Toward the end of Dreams from My Father, Obama brushes his hand across the “smooth yellow tile” of his father’s tomb. He wants to tell him that you can’t become a “whole man” by leaving a part of yourself behind. He feels sated, though, no longer shut off from him. Meeting his Granny, he has a similar feeling: of a circle closing, being able to “recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place.”¹²⁹

This way of putting it—in terms of self-recognition and completion—sets him apart from Keanu, whose characters usually couldn’t care less about recognizing themselves, or about anyone recognizing them, least of all “here, now, in one place.”

Where Keanu pauses, mumbles, and trails off, Obama is assured and steady. Life for him is the gradual piecing together of identity: black, white, American, Kenyan, Indonesian, Hawaiian; a native of Los Angeles, New York, and South Side, Chicago. These experiences, if properly understood, can be assembled to form a whole, a circle. Or, at least, it’s his belief in this possibility which constitutes his heroism.

For Keanu, who wants to fit “all categories—and no categories,” heroism is about dispersal. Far from being a “whole man,” he celebrates his incompleteness and confusion. The various points of his identity are like stars, scattered and moving further apart.

In Hawaii, where Keanu’s dad is from and where Obama went to high school, there are native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, and Portuguese, alongside white people from the mainland.

It’s a microcosm of the world’s variety—of a variety which is still growing. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, there are more children of “mixed origins” than ever and more people choosing to identify their ancestry as “Other, mixed.” Between 2001 and 2011, the number of “mixed” people in England and Wales grew by 82 percent.¹³⁰ Around the world, there are an endless variety of pardos, ainoko, mestizos, and zambos. Immigration and “intermarriage” aren’t new phenomena; they’re two of the few permanent facts about our shared history.

The mixed-race experience, if it means anything, isn’t sad or lonely or heroic so much as confusing. Regardless of background, it should force us to consider the parts of ourselves we take for granted—ideas of race, nation, and wholeness—and to appreciate how our experience of the world is always mixed. That is, marked in equal parts by recognition and incomprehension.

Approaching his eightieth birthday, Goethe wrote a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann reflecting on his life: “Throughout the ages people have said again and again that one should try to know oneself. This is a strange demand with which nobody has complied so far, and with which nobody should comply.”¹³¹

Man is a “dark being,” Goethe wrote, “he does not know from where he comes nor where he goes; he knows little of the world, and least about himself.”¹³²

This was one point on which Goethe and Nietzsche agreed. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes about his “unconquerable mistrust of the possibility of self-knowledge.” Though he could often seem scornful and self-assured, he felt that the “most certain thing” he could know about himself was this “aversion in me to believing anything definite about myself.”¹³³

This should give us hope. History doesn’t have to be the story of brightly lit individuals, active and masculine, doing great deeds. Our stories don’t have to be about achieving self-knowledge, or failing to do so. They can recognize the matrix of differences—along lines of class, race, gender, and sexuality—that shape our experience of the world. They can be about the spaces between.

Another letter, from Audre Lorde to the white feminist and academic Mary Daly in 1979, echoes this thinking: “When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision.”¹³⁴ That “dark and true depth” of knowledge within us is capable of nurturing understanding precisely because it is unknown.