I suspect that Ayers did ghostwrite it, but it’s also, as another writer points out in an article posted today, heavily based on Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” particularly with regard to certain characters and episodes. It is clearly the basis for Ayers/Obama’s attitudes towards whites and the supposed white hegemony. Ayers, who is older than Obama, is from a leftist generation that loved Invisible Man and regarded it as the an explanation of the true essence of “blackness.”
Ayers would also have been a fan of Frantz Fanon, who was very popular at that time among leftists. Fanon was from Martinique and of mixed white and black parentage, and rejects his “white half” and becomes a black-nationalist theorist of race, colonialism, Marxism and violent revolution. He was very involved with the Algerian troubles and became a Muslim at some point. I don’t think Barry is old enough to have been a follower of Fanon (although he might have known of him through Frank Davis, the unabashed communist “mentor” of his youth), but Ayers certainly would have been, and Obama’s supposed opus certainly reflects Fanon’s beliefs about colonialism and “whiteness” in a way that a 60’s white radical like Ayers would have expressed them.
They've discussed and admired this book in their monthly book club meetings.