ABSTRACT
Recently, Katherine Rosman, a white journalist, has recounted going to a party for a new author in Manhattan on an evening in 2003, where she noticed a black man on the edge of the elite crowd who appeared awkward and out of place. As he was one of few blacks at the party, and Rosman also felt a bit uncomfortable in the crowd, she sought him out and began a conversation. Later, she was approached by a prominent white author who asked about the man to whom she had been talking. “Sheepishly he told me he . . . had asked him to fetch him a drink.” The man in question was Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator. In a bit more than five years, thus, Obama moved from being an unknown Illinois official who was stereotyped by a white person as a servant to being the 44th president of the United States.1
