{"id":23719,"date":"2012-10-31T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2012-10-31T00:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23719"},"modified":"2015-10-05T17:30:45","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T17:30:45","slug":"%e2%80%9ctense-and-tender-ties%e2%80%9d-a-review-of-janny-scott%e2%80%99s-a-singular-woman-the-untold-story-of-barack-obama%e2%80%99s-mother-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23719","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTense and Tender Ties\u201d: a review of Janny Scott\u2019s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama\u2019s Mother (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTense and Tender Ties\u201d: a review of Janny Scott\u2019s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama\u2019s Mother (2011)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Transition<\/a>
\nNumber 108 <\/a>(2012)
\npages 129-140<\/p>\n

Kimberly DaCosta<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students
\nNew York University, Gallatin<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.<\/em><\/p>\n

My father\u2019s white, I tell them, and rural.
\nYou don\u2019t hate the South? they ask. You don\u2019t hate it?
\n\u2014Natasha Trethewey<\/a>, \u201cPastoral\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI think my dear brother Barack Obama<\/a> has a certain fear of free black men,\u201d said Cornel West<\/a> in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig<\/em> in May 2011. \u201cIt\u2019s understandable,\u201d he continues, \u201cAs a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he\u2019s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening … Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow<\/a>, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.\u201d<\/p>\n

West claims to understand quite a lot about Obama, intuited from the most general facts of his upbringing in an interracial and international family context. According to West, this upbringing has directly shaped (or perhaps \u201cdistorted\u201d is the better description from West\u2019s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (\u201cderacination\u201d) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls \u201ca black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.\u201d<\/p>\n

“It is a tried and true ritual of American politics to interpret interracial intimacy and mixed race subjectivity as a sign of suspect political loyalty.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics\u2014the one in which interracial intimacy and mixed-race subjectivity are interpreted as sign of, or explanation for, suspect or insufficient political loyalty. George W. Bush<\/a> performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain<\/a> in the South Carolina Republican primary with a whisper campaign that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Most recently, in a widely read and discussed New York Times opinion piece published just a few months after the West interview, Drew Westen, psychologist and self-described \u201cscientist and strategic consultant,\u201d explained Obama\u2019s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have \u201ca president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his reelection. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in Dreams from My Father<\/em> appended a chapter at the end that wasn\u2019t there\u2014the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n

These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people\u2014psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors\u2014for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama\u2019s family life. Not that more detail about those relationships matters much to those making these kinds of political speculations. Ideologies, as Barbara Fields reminds us in the New Left Review<\/em>, \u201care real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate\u201d in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible\u2014rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing\u2014that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.<\/p>\n

Janny Scott\u2019s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama\u2019s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama\u2019s Mother, published by Riverhead Press, provides some much needed context. Scott did not get to comment on this most recent controversy since the volume went to press before it occurred. Yet, her book can be read as a long (nearly 400-page) retort to those who would so blithely use interracial kinship and mixed-race subjectivity in this way…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article in HTML<\/a> or PDF<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTense and Tender Ties\u201d: a review of Janny Scott\u2019s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama\u2019s Mother (2011) Transition Number 108 (2012) pages 129-140 Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students New York University, Gallatin Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,5,8],"tags":[8042,8662,4084,181,8663,6461],"class_list":["post-23719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","tag-ann-dunham","tag-janny-scott","tag-kimberly-dacosta","tag-kimberly-mcclain-dacosta","tag-stanley-ann-dunham","tag-transition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23719","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=23719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43077,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23719\/revisions\/43077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}