Reading about Wright’s middle-class childhood, you can’t help but wonder if Wright’s formative influences are more like Obama’s than we think. Is Wright’s own political radicalism actually an effort to counteract assimilation and restore a lost authenticity? That would help make sense of his exhortations to “fight middle-classness.” In “Edward Said, Imperialist,” I argued that Said’s radicalism was an effort to counteract his own assimilation.