All through his brief political career, Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, has mused about what he sees as his “otherness”. In his latest book, A Promised Land, he claims that people saw him as someone “from everywhere and nowhere, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast.”
However, even if that were true, Obama’s “otherness” could be found elsewhere. To start with, he was the first person to win the US presidency after a brief stint in public office as a junior senator. (His successor Donald Trump didn’t have even that). Obama was also the first person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize without having done anything for peace or war.
