Sunday, February 08, 2009

The White Man Likes him: he is not very dark

"Booker is a light-skinned black man with blue-grey eyes and a serial Ivy League education (Stanford, Oxford, Yale). He was brought up in a predominantly white suburb of New Jersey. His public persona is affable in demeanour, intellectual in reach, inspirational in delivery; in private he is witty, unguarded and idealistic. He wears - I'm not the first to notice - rather ill-fitting suits, and he writes a blog in which, between comments on the national election or a local murder, he'll assess his own salsa-dancing skills and compose a spontaneous poem. This combination of magnificently urgent rhetoric and slightly goofy charm has garnered him landslide numbers of followers." (thanks Arun)