Obama was a walking legitimation crisis, throwing into conniptions the very state he represented because it meant, by implication, or extension, that the blacks it had historically demeaned and excluded were now part of official American identity, were that much closer to being perceived as full citizens. And so an equally powerful wind blew back, insisting that Obama could never be truly American, truly a citizen, truly the symbol of the nation as its putative father because he was, in essence, illegitimate, a bastard president, a political orphan with no lines of kinship to authentic
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