama's unfettered optimism in the American Dream mirrors that of Baldwin's John Grimes, who believes he has the strength and the smarts to liberate himself from his broken home and a destiny of serving his Pentecostal church, the Temple of the Fire Baptized. In the first section of Baldwin's novel, John stands in Central Park, which lies between Harlem and Fifth Avenue--the way to the Promised Land--contemplating the disparity between what he sees as a the glamorous lives of whites, whose acceptance he craves, and what he has been told by his father:

His father said that all white people were wicked, and that God was going to bring them low. He said that white people were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies, and that not one of them ever loved a nigger. He, John, was a nigger, and he would find out, as soon as he got a little older, how evil white people could be.

Much has changed in the past 50 years, but the memory of hate crimes and Jim Crow are still fresh. In his memorable "More Perfect Union" speech last March, Obama evoked these memories when he condemned Wright for viewing history as static, but also warned America of the anger that blacks still hold toward whites: "The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." This misunderstanding between the races was never more apparent than the recent news that three white would-be assassins were arrested in Denver during the convention, one of whom had this nugget to offer: "He [Obama] don't belong in political office. Blacks don't belong in political office. He ought to be shot."

It would be easy to dismiss this as your garden variety David Duke bedtime story, but the fact that Obama's numbers are stalled at a time when they should be skyrocketing--a bad economy, an unpopular war, and even more unpopular president, a flagging opposition--speaks volumes about the Silent Majority's even quieter racism. Even Hillary Clinton's warthog strategist, Mark Penn, grasped this fact about America's stance toward a multicultural candidate, as evidenced by his prescient memos from 2007: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values...Save it for 2050."

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"Go Tell It on the Mountain" is not a book about racism, although there are, to be sure, racially charged moments. There aren't any white characters; they are kept off the page and in the background, running things in threatening fashion. Baldwin's story is about change from within a community, about personal change and the emergence of oneself. It is about a new breed of self-reliance. This may also explain why Obama comes off as an unknown quantity, and is perceived as an outsider by America's black leadership. Obama's refusal to kiss the rings of known black leaders has secured him a reputation as a maverick, but white voters, used to civil rights-era displays of large-scale black unity, continue to be perplexed by the very existence of a black independent. Obama's strident reminders of black responsibility and complicity, especially to black fathers, have put him at odds with more than just Jesse Jackson's razor blade.

At the heart of "Go Tell It on the Mountain", too, is a father-son conflict that Baldwin fashioned from his own difficult relationship with his stepfather, a fiery preacher. This bears some resemblance to Obama's troubled relationship with Wright and Trinity Church. In his "More Perfect Union" speech, Obama, in effect, presents Trinity as a metaphor for black culture in general:

Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humour...The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

Obama's unflinching description doesn't pull any punches, and the last climactic section of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" elucidates this overpowering religious experience. Baldwin's character undergoes an all-night spiritual awakening, receiving visions of God amid the shouts and the singing and the pounding piano and the rattling tambourines of his father's church. As a teenager, Baldwin became a preacher himself, but found it stifling. Like Obama, he eventually left his church, an outcast from the very environment where he had flourished. Both men are encouraged by what is positive about the church, but remain frightened by its potential for divisiveness.

Obama's acceptance speech the other week took place on the 45^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's delivery of his historic "I Have a Dream" speech to an equally large congregation in Washington, DC. Among the thousands of marchers, behind George Romney, was James Baldwin, a man who devoted his life to chronicling the black experience in America. For him it was a relentlessly heartbreaking task.

At the end of "Go Tell It on the Mountain", as the dawn comes up, Baldwin describes his own exhilaration in going forth into the world--a world far more complicated than he had imagined: "He was filled with joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots...were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered." Over 70 years later, change can be seen, but it is slower to come than we think, and there is still some despair. Both James Baldwin and Barack Obama know what it means to be misunderstood, by blacks and whites. But it is this way--as enigmas, as riddles--that they both evade simple prejudices, and perhaps point the way forward.

Picture credit: EricaJoy/flickr

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in New York.)