In visit to Ireland, O'Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

President Obama's one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals - one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O'Bama. "My name is Barack Obama," he said in Dublin, "of the Moneygall Obamas, and I've come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way." Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale.

Second visual, potent indeed: that imperial pint of Guinness at Ollie Hayes' pub in Obama's ancestral town of Moneygall (Irish Muine Gall, or "thicket of foreigners"!). Queen Elizabeth wouldn't touch Guinness when she visited, but Obama laid to with manly resolve - not as the U.S. construct "black man," but as an American toasting his Irish heritage.

Third visual, even more potent: the slim, assertive technocratic couple, politicians, parents, and partners: Michelle and Barack Obama, 21st-century bridges among Americas, Africa, and Europe.

Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

"Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012," says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. "But that isn't where the conversation ends. There's a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new."

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him "Barack Obama, America's 44th white president?" Or "America's third Irish American president" (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?