Mixed Race Studies

Racial Paradox and Eclipse: Obama as a Balm for What Ails Us

Denver University Law Review
Volume 86, Special Issue (Obama Phenomena: A Special Issue on the Election of President Barack Obama (2009)
pages 743-783

Camille A. Nelson, Dean and Professor of Law
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

I. Introduction

The 2008 political season provided us with sublime political spectacle. The contest for presidential nominee of the Democratic National party was an exciting and historic race. The subsequent presidential race whipped Americans, and indeed many throughout the world, into a frenzy. Never before did two white women and a black man exemplify the dreams and aspirations of so many. People the world over hoped and sought to change the course of history through the selection of the President and Vice President of the United States of America. There appearedto be a captivating yet ironic handwringing around identitarian politics at the same time that this elephant in the room was downplayed. The contest elevated, yet simultaneously sublimated, Americans’ struggle with race, gender, religion and national origin. As everyone was well aware of the monumental contests for symbolic firsts1 the 2008 Presidential race took on added momentum. With the designation of “First black President of the United States of America” looming within sight, supporters and detractors of Barack Obama were plagued by the weighty history of America. This racist history was cast as both past and prologue. With so many “firsts” at stake—either the potential for the first woman President and Vice President or the first black President—both crude and subtle identity politics were revealed which challenged claims that the citizenry of the United States had moved beyond identity politics, or race more specifically.

However, transcendent colorblind theories have been echoed in recent U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence—they buttress a disconnect from our racialized past and present. In 2003, Justice O’Connor in Grutter v. Bollinger remarked that in twenty-five years we should no longer require affirmative action initiatives, presumably because we will have reached a post-racial epoch of cultural colorblindness. A few years later Chief Justice Roberts in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 15—a case addressing affirmative action initiatives undertaken by school districts—similarly asserted that the best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating. Cases such as these encode a normative boundary between public and private. They establish a terrain of identity schizophrenia on which we are often deluded by our perceptions of reality—no longer can we tell what is real from what is fiction.

This is the terrain on which I would like to examine the Obama phenomenon to reveal Barack Obama as somewhat of a paradox, black but white, manly but feminist, alien yet familiar, foreign but quintessentially American, and of course dubiously Christian. Accordingly, this essay will explore what might be described as the disordered identity politics revealed at the site of Obama’s ascendance. I will focus largely upon racial dynamics while recognizing the work of other identity constructs in constituting and reinforcing each other. Admittedly, race and racial politicking are the focus of this essay, but gender (specifically masculinity), religion, class and national origin also occupied the political landscape in meaningful ways. Essential to this exploration, therefore, is the intersecting identity of Barack Obama as not only a man, but a heterosexual black man of mixed racial, cultural and religious heritage. This multifaceted identity nexus carries incredible baggage in America—it complicates the desire for simplified identitarian politics but does not eliminate its force.

While to some people Barack Obama, as a mixed-race man who is Black identified, holds within him the specter of a post-racial America, it is my sense that we have not yet achieved this lofty goal, despite his election. Instead, America remains deeply invested in identitarian politics and race more specifically. No doubt some citizens cast a vote for Obama because of his race and others refused to do so for the same reason.  Rather than being irrelevant, the visibility and salience of race in America is starkly demonstrated by Obama mania—Obamania—the frenzy, excitement and furor surrounding his candidacy for President of the United States. Obama supporters and detractors alike have seized specifically upon race, consciously or unconsciously, to reveal deepseated identity-based paranoia. Thus, contrary to what the Supreme Court of the United States proclaims, race is not irrelevant in America, especially when politics and power are concerned.

This essay will explore some of the disordered permutations of race, specifically racial construction and deconstruction, as publicly demonstrated through Obamania. In Part I, particular emphasis will be placed upon the mixed-race rhetoric surrounding Obama—this framework casts Obama as racially transcendent and celebrates public American postracialism.  Curiously, though, despite this philosophy that dismisses the centrality of race in America, Obama himself acknowledges that he has had to make private race-based identity choices. Obama asserts that he is a black man in America—it is unlikely that he could assert that he is a white man and be legitimated and embraced as such. U.S. Representative G. K. Butterfield states, “Obama has chosen the heritage he feels comfortable with. His physical appearance is black. I don’t know how he could have chosen to be any other race. Let’s just say [if] he decided to be white people would have laughed at him.” Indeed, it is folly to believe that those who see him in dark, distrustful hues would embrace his white-half identity thereby seeing themselves in him to overcome their perception of his troublesome blackness. American public progressivity is out of step with our private racial ordering. Ironically, many in America can publicly celebrate the incredible reality of our first black President, yet self-righteously return to markedly and intentionally segregated private lives.

Part II will explore the racial tightrope that Obama skillfully crossed. Of all the major political candidates, only Obama was asked to be all things to all people. At times, he was not seen as black enough. At other times, Obama was too black. Yet on other occasions, Obama’s Christianity was questioned with the post-9/11 weightiness of an ascribed Muslim identity. There were other occasions on which his masculinity was questioned, even as he undoubtedly felt the historical burden of hyper-masculinized black manhood. Identity politics were cast upon Obama with a furor seldom demonstrated in national politics. Skillful as ever, however, Obama emerged victorious and relatively unscathed. To my mind, navigating the swath of identitarian complaints and politics thrown only his way was one of his greatest accomplishments.

Ultimately, Part III will conclude with an exploration of the ways in which the political contest for the Democratic Party nominee exposed the primacy of identitarian politics, specifically of race, in America. In conclusion, this essay will assert that, in keeping with America’s schizophrenic socio-legal history, race remains a challenging concept and its persistent relevance indicates that we have not yet achieved the racial healing or transcendence which Obama’s public ascendancy proclaims. Obama, therefore, is not the balm for our racial ailments. Instead, Obama’s ascendancy reveals our racial disorder. At the same time that Obama’s eclipsing blackness comforts many of us in the knowledge that we have finally elected a black President, others are equally disappointed by this fact. Moreover, Obama’s public trajectory to the forefront of the political super strata eclipses the pervasive reality that private prejudices remain steadfast throughout the social landscape and we remain more racially segregated than ever…

…To many people Obama’s mixed-race heritage indicates the triumph of colorblindness over racism. That colorblindness, as opposed to colorconsciousness without negative ascription, is seen as the sine qua non of racial progress is itself revealing of our racial disorder. For many in America the only way to overcome racism is to deny the consequences of race and colorism. Instead I suggest that we think about eliminating the negative connotations and consequences tethered to racialization rather than seeking to avoid any recognition of the socio-cultural concept of race itself. In the political landscape Obama was paradoxically wedged between these two competing viewpoints. [Shelby] Steele summarized these perspectives as follows:

There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America’s exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch—if only briefly—with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics—any form of collective chauvinism.

I read the identitarian discourses surrounding Obama differently. The posing of these questions around identity betrays our subconscious recognition that we are not there yet—we remain burdened by a default racial calculus. Even the semantics of being post-racial reveals the persistence of race and racial constructions. We do not even have terminology, let alone the ideological substance, to take us beyond racial fixity. These questions further indicate our quest for a racial healing that we know has not yet been achieved. Hence the racial schizophrenia. We aredeeply conflicted. It is unclear what is reality versus what is merely our distorted perception. It is my ultimate conclusion that our distorted racial perception is our reality…

Read the entire article here.

A conversation with Daniel J. Sharfstein (Author of  The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White)

The Penguin Press
January 2011

Lauren Hodapp, Senior Publicist
The Penguin Press

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN 9781594202827.

What is “race” in America?

This is a question that has never had a single answer.  The idea that human beings can be classified, ordered, and assigned superior and inferior status is much older than this country.  In America racial classifications were initially justified on religious grounds, but they evolved into something biological, transmitted through blood from one generation to the next.  At the same time, race was also about how people acted and the rights that they exercised.  During slavery and Jim Crow, each state had its own rules for what made someone white and what made someone black.  Some people who were black in North Carolina, for instance, were white in South Carolina.  Even when there seemed to be some public consensus about what race was, it has always meant something different behind closed doors. 

Once we understand that African Americans were continually crossing the color line and establishing themselves as white, we have to rethink what the categories of “black” and “white” mean.  This is a history that has touched the lives of millions of Americans.  Biology—“black blood”—cannot be what makes a person black.  After all, plenty of white people have black blood, too.  In The Invisible Line I try to strip away centuries of shifting justifications for race and suggest instead that the category of “black” has always functioned as little more than a marker of discrimination.  W. E. B. Du Bois said it best: black means the “person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”

THE INVISIBLE LINE shares the stories of three families over two centuries.  How did you select these particular families?

I chose to focus on the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they epitomize how individuals and families changed racial identities from black to white in different periods of American history and in different parts of the South.  They challenge our conventional wisdom about racial identity and the color line.  I initially researched hundreds of families after years of looking through court cases, government records, histories and other scholarly works, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and family papers from manuscript collections in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. I wound up selecting the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls because they were typical, but also extraordinary.  An incredible wealth of material about each family has survived the centuries—letters, trial testimony, speeches, wills, property and census records, and more.  Because of this information, I was able to go beyond just establishing the fact that people migrated across the color line and could explore why they did and what effects the migration had on their lives and on the lives of their descendants.

The fluidity with which many of your subjects approach race seems, in many ways, more sophisticated than the way we envision race today. Why?

Much of what we take for granted about race and its history are actually relatively recent developments.  For example, the “one-drop rule,” or the idea that any African ancestry makes a person black, was not the law of Southern states until the 1910s and 1920s.  Before that, states used a patchwork of fractional rules—one-fourth African “blood” made a person black, one-eighth, etc.  These rules, and the ways that courts interpreted them, reflected a reality in which people were constantly crossing the color line.  If the line were policed too strictly, then virtually no one would be safe from reclassification.  And people knew it.  Many scholars today talk about race as a “social construction,” but you can find eerily similar language from plain folks in small Southern towns one hundred years ago.

What did this mean for individuals and families in the 19^th century?

White communities often knew that people were racially mixed and let them in anyway. The typical accounts of “passing for white” involve wholesale masquerade—abandoning family and moving far away, assuming a new name and identity, and the ever present fear of being found out.  But people could become white in areas where their families had lived for generations, and many could become white even when they looked different.  There was such a thing as a “dark white man.”  But for Southern communities, acceptance of individuals did not translate into tolerance on a larger scale.  In fact, some of the very communities that allowed people of color to assimilate supported slavery, segregation, and even lynching.  There was a collective denial, a capacity for living with intense contradiction that is hard for many of us to grasp today.

What did you discover in your research that particularly surprised you?

Becoming white was not necessarily an upwardly mobile act.  In fact, it could be spectacularly downwardly mobile, especially for the “Negro aristocracy” of the late nineteenth century.  Hundreds—including O.S.B. Wall’s children—traded in lives of distinction and leadership for anonymity and often poverty.  It is easy to think that crossing the color line was a perfectly rational act for people who wanted better opportunities for themselves and their children, but the fact that people would go to great lengths to become white even when it was against their interest shows just how poisonous racism has been in the United States.

Henry Louis Gates and the African American Studies department at Harvard has become a legendary source of fresh thinking about race. When you were studying with Gates was there a sense that he and the students were creating a new vision of race?

Absolutely.  My first year as a student in the department was Gates’s first year at Harvard.  He had come with a mission to reinvent the field.  The seminar I took with him that fall was not only an intense introduction to a series of extraordinary texts, but also a class devoted to rethinking what African American Studies should be and making a case for its centrality to our understanding of the American experience.  It was a very exciting time to be at Harvard, and the discussions we had nearly twenty years ago continue to influence me and my work.

How did your own experiences with and perceptions of race influence your work?

My interest in African American history developed as a child listening to stories about my father’s civil rights activism in the early 1960s—the time as an undergraduate he met Martin Luther King, Jr., his experience attending the [1963] March on Washington.  I also grew up with stories about my grandparents’ experience as the children of Eastern European immigrants living in a racially integrated neighborhood in northwest Baltimore.  They learned English from their black neighbors—it was their first exposure to what it meant to be American.

As a college student in 1993, I volunteered on a voter education project in South Africa before the country’s first free elections.  Our office was in a building with two elevators that were still marked “Europeans Only” and “Non-Europeans and Goods.”  My colleagues were all longtime anti-apartheid activists.  The government had classified them as “African,” they said, except for one, who was “Coloured” or mixed-race.  But, she explained, she was not mixed at all—she would have been classified “African,” except for the fact that her father had been a police officer.  In the 1950s an official responsible for classifying the people in her neighborhood decided to reward her father’s service by listing him as “Coloured.”  As a result of that one simple act—one word—she had led a very different life from her colleagues.  She had grown up in a different kind of township, went to different schools, and only spoke English and Afrikaans.  It was a revelation to me that something that seemed as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of personal relationships, community ties, and individual whim.  I came back to the U.S. wondering if the same kinds of things had happened here, and for the first time, I began reading legal cases from the Jim Crow South in which judges and juries had to determine whether someone was white or black.  The cases presented fascinating portraits of communities that were committed to segregation and white supremacy even as they willed themselves to forget their own ambiguous roots.

 How did your law background impact your understanding of the stories, journals, and documents that you encountered while researching THE INVISIBLE LINE?

 Dozens of court cases have involved people crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities—they are some of the best sources of material on the subject—so having experience working with legal documents really helps in making sense of this history.  From soon after the Revolution until well into the twentieth century, just about every law that distinguished white from black provided occasions where courts were forced to determine someone’s race.  Along with marriage prohibitions and segregated schools and trains, there were different tax rates, gun ownership rules, restrictions on who could testify in court, even libel penalties for falsely accusing someone of being black.  Race in America has always involved a lot of rules, and my legal training has enabled me to recognize both the power of law and its limitations.

Which of the individuals you encountered do you feel most affinity for and why?

I really enjoyed getting to know O.S.B. Wall (1825-1891), the son of a plantation owner and his slave, who was freed and sent north to become educated and learn a trade.  He began as a shoemaker and then became a radical abolitionist, Union Army officer, and eventually a politically active lawyer in Washington, D.C.  He was able to preserve his sense of honor and idealism in terrible times both before and after the Civil War.  Even when he was a humble shoemaker, he was never intimidated by powerful people.  And he had a great sense of humor.

The families that you profile span 200 years of American history. What have we previously overlooked in this time span? 

 We have overlooked one of the great mass migrations in American history: the journey from black to white.  It is a migration that affected large numbers of families and communities.  It contradicted and reinforced slavery and segregation.  It forced people to consider what race means, and changed how they thought about race.  The migration occurred alongside other mass movements in our history—the settlement of North America, our expansion west, the rise of great cities, new waves of immigration, and the industrialization of even our most isolated areas.  In a world defined by change, race could never be a static concept.  Americans have always been in motion and have continually reinvented themselves.  The migration from black to white is a part of this dynamic tradition.

More broadly, we have overlooked the vexed relationship between liberty and equality in our nation’s history.  The prospect of freedom for African Americans has been one of the major forces in the evolution of racism in the United States.  In colonial Virginia, African Americans’ quest for freedom gave rise to black codes.  Even as large numbers of African Americans were being freed during the Revolutionary Era, ideas that blacks were biologically inferior gained widespread currency.  In the decade before the Civil War, white Southerners countered Northern arguments against slavery with race-based justifications for the institution that survived its demise.  After the Civil War, black freedom took root alongside modern forms of racism that persist to this day.  Each advance in liberty gave way to potent new forms of inequality.  Every time the struggle seemed over, it had only begun again.

What about today?

The idea that race is blood-borne and grounded in science still has incredible power over how we think about ourselves and order our worlds.  Even in our “post-racial” era, it is very easy for whites to tune out issues involving African Americans or to regard blacks as fundamentally different from—even opposed to—themselves.  Race remains a potent dividing line and political tool.  I hope to shatter the notion that this line exists and help us to realize that we are all related, that the African American experience is absolutely central to the American experience generally, and that our conventional understanding of racial difference and the persistent legacy of racism are shaped in no small part by the secret history that The Invisible Line explores.

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race students, interracial couples become norm as US diversifies

The Flor-Ala (Student newspaper of the University of North Alabama)
Florence, Alabama
2011-02-10

Lucy Berry, News Editor

When some people see UNA students Lauren Kirby and DeForrest Brown together in public, one of the first things they notice about the couple are their racial differences.

But the young duo, who met in 2009 and quickly formed a friendship after sharing a mutual love for music, rarely notice the fact that they are of separate races. Kirby, a Caucasian American, and Brown, an African American, have to remind themselves that they are an interracial couple.

“My father always told me when I was a kid that I could marry any man, no matter what color he is, as long as I was in love with him,” Kirby said. “I don’t worry about what other people around me think. I know there are people who probably don’t secretly approve of our relationship, but that’s their problem.”

The Pew Research Center reported in a 2008 analysis that one in seven new marriages in the United States is between spouses of different races or ethnicities…

…Though more mixed-race students are popping up around college campuses, many U.S. citizens still think of themselves in specific racial terms, making it difficult or impossible for some mixed-race young people to establish their own identity.

“I am who I am and have always been taught that,” said UNA student Lauren Davis, who comes a mixed African American and Cuban background. “There is no reason to ever be confused about who you are. You can be purple or polka dot, but your personality is not based on race.”

The influx of immigration and increasingly relaxed attitudes about interracial marriages have contributed to a more diverse America, but many citizens are skeptical about blending the races and believe it may lead to stratification among racial groups.

Dr. Gabriela Carrasco, assistant professor of psychology, said it’s common for people to classify others in modern society.

“We naturally categorize people and things cognitively, and even if we were to melt all of the races together, humans would probably still find a way to categorize something else,” she said. “I tell my students that categorization is not the negative. It is stereotypes, generalizations and the behaviors in which people act differently toward other groups that are the problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Coming MiscegeNation?

TruthDig
2011-02-13

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official. We’re a “miscegeNation.” The 2010 Census results are reminding us that multiracialism is not only our destiny but our reality. We’re seeing the rise of the most diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history with a record low white population—the millennials. According to The New York Times, “Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.”…

…Does today’s focus on multiracialism mean that we’re finally seeing the end of racism? Or does it mean that racism has simply gone underground?

The answer depends largely on talking and to whom we talk. Many would like to believe that our comfort with categorizing people as multiracial has erased racism and the stigma of interracial relations. Here is a perfect example: In defending herself and the tea party against the NAACP’s charges of racism, Sarah Palin calls on her own multiracial family as evidence in a Facebook post titled “The Charge of Racism: It’s Time to Bury the Divisive Politics of the Past”:…

…Translation: Multiracial families bestow the skill of racial reconciliation that will result in the end of racism. What is more, multiracial families can even promote the end of race. Palin is not the only one who expresses such views. The politically correct lip service that says that multiracial individuals and families are not racist and naturally racially progressive abounds in the press and blogosphere.

This sexy-but-flawed way of thinking is based totally on appearances. Because of our nation’s history of slavery, segregation and interment, racism is conflated with physical racial separation. As a consequence racial progress is conflated with racial mixing. Multiracial individuals and interracial families are touted as icons of racial healing because they are thought to have special insights based on what they are—mixed. In his 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech, President Obama addressed how absurd this kind of thinking is. He said that his grandmother “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” The president also implied that the idea of multiracials ending racism ignores the fact that interracial romantic relationships still experience higher rates of failure and divorce than same-sex relationships (i.e., his own parents’ divorce; Halle Berry’s and Gabriel Aubry’s custody battle over their daughter, Nahla).

If we still think that being multiracial or being part of a multiracial family automatically ends racism, then we must consider the cases of Lawrence Dennis and Leo Felton. Dennis, the multiracial right-wing fascist, was charged with sedition for allegedly seeking to establish a Nazi regime in the U.S. during World War II. Felton, a multiracial white supremacist, was convicted of bank robbery and plotting to blow up Jewish and African-American landmarks around Boston. The child of an interracial couple, Felton wrote a letter in which he criticized his parents and said he is “an unrepentant enemy of the multicultural myth.” Multiracial backgrounds did not encourage these men to become racial healers…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Matters: Mixed-race pupils discuss school and identity

Troubador Publishing
March 2011
128 pages
198×127 mm
ISBN: 9781848765719

Denise Williams

Mixed Matters responds to the dearth of literature about the experiences of mixed-race pupils in British schools. It seeks to examine how much credence schools should give to pupil identities when one parent is white British and the other is of black British/Caribbean heritage, as well as offering practical advice on how to improve the educational outcome of mixed-race children.

More often than not, mixed-race pupils are simply referred to as black and tend to be encompassed in a larger, more diverse group of black pupils, but the increased presence of mixed-race pupils in schools needs to focus the efforts of education professionals to address issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

Mixed Matters is essential reading for all educational professionals who want to get to grips with the issues that face mixed families and the pupils themselves as they share their personal experiences of what it is like to be them in the British schooling system. The young people featured in this book challenge some of the commonly held assumptions made about them – especially regarding their aspirations.

This book contains some resources that can be used to support work with mixed-race pupils as well as initial training and professional development of teachers. The book also details the approach of Mix-d, formerly the Multiple Heritage Project, in organising youth conferences and training youth facilitators of mixed-race to lead their peers in discussions about school and identity.

Room For Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma

The New York Times
2011-02-13

In Room for Debate, The New York Times invites knowledgeable outside contributors to discuss news events and other timely issues.

Introduction

An article in a Times series on the growing mixed-race population in the United States describes a debate over new Education Department rules for how schools from kindergarten through college count students by race and ethnicity. Students of mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category.

But those identifying themselves as Hispanic will be reported only as Hispanic, regardless of their race. Some civil rights leaders and educators say that these new classifications will complicate efforts to track academic inequities and represent a step backward in addressing them.

Do the new federal requirements make sense? What are the possible pitfalls?

Debaters:

“Why Race Still Matters”
Anthony P. Carnevale, Research Professor and Director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
Georgetown University

“‘Check One’ Didn’t Work”
Susan Graham, Executive Director
Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally)

“Identity and Demography”
Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

“The New Color Wheel”
Eric Liu
Author of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998)

“Racism and the Multiracial Label”
Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011)

“Take the Politics Out of Race”
Shelby Steele, Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution

“Race, Poverty and Educational Equity”
Gerald Torres, Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

…The change endangers the accurate monitoring of civil rights compliance in education. Despite the important gains of the civil rights movement, much discrimination still exists, albeit in less overt forms. Civil rights compliance monitoring—the use of racial statistics to uncover suspicious patterns in education, housing, employment, etc.—is our very best means of detecting covert and institutional discrimination. It is the reason for all those “check boxes” for racial identity that no one loves…

…People, including students, are not discriminated against on the basis of being mixed-race, but rather on the basis of being one part of that mixture The federal race categories, crude as they might be, allow us to track how people are treated based on how they are perceived by others. The dangerous result of the Education Department’s provision will be two-fold.

On one hand, the “two or more races” category will provide no useful data for compliance monitoring; while on the other, real racial discrimination against some students will go untracked by the compliance monitoring apparatus because students who check more than one box will not be placed in the categories that are in fact motivating their unjust treatment…

Rainier Spencer

---

---

…But a new generation has arrived, more mixed than any before, and these young Americans are quite uninterested in seeking permission to sit in one of four or five colored boxes. Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.This is progress. At the same time, the blurring of race labels is neither the dawn of colorblindness nor the dusk of racism. Go to a place like Rio (or, for that matter, New Orleans), where people of many races mix, where there are many fine distinctions of shade—and where lighter is still usually seen as better.If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness – just a drop of it – does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America…Eric Liu

---

---

…This conflation of race and ethnicity inevitably distorts the diagnosis of the unique educational problems of black Hispanics—or, worse yet, averages them into obsolescence. This is particularly harmful because false or partial diagnosis of any problem inevitably produces less effective policy responses…Anthony P. Carnevale

---

---

…All children are worthy of recognition of their entire heritage. If we teach our children to tell the truth and then stand in the way of them doing that on school forms, we are missing the point. If accurate data are what we want, true identity of our students is what we must collect and reflect.We are not asking for a piece of the pie, but we need to be reflected on those data pie charts. Tracking the multiracial population is no less important than tracking any other group…Susan Graham

---

---

…Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded……The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?…Gerald Torres

Read the entire debate here.

Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer

The New York Times
2011-02-13

Richard Conniff

In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.  He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa.  The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year.  The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.

But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups—typically black people, or sometimes the Irish.  A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins.  This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu’s own life.

When Du Chaillu arrived in London for the 1861 publication of his book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious.  He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes.  He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals…

…But as I was researching my book “The Species Seekers,” I kept coming across hints of an uglier motive for the attack on Du Chaillu, based on race. A merchant in Gabon made the cryptic assertion that he possessed “from reliable sources, information the most exact as to [Du Chaillu’s] antecedents.”  Others whispered, as The New York Times reported, that “the suspicion of negro sympathies hangs around him in many ways.”  Du Chaillu presented himself as a white man, born in Louisiana, and an almost compulsive awareness of race runs through his book:  “’You are the first white man that settled among us, and we love you,’” a village chieftain declares at one point.  “To which all the people answered, ‘Yes, we love him! He is our white man, and we have no other white man.’”

But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder.  Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was “an understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.” In fact, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton kept a vast collection of skulls there, “the American Golgotha,” for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The “mysterious and rapid” end to Du Chaillu’s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from “a committee member’s discovery of his maternal ancestry.”

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory.  George Ord, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and detected “evidence of a spurious origin.”  Ord added:  “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.”…

…Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called “The Octoroon.”  It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans beauty “educated in every refinement and luxury” who was “almost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon.”  In all three contesting versions of this tale, an “underhanded Yankee overseer” seeks to possess the heroine on the slave market.  And in each case, a dashing sea captain foils the nefarious plot and carries the beauty off to freedom.  Audiences apparently felt comfortable taking the heroine’s side because she was seven-eighths white.  But what if the sexes had been reversed, with a white woman falling for a mixed-race man—a man like Du Chaillu, say?…

Read the entire article here.

Neither Black nor White: The Saga of an American Family

The New World Africa Press
2006-03-03
252 pages
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
ISBN-10: 0976876124; ISBN-13: 978-0976876120

Joseph E. Holloway, Professor of Pan African Studies
California State University, Northridge

Historical novel, which traces the history of the Hadnot family from Gloucester, England in 1585 to New Orleans and the birth of Lucille Catherine (Celia) Hughes Hadnot the matriarch of six families that traced their descent from her. It is the true story of a black family, who were never enslaved, but owners of slaves. A tale about a people from indentured servitude, slavery, the Colfax riots, segregation and Jim Crow to Civil Rights. It is the story of a people who did not regard themselves as “neither black nor white.” It is a story of a family—one black and the other white. Both related sharing a common ancestor by the named John Hadnot. This novel by Joseph Holloway is compelling reading that explores black culture, history, Jim Crow and issues of colorism.

Hollywood’s Whiteout

The New York Times
2011-02-11

Manohla Dargis

A. O. Scott

CRAMMED into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream detectives and animated toys. It’s a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre, topic, sensibility, style and ambition. But it’s also more racially homogenous—more white—than the 10 films that were up for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.” In view of recent history the whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.

Nine years ago, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won his and her Oscars—he was only the second African-American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress—each took a moment to look back at the performers from earlier generations who had struggled against prejudice and fought to claim the recognition too often denied them…

…What happened? Is 2010 an exception to a general rule of growing diversity? Or has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Mr. Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion—or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) have inspired puzzlement among his supporters who want him to be one thing and detractors who fear that he might be something else.

In their modest way American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity. Actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte made the leap, allowing black men to move beyond porters and pimps to play detectives, judges, the guy next door, the God upstairs and the decider in the Oval Office. At the same time, while the variety of roles increased, the commercially circumscribed representational conservatism of American cinema—with its genre prerogatives and appetite for uplift, its insistence on archetypes and stereotypes, villains and heroes—meant that these images tended to fit rather than break or bend the mold. Certainly this isn’t a cinema that jibes with what, in his 2007 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama called “the fluid state of identity.”…

Read the entire article here.