Mixed Race Studies

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Whiteness: A Revolution of Identity Politics in America

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 2, Issue 1 (2012)
pages 149-166

Andrés Acebo

An enduring motif in American political history reflects the nation’s slow progression towards inclusion of a once disenfranchised populace. In the annals of its jurisprudence, the nation recalls a time when citizenship was linked to race: a time when the racial perquisites for naturalization were not challenged based on its constitutionality, but on who could be professedly “white.” President Obama’s election ushered in a new chapter to this American narrative. His election and the response to it reveal how far we have come and how far we have left to travel on the path towards equality in citizenship.
 
This Article frames a longstanding debate concerning race consciousness in the political sphere and how it consequently influences an ever-changing electorate. It explores the impact that our courts and our policymakers have had on shaping what it means to be white in America, and accordingly to possess a majority voice in society. The Article further seeks to explicate how politicized social institutions are sustained from generation to generation by way of an unabashed preservation of the status quo. Those who come to power do so by protracting nostalgic yearnings, summoning persistent lore and mythos about a way of life that has not always benefited an entire electorate, and not threatening or offending the mainstay of the American political complex. Obama’s election revealed a model, embossed by a romanticized collective national history and a steadfast commitment to the ideals of American Exceptionalism, for transforming a minority candidate’s use of identity politics to garner support, influence and ultimately the ability to govern.

CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. WHITENESS SOUGHT AND DEFINED IN AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE
  • A. Contemporary Whiteness through Biology and Demographics
• III. 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION REVEALS NEW FORM OF RACISM
  • A. The Pursuit of the White Vote159
  • B. A Message of Change and the Opposition that Fears It
• IV. “REAL AMERICANS” INCITE RACISM WITH DIVISIVE RHETORIC
  • A. 2010 Candidates Followed Obama’s Example to Distinguish Themselves From Him
• V. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM STIFLED BY NOSTALGIA FOR A MORE DIVISIVE ERA

I. INTRODUCTION

April 12, 2011, marked one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War’s first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The war pinned brother against brother and forced an infant republic to confront its original sin of slavery. The sesquicentennial of that defining struggle provides this generation of Americans with the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and how much further we must travel on the curving path toward our more perfect union. Despite undeniable progress, the nation’s wounds of bigoted conflict have not completely healed. Racism, albeit publicly renounced, has persisted and remained the scar that fervently reminds people of a much more divided time. In the twenty-first century, racism can no longer be classified as a social ill that plagues the ignorant and indifferent. Racism has transmuted from a “creature of habit” that sought to justify the subordination of some to a more nuanced political calculation for preserving the current racial political establishment. This phenomenon did not occur overnight, but it certainly did find the election of the nation’s first non-white president as the opportune moment to emerge. This new racism has been coupled with centuries-old nativism3 and has disguised itself under the banner of American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism finds its roots in the romanticized emergence of the American democracy. Horatio Alger provided this narrative in parables about the American Dream, while John Winthrop’s famous speech painted America as the shining “city upon a hill.” What is so perplexing is that this idea, which helped form the tide that ushered Barack Obama to the presidency, has become the one that seeks to wash him out. The attack on the president has been one in which the racial epithets of yesteryear have been drowned out by the spewing of political rhetoric that claims to try to “take America back” for its rightful keepers. A growing sentiment in our political debate is that those who do not blindly accept America as the greatest civilization in history and those who admonish the present conditions as defiling the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Constitution are not true or real Americans. The emergent consequence is that race consciousness and, more specifically, what it means to be white in America is qualified by more politically conservative circles in terms of whether an individual subscribes to notions of American Exceptionalism. Groups enter the fold if they do not condemn, criticize, complain about, or campaign for any sort of fundamental change to the existing order. Essentially, for those once excluded, to now be white in America, they must not offend the structures that perpetuate white majoritarian influence.

The history of what is determinably white in the United States has been dictated by a fluid metric. It is not at all unusual that this redefinition has appeared at a time where Census projections reveal the rapid decline of the white majority in America. The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that, by 2050, minorities will be the majority in America. Minorities currently constitute one-third of the population in the United States, but according to census figures, they are projected to become the majority population by 2042. By 2050, minorities will constitute fifty-four percent of the population. The implications of what will come when these projections become reality are grave. With no majority white race, what will become of racialized existence in pluralist America? The prosperity and equality once drawn from the well of acculturation will be dried up. What will emerge in its place? Will a new dominant racial majority emerge or will accepted citizenship occur through enculturation? The answer is up for debate. However, history and judicial opinions alike reflect the absolute discriminatory intent behind separating citizens into groups of those deemed to belong and those who do not.

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part II explores and discusses the interplay of race and American jurisprudence. The privileges of American citizenship since the nation’s founding have been inextricably linked to racial classification. What it means to be white and who is white in America is constantly changing. Accordingly, the acquisition of rights has often been forged by racial reclamation. This section examines the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Thind, where the nation’s highest court swiftly legitimized the practice of making whiteness more exclusive, harder to attain, and consequently more desirable. The Article postulates what will become of the remnants of the legacy of racial supremacy when the nation is redefined as a majority-minority electorate.

Part III evaluates President Obama’s 2008 election and examines how his pluralistic campaign revealed not just the progress that has been made in America’s journey toward racial equality, but also the new affronts to social harmonization. The 2008 presidential election, a transformative moment in American history, was not the watershed moment of racial reconciliation that it has been portrayed to be. This section offers that the election of the nation’s first non-white president established a new paradigm for identity politics in the United States. President Obama’s successful campaign revealed that America’s racial cacophony had not yet been keyed into melody. At the onset of a new century, with demographic trends envisaging a new racial electoral composition, the pursuit of whiteness has been relegated to romantic notions of American Exceptionalism. An uncertain future has birthed a movement emboldened by nostalgia that threatens that the ushering in of change will threaten the pillars of the republic.

Part IV analyzes the 2010 elections and considers how the Obama model for identity politics was galvanized and successfully used by some of his staunchest detractors. Leading candidates attached their personal narratives to the republic’s chronicles. In doing so, acquiescence to the establishment’s will promulgated a new sentiment, which reaffirmed the racialized social order. By not simply subscribing to the existence of American Exceptionalism, but instead expressing anguish and disdain for those who not only deny its veracity but seek to weaken its condition, minority candidates have found a way to appeal beyond their immediate base of supporters.

In concluding, Part V of this Article observes that America’s demographic shift towards a majority-minority citizenry will make little difference if its politics remain unshaken. In the end, elections will amount to nothing more than isolated victories rather than breakthroughs until the legacy of racial supremacy is eradicated. The law’s memorialization of an ethereal demonstration of racial privilege and a modern electorate’s hope to garner a pluralist society in which all persons are treated equal are once more pitted against each other at the highest levels of our public discourse. Amidst the demagoguery and rhetoric is the often-overlooked axiom that America’s “Exceptionalism” lies in the nation’s ability to confront its inequality and maintain that a government of the people, by the people, shall always be for all the people. Elections that usher in both the face of groups long removed from influence and, more importantly, their voice are only the first step on a long road to redemption.

Read the entire article here.

Why Obama is Black: Language, Law and Structures of Power

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3
pages 468-481

SpearIt, Assistant Professor of Law
Saint Louis University

[W]ords are our tools, and, as a minimum we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. –J. L. Austin

When he filled out the race section of the 2010 U.S. Census survey, President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box despite the fact that Obama is of both European-American and African ancestry. This simple fact raises a number of complicated questions and challenges the idea that race, or more properly, racism, is a thing of the past or “post” as used in “post-racial.” “Post-racial” is rhetoric for an ideology that promotes “a larger national and legal consensus that ignores the bulk of racial disparities, inequities, and imbalances in society, and pursues race-neutral remedies as a fundamental, a priori value.” Ironically, the ideology garners support from Obama’s presidential election in 2008, which launched widespread reports that the country elected its first “black” president. For many, the election provided concrete proof of improved race relations. Such believers epitomized Obama’s election as fulfilling the American promise; for others, however, he symbolized a formidable challenge to the “post-racial” posture. Hence, although the term “post” intends to point to the past, it is really about the future, a destination that has yet to be achieved. It is a way of wishing away the present and supplanting it with an idealized future. Under such pretentions, “post-racial” reflects a desire to identify with something more sublime than the status quo.

Framing Obama as a poster for “post-racial” suffers from various defects. The most fundamental is the assumption that he is “black” in the first place. Although the decision that the president indeed is “black” is practically unanimous, such a conclusion neglects his “white” heritage. President Obama could have checked black and white on the census survey, but he passed on the option. This decision raises unsettling questions for post-racial ideologues. Rather than signal arrival into the post-racial age, however, his choice on the survey could be read as a denial of whiteness or an unfair response given the survey’s purposes, which imply an obligation to represent oneself based on parental lineage as opposed to racial ideology. But what if Obama’s logic led him to identify as “white”? For many this proposition would not ring true. Yet Obama’s self-identification as “black” raises no protest. Why the double standard? Of course the question itself is rhetorical—because a rigorous baseline logic is already at play.

Although Obama’s story is not the only forceful challenge to the “post racial” concept, it affords a solid frame to consider the merits and myths. A sober read of Tea Party rhetoric and the Henry Louis Gates episode indicate that talk of “post-racial” is premature, a point further exclaimed by the resignation of Shirley Sherrod. Far from relegating racism to the back burner, events since Obama’s election have stoked racial flames and revealed that race still matters. His presidential victory might have ignited widespread faith in a “post-racial” era, but a more pessimistic read would render it a backlash from the country’s collective guilt over the Bush regime that moved voters to “reject the party of an unpopular president.” The election may have helped herald in an era of wishful thinking called “post-racial,” yet its logic, paradoxically enough, was governed by the rule of hypodescent, which can drown an oceanic man in the tide of one drop.

What follows is a critique of the “post-racial” ideology. It begins with “Language and Law,” which provides a theoretical backdrop to map how law influences common language, and more importantly, how concepts rooted in racism maintain in the American lexicon through the force of law. The next section, “White by Law,” analyzes the legal and social constructions of whiteness, a historical survey that arrives at constructions in the American context. Building from the previous parts, “Structures of Racism,” outlines how racial language and ideals of white superiority work in tandem to produce structural racism, that is, racism beyond individual bigotry. Today’s racism is not simply the aggregate of individual interactions; rather, the discrimination resides in the institutions and polity of American society, particularly in the language of law. The last section, “Beyond Binaries and Reinscribed Racism,” is a normative venture that offers ideas for stemming the force of these linguistic and conceptual burdens. Centuries of racial sedimentation have made some aspects of racism invisible to the eye, yet an analysis of the post-racial concept shows that debates on race and color are fundamentally flawed. This Essay exposes the concept as a type of wishful thinking, and more critically, how the law prevents this wish from being fulfilled.

Read the entire article here.

Signifying on Passing: (Post) Post-Racialism, (Post) Post-Modernism, and (Post) Post-Marxism

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3 (July 2012)
pages 482-489

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

The social and legal relevance of racial passing appears to be fading as we ostensibly enter a color-blind, post-race era. During the “Age of Obama,” the notion of passing in our multi-racial society seems to many to be antiquated and unnecessary. As the nation has moved beyond state-sanctioned racial discrimination, many believe that the country also has moved beyond the need for a legal dialogue on racial passing and ambiguity. This “retreat from race,” exemplified in part by the apparent declining significance of racial passing, proclaims that the state no longer should consider race when interpreting the law or incorporating democratic values of equality and opportunity. This Essay, however, argues that the continued phenomenon of racial passing can be utilized as a conceptual vehicle to destabilize and de-legitimatize the post-racial agenda.

The continuing relevance of racial passing also underscores the significance of the lessons of Marxism. After all, the concept of “race,” and therefore the existence of racial passing, traces its lineage to the capitalist condition of racialized class distinctions and cultural hegemony (e.g., the white cultural norm). The post-racial agenda seeks to mask the commodification of persons, obscuring the salience of race and discrimination. Thus, the cry for a post-racial America is the latest attempt to lure society into a false sense of class and racial transformation. The continued presence of racial passing may lift the veil from our eyes to the conditions of racial and class exploitation that govern everyday life.

This Essay will proceed in three parts. The first section argues that the particular weltanschauung of post-racialism has obfuscated the continuing relevance of racial difference and conflict. The post-racial model seeks to skew the proletariat perception of social reality by imposing a false-consciousness that conceals existing relations of racial subordination and exploitation. In so doing, post-racialism strives to reject its theoretical Other: Marxism. However, the failings of post-racialism as a worldview are traced directly to its inability to refute the continuing salience of class and racial conflict. The second part of the Essay explores the similarities and differences between the post-racial model and the classic liberal colorblind model. The third part of the Essay concludes that the continuing relevance of racial passing should be utilized to reveal and disrupt the post-racial agenda…

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