Mixed-Race Superman Keanu, Obama, and Multiracial Experience

An edgy and insightful look at Barack Obama, Keanu Reeves, and the mixed-race experience in our divided world.

At once personally revealing and politically astute, author Will Harris reflects on the lives of two very different supermen: Barack Obama and Keanu Reeves. In an era where a man endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan can sit in the White House, Harris argues that the mixed-race of both Obama and Reeves gave them a cultural 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, was a real-life 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, Harris asks what they can teach us about race and heroism.

Will Harris is a London-based poet and critic. He is the author of the chapbook of poems, All This Is Implied, and was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere.