Mixed-race Superman

Abstract

"A personal essay on Barack Obama, Keanu Reeves and mixed-race experience in our increasingly divided world. At once personal and political, Mixed-Race Superman is a reflection on the lives of two very different supermen: Barack Obama and Keanu Reeves. In an era where a man endorsed by the Klu Klux Klan can sit in the White House, Will Harris argues that the mixed-race background of each gave them a shapelessness that was a form of resistance. Reeves, as Neo in The Matrix, portrayed the chosen one on the silver screen, while Obama, for a brief moment, took the shape of a superhero on the world stage. Drawing on his own personal experience and examining the way that these two men have been embedded in our collective consciousness, Will Harris asks what they can teach us about race and heroism