Mixed Race Studies

Othering Obama: How Whiteness is Used to Undermine Authority

Altre Modernità/Other Modernities
ISSN 2035-7680
Number 3 (2010)
pages 112-119
DOI: 10.6092/2035-7680/517

David S. Owen, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Director of Diversity Programs, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Louisville

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority.  Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color.  Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Introduction

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008 was undoubtedly a truly historic moment. The election of a self-identified black man to the highest political office in the nation was symbolic of a degree of progress the U.S. has made towards racial justice. However, there has been considerable disagreement in public discourse about how substantive a change this Obama presidency reflects. Some have  claimed (and did so immediately after the election) that the Obama presidency signals the end of racial oppression in the U.S. Others have argued that while the Obama presidency is significant, it does not indicate that the system of racial oppression has dissolved over night. This debate was sharpened in the summer of 2009 by the public discourse concerning health care reform. To many, that discourse often devolved from rational policy critique to racist attacks of Obama. And, in fact, the topic of racism broke into explicit discourse during this period, culminating with former President Jimmy Carter accusing many of the president’s critics with racism. Much of the debate around whether or not the critics of health care reform were behaving in a racist manner turned on the question of intent: Did they, or did they not, intend to send a racist message? I will argue in this paper that this question misses the point. The system of racial oppression, which was not dissolved on election night in 2008, is maintained and reproduced by behavior that echoes and carries forward racist imagery, representations, and symbols of the past in the guise of structures of whiteness. While there were clearly explicitly racist actions taken by the health care reform critics, much of the harm and effectiveness of the racially oppressive behavior is found in what ostensibly looks like non-racial behavior. Such behavior appears to be non-racial because it presumes the norm of whiteness. These debates provide a constructive case study for understanding how people of color can be marginalized and devalued—even when they have achieved very high accomplishments…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness in the Age of Obama

The Huffington Post
2012-11-26

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law
Duke University

Recall the numbers: 59 percent of white voters supported Romney. More dramatically, 88 percent of his votes came from whites. One simple but plausible analysis suggested that Obama won a majority of white votes only in New England, New York, and Hawaii. His national share of the white vote fell by several points after four years in which Republicans, especially the Tea Party, worked relentlessly to be the party of whiteness.

As I’ve noted before (and so have lots of others), this was the barely-concealed meaning of Tea Party claims that Obama was not American, not constitutionally the president, somehow deeply alien. These ideas are so unmoored from reality that they have to be approached as symptoms, not positions. Race was also much of the meaning of tying Obama to food stamps, and of (barely less public) assertions that health care reform was a giveaway from white taxpayers to black dependents.

Those notorious maps showing the overlap between Romney states and the old Confederacy take on a grim extra plausibility when you consider that Obama seems to have taken less than 20 percent of the white vote in the core states of the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I’m reminded of the friend in West Virginia who told me, back in 1988, that one reason to support Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary was that he could pick out his solitary vote when the local newspaper printed the results.

But consider: whiteness, like any other racial category, is a made-up thing. It is a matter of what people do, not what they are. (Social construction is the clunky academic name for this.) Like other made-up things, it changes. Obama’s share of the youth vote in swing states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio was so high that clearly, somewhere around age 30, a majority of white people started supporting the president. Romney’s success with old people isn’t just a matter of the fact that America used to be much more white. It’s that white people used to be much more white—in the Mitt Romney sense of white. Whiteness, too, is changing. What might it become?…

…Race in the age of Obama

There are many ways to look at Barack Obama, a fact that has been both a strength and a weakness in his political career. One of those, one he invites and seems to believe, is that he is a man who made a pair of deliberate choices: to be black and to be American, to identify with both those traditions and to braid their hopes more tightly together. This is the conclusion of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and it has rippled through a good deal of what he has done and said as President.

That American identity is open to this kind of choice is one of the best things about it. That Obama’s claim to stand at the center of American identity has inspired so much resistance is a sign of the value of that central place, of its being—sometimes tragically—worth fighting over.

All of us who live in Obama’s age are, more or less explicitly, engaged in the same problem: how to orient ourselves to an American identity that no longer has its old center. The change, the beginning of overcoming the America-is-whiteness myth, is overdue and entirely right.

Maybe that identity will be more comfortably hybrid. American civic myth has always involved the fantasy of purity. The Pilgrims were righteous, goes the myth. So were the Revolutionaries. The Founders were wise and beneficent. The Constitution is full of moral truth. Our wars are good wars.

There is a strange half-rhyme between that fantasy of purity and the fantasy of race, especially the bad old idea that whiteness contains something special, rare, and pure—an idea few will say in public anymore, but which still echoes in our racially divided politics. These myths had many victims, most obviously those whom they defined as not quite, or not at all, American. More subtly, they mutilated history itself. They cost everyone the chance at an honest start to understanding the present by appreciating the past…

Read the entire article here.

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up

Dog Park: Media Unleased
2012-11-20

Leighton Woodhouse, Founding Partner

As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
 
The story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy’s post-election anointing of the “new governing coalition,” following the second presidential election in a row in which African-Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there’s another demographic category of Americans that’s getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it’s the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
 
That’s not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is “mixed race” really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is “Latino” or “Asian”). As a demographic category, however, it’s going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It’s simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That’s more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more interracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny…

Read the entire article here.

Political Racism in the Age of Obama

The New York Times
2012-11-10

Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania

The white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era.

But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and may in fact have been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved…

…By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.

The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Indigenous Giles stands by Abbott

NT News
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
2012-11-15

Nigel Adlam

TERRITORY indigenous politician Adam Giles has refused to condemn Tony Abbott.

Mr Abbott said Alison Anderson was an “authentic representative” of ancient Central Australian culture but mixed-race MP Ken Wyatt was “not a man of culture”.
 
Mr Giles also refused to criticise the Coalition leader for not including him in a list of the NT’s Aboriginal Members of the Legislative Assembly…
 
But Mr Giles did warn that Aboriginality was a “sensitive subject”.
 
“Sometimes the smallest word can get the hairs on your back going,” he said.
 
Mr Abbott said he wanted to increase indigenous representation in the national parliament.

But he seemed to blunder into the “who’s an Aborigine?” minefield when he then made the comparison with Mr Wyatt – calling him an “urban Aboriginal”.
 
Mr Abbott’s office yesterday said he had not been implying Mr Wyatt was not indigenous…
 
Mr Giles said he wouldn’t get involved in the argument about “who is more authentic”.
 
“It’s abhorrent,” he said.
 
“All indigenous people know who they are.”
 
In a seeming reference to the difference between mixed-race people and full-blooded Aborigines, the Transport Minister said: “I know how many indigenous Australians have a hole in their heart in wanting for cultural enrichment…
 
Read the entire article here.

“At This Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race

New York University Press
October 2011
229 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780814752975
Paperback ISBN: 9780814752982

Enid Lynette Logan, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

In January 2009, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States.  In the weeks and months following the election, as in those that preceded it, countless social observers from across the ideological spectrum commented upon the cultural, social and political significance of “the Obama phenomenon.” In “At this Defining Moment,” Enid Logan provides a nuanced analysis framed by innovative theoretical insights to explore how Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy both reflected and shaped the dynamics of race in the contemporary United States.

Using the 2008 election as a case study of U.S. race relations,  and based on a wealth of empirical data that includes an analysis of over 1,500 newspaper articles, blog postings, and other forms of public speech collected over a 3 year period, Logan claims that while race played a central role in the 2008 election, it was in several respects different from the past. Logan ultimately concludes that while the selection of an individual African American man as president does not mean that racism is dead in the contemporary United States, we must also think creatively and expansively about what the election does mean for the nation and for the evolving contours of race in the 21st century.  

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Landscape of Race in the 21st Century
• 2. Post-race American Triumphalism and the Entrenchment of Colorblind Racial Ideology
• 3. Rooted in the Black Community but Not Limited to It: The Perils and Promises of the New Politics of Race
• 4. Contesting Gender and Race in the 2008 Democratic Primary
• 5. The Trope of Race in Obama’s America
• 6. Asian and Latino Voters in the 2008 Election: The Politics of Color in the Racial Middle
• 7. In Defense of the White Nation: The Modern Conservative Movement and the Discourse of Exclusionary Nationalism
• 8. Racial Politics under the First Black President
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author

A Milestone Election

Weekend Reader
Hannah Arendt Center
Bard College
2012-11-09

Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies, Human Rights, and Philosophy; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

The re-election of Barack Obama is a milestone. Barack Obama will always be remembered as the first black President of the United States. He will now also be remembered as the first black two-term President, one who was re-elected in spite of nearly 8% unemployment and a feeling of deep unease in society. He is the black President who was re-elected because he seemed, to most Americans, more presidential, more trustworthy, and more likable than his opponent—a white, Mormon, representative of the business elite. Whatever you want to say about this election, it is difficult to deny that the racial politics of the United States have now changed.
 
President Obama’s re-election victory and his distinguished service have made the country a better place. The dream of America as a land of equality and the dream that our people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character—these dreams, while not realized, are closer to being realized today because of Barack Obama’s presidency and his re-election.
 
There are some who don’t see it that way. There is a map going around comparing the 2012 electoral college vote to the civil war map. It is striking, and it shows with pictorial clarity, that the Republic strongholds today are nearly identically matched with the states of the Confederacy 150 years ago. For some, this is an indictment not only of the Republican Party, but also of the United States. The argument made on Facebook and beyond is that the country is still deeply divided racially; that this election brought out the deep-seated racism underlying the country…

Read the entire article here.

Parallels to country’s racist past haunt age of Obama

Cable News Network
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-11-01

John Blake, CNN

This is the second in an occasional series on issues of race, identity and politics ahead of Election Day, including a look at the optics of politics, a white Southern Democrat fighting for survival and a civil rights icon registering voters.

(CNN) – A tall, caramel-complexioned man marched across the steps of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn into office as a jubilant crowd watched history being made.
 
The man was an African-American of mixed-race heritage, an eloquent speaker whose election was hailed as a reminder of how far America had come.
 
But the man who placed his hand on the Bible that winter day in Washington wasn’t Barack Obama. He was Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
 
His election and that of many other African-Americans to public office triggered a white backlash that helped destroy Reconstruction, America’s first attempt to build an interracial democracy in the wake of the Civil War.
 
To some historians, Revels’ story offers sobering lessons for our time: that this year’s presidential election is about the past as well as the future. These historians say Obama isn’t a post-racial president but a “post-Reconstructionist” leader. They say his presidency has sparked a white backlash with parallels to a brutal period in U.S. history that began with dramatic racial progress.
 
Some of the biggest controversies of the 2012 contest could have been ripped from the headlines of that late 19th-century era, they say: Debates erupt over voting rights restrictions and racial preferences, a new federal health care act divides the country, an economic crisis sparks a small government movement. And then there’s a vocal minority accusing a national black political leader of not being a “legitimate” U.S. citizen.
 
All were major issues during Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the former Confederate states back into the national fold and create a new era of racial justice. And many of the same forces that destroyed Reconstruction may be converging again, some scholars and historians say…

…Obamacare, 19th century style
 
Beyond Revels, there are other parallels between today and the post-Reconstruction era, according to some historians.
 
The most commonly cited link revolves around the debate over voter ID laws. Since Obama’s election, 34 states have considered adopting legislation requiring photo ID for voters, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Seven have passed such laws, which typically require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls.
 
During the post-Reconstruction era, many white Southerners viewed the onset of black voting power in apocalyptic terms. They created a thicket of voting barriers – “poll taxes,” “literacy tests” and “understanding clauses” – to prevent blacks from voting, said Dray.
 
“The idea was to invalidate the black vote without directly challenging the 15th Amendment,” Dray said….

Many contemporary voter ID laws are following the same script, he said.
 
“It just goes on and on. They’ve never completely gone away. And now they’re back with a vengeance.”
 
Some opponents of the voter ID laws note that these measures disproportionately affect the elderly and the poor, regardless of race.
 
Supporters of voter ID laws say they’re not about race at all, but about common sense and preventing voter fraud.
 
“That is not a racial issue and it certainly isn’t a hardship issue,” said Deneen Borelli, author of “Blacklash,” which argues Obama is turning America into a welfare nation.
 
“When you try to purchase over-the-counter medication or buy liquor or travel, you present photo ID. This is a basic part of everyday transactions.”
 
Historians say there are other ways the post-Reconstruction script is being dusted off and that some of them appear to have nothing to do with race on the surface.
 
Consider the debate over “Obamacare,” the nation’s new health care law. The controversy would be familiar to many 19th-century Americans, said Jim Downs, author of “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
 
The notion that the federal government should help those who cannot help themselves wasn’t widely accepted before the Civil War. There were a few charities and municipal hospitals that took care of the sick, but most institutions ignored ordinary people who needed health care, said Downs, a Connecticut College history professor who studies the history of race and medicine in 19th-century America.
 
Reconstruction changed that. Post-Civil War America was marked by epidemics: yellow fever, smallpox and typhus. Freed slaves, who were often malnourished and had few clothes and little shelter, died by the “tens of thousands,” he said.
 
The federal government responded by creating the nation’s first-ever national health care system, directed at newly freed slaves. It was called the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The division built 40 hospitals and hired hundreds of doctors to treat more than a million former slaves from 1865 until it was shut down in 1870 after losing congressional funding, Downs said.
 
“It absolutely radicalized health care,” he said. “You can’t argue that government intervention in health is something new or a recent innovation. It originated in the mid-19th century in response to the suffering of freed slaves.”
 
Critics at the time said the new health care system was too radical. They said it would make blacks too reliant on government. The system was expanded to include other vulnerable Americans, such as the elderly, children and the disabled. Yet some still saw it as a black handout, Downs said.
 
“The whole notion of the modern day “welfare queen” can be traced to the post-Civil War period when people became very suspicious of the federal government providing relief to ex-slaves,” Downs said. “They feared this would create a dependent class of people.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race Under the Microscope: Biological Misunderstandings of Race

Center for Genetics and Society
2012-05-24

Despite the fact that advances in genetics undermine the notion that discrete and distinct racial groups exist at the biological level, the science of genetics is inadvertently reinforcing the myth that race is a biological, rather than a social, category. In this video, produced by the Center for Genetics and Society, a group of experts discusses the history and consequences of the misuse of racial categories in medicine and science. The video is a great resource for students and educators.

Race Under the Microscope features commentary on the misuse of race from esteemed professors Jonathan Kahn (Professor of Law, Hamline University), Dorothy Roberts (Professor of Law, Northwestern University), Osagie K. Obasogie (Professor of Law, University of California Hastings Law School), and Joseph Graves (Associate Dean for Research, Joint School for Nanosciences & Nanoengineering, Greensboro, NC). The excerpts used in the video were filmed during the 2011 Tarrytown Meeting.

Obama’s second victory is more low key, but in some ways more impressive

The Guardian
London, England
2012-11-07

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

The euphoria of 2008 has gone, but the US president’s second win is remarkable precisely because it is not as symbolic

Harold Davies didn’t cry this time. Four years ago when I accompanied him to the polls his eyes welled up as he described how it felt to vote for an African American candidate. This time he was in and out within 10 minutes and then off to his brother’s for his tea. You can only elect the first black president once. To use the euphoria of 2008 against the more toned-down celebrations of Tuesday night as a stick to beat Barack Obama misunderstands the significance of his trajectory.

Electing a black candidate on his promise, amid a massive economic crisis, is one thing. To re-elect him on his record, even as that crisis endures, is quite another. In more ways than one his victory on Tuesday night was more impressive than in 2008 precisely because it was not more symbolic.

It’s difficult to think of a more vulnerable president facing re-election and pulling it off so decisively. Having redrawn the electoral map and reshaped the electorate in 2008 he managed to give a plausible account of his efforts over the past four years even when they had fallen short. His fallibility as a candidate is now accepted; his timidity as a leader now beyond question.

On a flight to Denver last week an Obama supporter sitting next to me explained how his view of the president had evolved: “I thought he was a prophet. Now I realise he’s just a king.” Sooner or later he will have to get used to the fact that his president is just a human being…

…There are a few reasons to believe that this might change. The first is that the Republican party has reached a point where it will either have to change or die. This election effectively exposed it as a mono-racial party in an increasingly multi-racial state. At every rally you can see it. Regardless of the ethnic composition of the area in which they are held, the composition of rallies never changes. At the Republican convention one person threw peanuts and insults at a black camerawoman. The Grand Old Party is becoming the White People’s Party. And that is not only unbecoming, it is untenable.

Every month 50,000 new Latinos become eligible to vote. What Tuesday night showed was that the new coalition Obama cohered in 2008 that mobilised the young, the brown and the black in unprecedented numbers was not just a one-off. Soon, North Carolina, Arizona and ultimately Texas will be tough to hold if Republicans refuse to challenge the xenophobia of their base…

Read the entire article here.