Prologue: the riddle of race |
Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 4-14
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563141
Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English and ALANA [African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans] US Ethnic Studies
University of Vermont
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| James Vellacott, ‘President Obama shakes the hand of PC Michael Zamora on the way into Number 10’, London, 1 April 2009. Credit: Mirrorpix. |
Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard’s essay on the case of race in the United States.
Post black
A classroom at an Ivy League university. A black professor at the helm. The audience, a palette of skin colours. Black, white and brown bodies have come here for answers: answers to the puzzle of race.
The professor calls herself African American but she was born in Italy, not in the United States, and has she never been to Africa. Her racial identity is born of a sense of affinity; it is, essentially, a choice. Because her skin is brown, no one questions this choice. Everyone in this room, in fact, equates this affinity with authority, which is why her lecture on the meaning of race goes unchallenged.
Today, the professor is not really talking about race, but not-race. She tells us, her multicoloured audience, that race no longer holds meaning, that it never held meaning, that it is a fiction or, in academic language, a construction.
Most of us, including me, nod our heads. That is, except for one young woman, a student at the law school, who raises her hand and waits to be recognized.
‘Look, I don’t really understand what you mean when you say that “race is a construction”. Race is real, and I know what it is. I’m black. It’s where I’m from and how I live.’
The professor turns to address the woman directly. Her tone is agreeable and her gestures are sympathetic, but her language does not change. She continues to speak in the artful theoretical vocabulary that has brought her to international prominence. She seems as frustrated as the young woman that her words cannot bridge the gulf between them. In the academic world in which I was trained, we were taught to view lived experience with suspicion, and to dismiss emotion as a meaningful category of analysis. Time is up. People stand to speak to the professor, to thank her for her insights and congratulate her on her work, except for the law student, who heads directly for the door.
Such dramas are being played out in classrooms around the country these days, including my own…
…Race is a fiction. When we use it to narrate our experience in the world, we take the easy way out, and neglect other factors that name and place us. The easy way out is a one-way street; our real lives are lived at the intersections, where race meets class meets gender and so on. Inextricably intertwined is what we are; the boundaries to which we pledge ourselves do not exist. Underneath the umbrella of race, categories like gender, sexuality, class, even geography, are also invisibly huddled. Each of these categories contains its own story, a story that intersects with the story of race, but a story that race alone cannot encompass. In other words, a different kind of blackness—a different story—is lived in, say, Northern California than in rural Mississippi. To be gay, black and rich—or straight, white and poor—in these respective places adds more meaning to the experience of race than the term ‘race’ can communicate. Identity honours no borders, neither in language nor in life.
But the fact that race is a fiction does not rob it of meaning. Certainly, race is an invention, but that doesn’t make it untrue…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Emily Bernard, Patterns of Prejudice