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"FacebookPinterest\n\nYou know those cartoons where Bugs or Fred and Barney are walking and walking and the background hills and trees are unspooling behind them, and then at some point the background transforms into, say, arctic tundra or coral reef, but it takes our heroes a long beat before they realize that their environment has shifted utterly? Well, that's what it's like being a tall, skinny, overeducated fortysomething black man in the Age of Obama. You go to sleep Ricardo Tubbs and you wake up Sonny Crockett. I was fifty feet under Columbus Circle, getting off the Broadway IRT, when I realized I'd arrived in the promised land.\n\nI don't remember the exact date, but it was sometime between the Iowa caucuses and Super Tuesday, and Obamamania was at a fever pitch.\n\nI was wearing a white dress shirt, jeans, and loafers, and as I passed a very tall, quite beautiful redhead, she smiled and said, \"Nice shirt.\" Up to this point in my experience with the New York City subway system, only bearded men who were peeing on themselves ever talked to me, so it took a second before I stopped and thanked her. Then I had to move on. I was late for drinks with a long-stemmed Afro-Teutonic writer who looked like Heidi Klum, were Heidi Klum dipped in caramel. Bounding the stairs to street level two at a time, I muttered to myself, \"God bless you, Barack Obama.\"\n\nGrowing up, I was an out-of-shape nerd with oily skin and a mouth full of metal, too shy to even think about talking to a real girl, so this sudden attention was, well, dazzling. Like Obama's Honolulu, the town of Hamden, Connecticut, where I was raised, is notable for its paucity of black folks (that and for being the birthplace of Ernest Borgnine). As a boy, I was surveilled from the moment I entered the hobby store to the moment the door closed behind me. When I was the only kid who knew that the prime minister of England lived at Number 10 Downing Street, my sixth-grade teacher gawked as if I were the Africanized reincarnation of Sir Isaac Newton. Three years later, when I became old enough to date, I sat on the sidelines alternately weeping and gnashing my teeth while my best friends, Ben (blond) and Danny (Jewish), both went out with the ambrosial Melissa Paulson.\n\nMy dating dry spell continued past college and well into my twenties. I tried Internet personals, yet often the women whose profiles I liked most would check off boxes for ethnicities from every continent except Africa. (Did they really want some random \"Pacific Islander\" or \"Other\" more than me?) The bitterest part was that many of those women preemptively voting me off their island were black!\n\nThe POTUS and I were both raised in this stew. In fact, we have a lot more in common than just age, height, hue, and being that black kid in pre-calc: We're both offcially certified, card-carrying members of the black bourgeoisie. Buppiedom is so insular that we even have a half-dozen friends in common, including the kid in college who told our future president, \"What kind of name is Barry? Barack is cool. Own it.\"\n\nSo in an extremely personal way, his ascendancy felt like my ascendancy. Almost daily throughout 2008, someone would ask my opinion on the issue of race in the campaign and hang on my pronouncements. And while men talked about Obama with me, women talked about him differentlyand not just Obama Girl. I noticed the way the eyes of nearly every woman of every color glazed and rolled heavenward at the mere utterance of his name. I can't tell you how many times in my life women have confused me for that other well-educated middle-class black guy they met months ago: that friend of their cousin's, or their sister-in-law's dermatologist, or, more than once, a guitarist named Hiram. In the case of that pol named Barack, would it be so wrong if this time I actively encouraged the confusion?\n\nA couple of days after Iowa, I bought my first fitted white dress shirt, just like the one The One was always wearing, most famously on the cover of The Audacity of Hope. Although I preferred my hair a little longer, I had my barber crop it close like his. After luring them in with my physical mimicry, the talking points would be easy. We shared the same pragmatic progressive politics, and I was more than happy to wax on about troop levels in Iraq or amnesty for illegal immigrants.\n\nCaramelized Heidi was the first indication that my diabolically shameless plan was working. Despite Iowa, I was not yet convinced that Obama had any real hope of actually being elected. Heidi, however, was a true believer. On our rst date (standard-issue H&amp;amp;#38M white shirt, dark suit, no tie) we argued heatedly about health care until she finally conceded. \"Wow,\" she murmured, leaning across our small table. \"If you were running, I'd vote for you.\"\n\nAs the campaign continued, so did the furtive smiles and unsolicited compliments. Election night 2008 was unquestionably the easiest night for a black man to get laid in this nation's history. We were like squadrons of beribboned fighter pilots in Times Square on V-E Day. The Lakers at Club Nokia after the Finals. Vampires at a Twilight screening.\n\nSince then, his political popularity has ebbed, but his status as sex symbol in chief remains unassailed. In the Times, columnist Judith Warner wrote about having a dream in which Obama took a shower in her house, and she noted that many of her readers reported \"dreaming about sex with the president.\" I won't pretend anyone's fantasizing about me, but I do know that as a single dad picking up my Sasha-and-Malia-aged kids from school, surrounded by moms-I'd-like-to-be-friends-with, I'm rarely at a loss for a playdate.\n\nYes, I'm being objectified. Crudely stereotyped. Sexually fetishized because of easy outward indicators. It's terrible. Despicable. Please, God, don't let it ever stop.\n\nLook, for a long-term relationship you of course need someone to love you for the content of your character, not your vague resemblance to the most powerful man on the planet. But all of us are constantly and summarily judged every day. Only, for me, after a lifetime of women clutching their purses, they now open them, pull out their cell phones, and ask for my number.\n\nYears ago I started using the term cultural mulatto for black people like the president and me who, regardless of parentage, were as culturally comfortable in the white world as the black. We knew as many songs by James Taylor as by James Brown. But back then, since we were uncategorizable by both whites and the working-class world of \"regular\" blacks, we felt like freaks. Neither hoodlums, athletes, entertainers, nor Urkelian Oreos, we were socio-logical aberrations with no box to check.\n\nIf we just wanted to be ourselves, pre-Obama, we had to first create the lens through which others would see us. For example, when meeting women of all races, we were compelled to explain what we were not, either explicitly or through signification (e.g., English Beat T-shirt, tattered John Fante paperback, Paul Smith suit). We had to assure that while we were most certainly law-abiding, well-spoken, and employed, we were not corny, stiff white-preppy wannabes.\n\nPerhaps the genius of our president's improbable rise is that the only role he's seemed to play is that of himself. He's successfully resisted a lifetime of pressure to act either white or like an auxiliary member of the Playboy Gangster Crips. His unceasing insistence on the legitimacy of his own authenticity is nothing short of revolutionary. When Obama refused to choose sides and won, he single-handedly liberated all the rest of us bookish black men.\n\nWhich makes me wonder if maybe some of my success lay not in biting his style but in finally feeling free enough to embrace my own. I'm not saying I've reached anywhere near his level of gravitational pull I'm just saying that once in a while, when my white shirts are at the cleaners and I'm in the laundry room reading Harper's in my well-ventilated Living Colour tee waiting for the dryer to cycle through, your sister, girlfriend, wife, or law partner might lean over and ask what I think about the story on carbon trading. What do I think? I think that, at least for tonight, I should leave that to the real Obama. She and I have other topics to discuss.\n\nTrey Ellis is a novelist, screenwriter, and assistant professor at Columbia University."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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