I think that's what the American writer JamesBaldwin meant when he said he was always grateful to Paris for the utter indifference with which it treated him.
As a teenager Barack sometimes skipped homework and buried himself in the works of black authors: Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, JamesBaldwin, Richard Wright, W.
Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and JamesBaldwin.