{"id":10390,"date":"2013-02-13T03:45:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T03:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10390"},"modified":"2017-07-17T01:03:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T01:03:29","slug":"vision-turns-to-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10390","title":{"rendered":"Vision Turns to Division"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vision Turns to Division<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

American Review
\n<\/a>Global Perpectives on US Affairs
\nIssue 2 (May 2010)
\npages 12-15<\/p>\n

Kevin Gaines<\/a><\/strong>, Director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and Professor of History
\nUniversity of Michgan<\/em><\/p>\n

The election of Barack Obama<\/a> has had surprisingly little impact on a nation fixated on race<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1886, the African American abolitionist and spokesman Frederick Douglass<\/a> published \u201cThe Future of the Coloured Race<\/a>,\u201d an essay which held that the biological assimilation of black Americans was inevitable. The Negro, in the parlance of the time, would neither be annihilated nor expatriated, nor would he \u201csurvive and flourish\u201d as a distinct and separate group. Instead, \u201che will be absorbed, assimilated\u201d into the white majority, visible \u201cin the features of a blended race.\u201d For Douglass, this amalgamation<\/a> was a fait accompli<\/a>, despite white protestations against interracial intimacy.<\/p>\n

Writing amid the codification of a new system of racial segregation in the south of the US<\/a>, and soon after his marriage to a white woman, Helen Pitts<\/a>, had angered many. Douglass\u2019s vision of racial comity through the biological absorption of blacks and whites was edgy, even transgressive. Still, it proved no match for the white south\u2019s concerted assault on the political and social rights of black people, which persisted until the mid-1960s reforms of the civil rights movement<\/a>. In a manner reminiscent of Douglass, since the 1990s advocates of the multiracial movement have looked to the growing population of mixed race Americans, neither black nor white, as evidence of racial progress. First Tiger Woods<\/a>, and now Barack Obama, have embodied for many Americans the solution to the nation\u2019s historical racial conflicts. Our black or, as some prefer, biracial president has become for many a symbol of reconciliation and national unity.<\/p>\n

Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior. In other words, this idealised view of \u2018bi-racial\u2019 people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority. The fascination with Obama as a seemingly \u2018raceless\u2019 mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, \u201cFor an hour, I forgot he was black,\u201d is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, Michelle<\/a>, as an \u201cangry black woman.\u201d The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just na\u00efve, but misguided…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The election of Barack Obama has had surprisingly little impact on a nation fixated on race<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,394,20],"tags":[4577,84,4576],"class_list":["post-10390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-american-review","tag-frederick-douglass","tag-kevin-gaines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10390"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54553,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10390\/revisions\/54553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}