Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Relationships and Loving v. Virginia

CityLine Boston
WCVB Boston
2011-06-15

Karen Holmes Ward, Director of Public Affairs and Community Services; Host and Executive Producer of CityLine

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ken Tanabe, President and Founder
LovingDay.org

Dr. Dawkins discusses the ongoing impact of interracial romantic relationships, multiracial identities and passing in the United States with Loving Day founder Ken Tanabe and CityLine host Karen Holmes Ward.

Notes by Steven F. Riley: There are several significant inaccuracies in this video.

1. Interracial marriage was in fact legal, not illegal, in most states 44 years ago.  Only 16 states had bans on interracial marriage at that time.
2. Ms. Ward’s comment, “No steps were taken to change the law until one appropriately named couple fought for their rights…” is grossly inaccurate.  There was no one “law” to ban such marriages in the United States. Each state had its own anti-miscegenation statute.  Most importantly, the battle to end anti-miscegenation (anti-interracial marriage) laws in the United States was a 50 year struggle which included such landmark cases like California Supreme Court: Perez v. Sharp (1948), U.S. Supreme Court: McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) and ending of course, with Loving v. Virginia (1967).
3. Mr. Tanabe’s comment, “After the case, for the first time, interracial marriage was legalized in the United States.” is incorrect.  Loving v. Virginia did not legalize interracial marriage in the United States.  It legalized interracial marriage only in the remaining 15 states (Maryland repealed its law during the case) that still had bans on such marriages.  In fact, there were 10 states that never enacted any bans on interracial marriage. Mr. Tanabe seems to have forgotten that Mildred and Richard Loving (the plaintiffs in the case) were legally married in Washington, D.C. in June of 1958, six months before they were arrested for violating the section of the law which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia.

To get a comprehensive view of anti-miscegenation laws and their impact on race relations in the United States, please read Peggy Pascoe’s multiple award winning book, What Comes Naturally, Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Also, please read my thoughts about the misreprentation of the Loving v. Virginia case in contemporary discourses.

Book Review Essay – The Legacy of Jim Crow: The Enduring Taboo of Black-White Romance

Texas Law Review
Volume 84, Number 3 (February 2006)
pages 739-766

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
Univesity of California, Davis

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. By Essie Mae Washington-Williams & William Stadiem. New York: Regan Books, 2005. Pp. 223.

Unforgivalbe Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. By Geoffrey C. Ward. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xi, 492.

Over the last one hundred years, racial equality has made momentous strides in the United States. State-enforced segregation ended. Slowly but surely, the nation dismantled Jim Crow. As part of that dismantling, the Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage, which were popular in many states.

Interracial relationships have increased dramatically over the last fifty years. In 2006, they meet with much greater acceptance than they did in 1950, especially in the nation’s major urban centers. The United States has begun to grapple with the issues related to interracial intimacy, such as the increasing number of mixed-race people and the controversy over transracial adoption, two topics that would have been wholly unnecessary to mention, much less analyze, just years ago. Ultimately, by transforming notions of race and races, racial mixture promises to transform the entire civil rights agenda in the United States.

Juxtaposed against this promise of transformed racial notions, however, lies this nation’s continuing battle against the enduring legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. While adeptly shedding light on the complexities of U.S. racial history, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson reveal just how far from this legacy the nation has advanced over the twentieth century. At the same time, the books highlight the many ways in which race relations have remained more or less the same.

Born in 1925, Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the half-black daughter of the late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond. Dear Senator tells the story of her life as the invisible child of a staunch segregationist and prominent national politician. Raised by her aunt in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Washington-Williams was first stunned to learn as a teenager that her real mother—not her aunt as she had been told—was Carrie Butler, a young African-American woman who had worked as a domestic in the Strom Thurmond family home in South Carolina. A few years later she met her father, whose identity had been a tightly kept family secret. Only upon Thurmond’s death in 2003 did it become widely known that he had fathered Washington-Williams.

A generation before Washington-Williams’s birth, Jack Johnson became the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Unforgivable Blackness details his capture of the championship as a milestone in the social history of the United States. Previously reserved exclusively for white men, the title served as a high profile symbol of white supremacy. Consequently, Johnson’s championship reign generated great controversy and contributed to heightened racial tensions…

…Both books reveal much about the deep-seated legal and social taboos that surrounded and influenced black–white relationships before the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. The stories of Essie Mae Washington-Williams and Jack Johnson demonstrate how law and policy, combined with strong social forces, sought to enforce the strict separation of the races in intimate relationships. Nonetheless, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, such relationships (often nonconsensual) frequently formed between prominent white men and subservient African-American women. Interracial sex was kept secret; this secrecy served to maintain the myth of complete racial separation.

Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blackness also reveal much about the social and legal double standards used to judge interracial relationships. African Americans like Jack Johnson were harshly punished for crossing the color line. Strom Thurmond, of course, legally married a series of glamorous “All-American” women and was able to keep his relationship with an African-American domestic service worker—and his half-black daughter—a secret from the general public. That liaison crossed the same line violated by Jack Johnson but was not sanctioned in the least; indeed, it fit comfortably into a long history of white men exploiting black women.

The legacy of Jim Crow and the legal and social separation of the races continues to affect the formation of interracial relationships in the modern United States. Most Americans marry persons of the same race. Although increasing, white–black relationships are relatively rare and much less common than Asian American–white, Latino–white, and Native American– white relationships.

A body of legal scholarship analyzing racial mixture has emerged in recent years. Some of that scholarship is autobiographical, including James McBride’s best-selling book The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. Adding to this body of literature, Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blackness tell memorable stories of the lives of two remarkable people and, at the same time, offer fascinating glimpses of how law and policy indelibly influenced them and their relationships.

This Essay analyzes how these books reveal the lasting impacts of slavery and Jim Crow on modern social relations. For even with the demise of the legal prohibition on interracial relationships, the social taboo on black–white relationships remains. So long as we live in a socially segregated society, low intermarriage rates between African Americans and whites will likely remain.

Part I of this Essay briefly summarizes the two books and places them in their proper historical, legal, and social contexts. Part II analyzes the enduring legacies of Jim Crow that Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blacknesshig highlight and discuss. These legacies include: (A) the persistence of social disfavor for black–white relationships; (B) the continued portrayal of African-American men as stereotypical criminals and hypersexual beings; (C) the endurance of the longstanding conflict between assimilation and nationalism as strategies for minorities seeking social change, personal survival, success, and happiness; and (D) the existence of white privilege in the United States, then and now…

One is left to conclude that Washington-Williams did not really know her father. The relationship was a formally cold one; one of her most lasting memories of Strom Thurmond was his strong handshake. This lack of love, or formal public acknowledgment, could not have been anything other than deeply hurtful, even though Washington-Williams refuses to condemn any of her father’s conduct.

…Despite family difficulties, Washington-Williams led a productive and successful life. She married an African-American man she met in college, who became a civil rights lawyer and died prematurely. Washington-Williams completed her undergraduate studies and later earned a master’s degree. Settling in the Los Angeles area, she was a school teacher and guidance counselor and raised a family. By all accounts, Washington-Williams self-identified as African American, growing up and living in African-American communities throughout her life. Though half-white, she suffered no burning ambiguity about her racial identity, showing again that race is a social, not a biological, construct. In this way, Washington-Williams self-identified as did many mixed-race African Americans, including W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass.

At the individual level, the painful experiences of Washington-Williams show an extreme example of the racial identity issues mixed-race people in the United States face. Importantly, she went public after Thurmond’s death to clear the air and end the years of media speculation about whether Strom Thurmond was her father. Now claiming to feel “completely free,” Washington-Williams is exploring her white roots and has gone so far as to seek membership in the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

It was the cruelest of ironies that not only was Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s father white, but he was also one of the most well-known segregationists of his generation. Strom Thurmond, along with many other Southern politicians, used segregation for political gain in post-World War II America. The despised race mixing was the evil thrown out like meat to the dogs when the issue of African-American civil rights was raised; campaign promises to attack this evil won many votes. Thurmond embraced racist views in spite of his long-time relationship with a black woman, thus himself engaging in race-mixing by fathering a child and maintaining a relationship with his half-black daughter. The inconsistencies between Thurmond’s personal and professional lives, of course, are in no way unheard of in U.S. history.

Racial mixture is part of this nation’s heritage. However, U.S. society historically went to great lengths to keep it underground. But when social norms failed to maintain the public separation of the races, law intervened with a vengeance, as it did in Jack Johnson’s life…

Read the entire article here.

Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

Identities
Volume 15, Issue 1 (2008)
pages 80-102
DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801841

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, this article inspects the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an analysis of Rio’s samba and carnaval. If differentiated from mestiçagem, the concept of hybridity can productively be put to use. The discourse on mestiçagem is the basis for dominant narratives of national identity and celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy. Such political use of culture was initiated by President Vargas’s appropriation of subaltern performance genres in his populist project of modernity. At the same time, as expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture, samba and carnaval are contested performances; many celebrate the “racially democratic” character of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability. This article traces the roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from interviews and fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja. The article stresses the methodological importance of addressing multiple practices and voices emerging in the context of samba performances. The concept of hybridity can thus describe Afro-Brazilians’ use of culture in the negotiation of power imbalances and alternative values.

Read or purchase the article here.

Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
29 pages
ISSN: 1438-5627

José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
University of Beira Interior, Portugal

For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

Read the entire article here.

Living Out Loud: (De)Constructing the Multiracial Individual

Stanford University
2011-05-19
55 pages

Stephanie Otani-Sunamoto

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Department Honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University

Although mixed race people have existed throughout American history, being mixed race was either stigmatized or an unrecognized identity option until the Multiracial Movement began in the late 1980’s. The past twenty years have brought an unparalleled rise in Mixed Race consciousness. On a political level, advocates successfully campaigned for Census reclassification in the form of a “Mark one or more” option on the Census 2000. Mixed Race scholars, activists, writers and artists were active in creating a new, cosmopolitan “Mixed Race Person.” All the while they proclaimed that they fighting against racism and representing a largely marginalized community.

This thesis takes a critical approach to the messages about what it means to be “Mixed Race” that proliferate in the media and in academia: Mixed Race people have “the best of both worlds” and the act of choosing one racial and/or cultural identity forces the multiracial person to deny part of who her or she is. I argue that the academic and popular conceptualizations of Mixed Race actually reinforce the racial/racist ideologies Multiracial activists claimed to be so oppressive. These problematic ideas are a direct result of one of the driving forces for Mixed Race activism and scholarship: the desire to legitimize multiracial families. In doing so, one particular narrative of mixed race identity and authenticity has prevailed. I call for a more nuanced vision of Mixed Race personhood that allows for non-traditional family structures and does not impose any ideals of authenticity upon the mixed race individual. I will then present a literary nonfiction piece, Outside/Inside, based on my own life as a counter-example to the common narratives seen in Mixed Race literature and representations.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Theoretical Framework
• Building a Mixed Race History
• Mixed Race Literature and Constructions of Multiracial Personhood
• Towards a Productive Mixed Race Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Introduction

I’m mixed. I’m not one or the other.
Interracial mixing is the future. Pretty soon, everyone will be mixed.
Mixed race people are so beautiful.
I don’t have to choose between my parents.
You are so exotic.
What is your ethnicity?
I love being mixed because people can’t place me into any categories.
Do you have anything else “in” you?
I am the best of both worlds.
Mixed race people aren’t as racist because they are a sign that old racial barriers are breaking down.

These statements, whether in the form of words or images, have been the soundtrack playing in my ears for all of my adult life. Three years ago, I started paying attention to the messages that surrounded me about Mixed Race and race in general. Everyone seemed to have opinions about where ambiguous bodies, including mine, belonged.

Academic literature on Mixed Race identity formation told me that mixed race people were in a position that is largely defined by the struggle to find legitimation from “both their cultures.” Cultures. The mixed race people I saw in videos and read in books talked about cultures as though they were tangible objects given to them the day they came home from the hospital and were told, Take these and make use of all of them. I knew that was not how race worked. Race was a physical categorization; it does not fully explain how the individual identity is internalized and made meaning.

But there were some divergent voices. Michele Elam argues that Multiracial advocates have framed their arguments as “ahead of the times” and in doing so have painted those who choose to criticize their efforts as conservative, even backwards. Michele Elam, Kimberly McClain DaCosta and Kim Williams are among the few who have taken a critical approach to studying the Mixed Race Movement through analyzing literature and entertainment, Multiracial organizations and marketing, and political strategies, respectively. While their works make important contributions, I believe that there is still much more room for nuance in the discussion about Mixed Race, particularly subjectivities.

The disconnect between what I knew about race and what I have read about Multiraciality led me on a roundabout journey to the research questions that drive this piece. The term Mixed Race implies that there are two (or more) essences being mixed, but how can that be if race isn’t real? If a new group has been created, new boundaries for group membership have also been created. Who stands inside and outside the boundaries of the new Mixed Race group? Are there other narratives in this movement that have been overlooked? Where is my place in all of this discourse?

I have created a framework that critiques popular ideas about Mixed Race and offers suggestions for the future of Mixed Race scholarship. I will discuss how the simultaneous denial and exploitation of multiracial people historically and the example of empowerment provided by the Civil Rights Movement spurred a group of people to give positive meaning to the word Multiracial. I will analyze the ways in which current representations and theorizations of Mixed Race identity conflate racial and ethnic identity formation. I argue that this has happened because Multiracial organization was motivated by the desire to validate the concept of a Multiracial Family. I will conclude by suggesting ways to for Mixed Race scholarship to move beyond advocacy and focus on the experiences of multiracial bodies, not multiethnic people.

Perhaps by presenting a voice that diverges from the monolithic entity that is Mixed Race Studies in 2011, it can provide a pathway for other types of stories we have yet to hear…

Read the entire thesis here.

The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American / Hispanic Political Thought

Oxford University Press
November 2011
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199746668; ISBN10: 0199746664

Diego A. von Vacano, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M University

The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.

Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simón Bolívar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic—a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.

Features

• Advances an alternative concept of race as inherently mixed, unstable, fluid, and politically potent
• Links approaches to race in Latin American thought to canonical Western political discourse
• Posits “race” as a central component of modernity and of political theory

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Paradox of Empire: Las Casas and the Birth of Race
• 2. Mixed into Unity: Race and Republic in the Thought of Simon Bolivar
• 3. Race and Nation in the Democratic Caesarism of Vallenilla Lanz
• 4. The Citizenship of Beauty: Jose Vasconcelos’s Aesthetic Synthesis of Race
• Conclusion: Making Race Visible to Political Theory

Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking

Cultural Studies
Volume 19, Issue 5 (2005)
pages 602-621
DOI: 10.1080/09502380500365507

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

A parallel is posited between the ways hybridity and kinship are thought about in Western contexts, challenging the idea that kinship and biology tend to lead to narrow, roots-oriented, essentialized definitions of identity. Rather than being the opposite of rhizomic, diasporic hybridity, kinship and biology partake of the tension between roots and routes that is characteristic of all hybridity. Anthropological evidence on the character of Western kinship thinking is examined to elucidate some features of its flexibility. Theories of hybridity are seen as being themselves a type of kinship thinking.

Introduction

Concepts of hybridity—and related ones of mestizaje, syncretism, creolization, mélange , métissage , mixture—have been widely deployed in cultural theory, especially in relation to fields in which racial and ethnic identifications are made (Anzalduá 1987, Bhabha 1994, Garcıá Canclini 1995, Gilroy 2000, Hale 1996, 1999, Ifekwunigwe 1999, Kapchan & Strong 1999, Nelson 1999, Smith 1997, Werbner & Modood 1997, Young 1995). The concept of diaspora, although not at first sight nor necessarily associated with processes of mixing, may be deployed to the same kind of effect, evoking a context or dynamic which creates mixing (Brah 1996, Hall 1996, Gilroy 2000).

In much of this work, there is a current that sees hybridity as potentially subversive of dominant ideologies and practices and leading to the dislocation and destabilization of entrenched essentialisms, often with a focus on racial and ethnic categories and boundaries, and frequently in colonial and post-colonial contexts. On the other hand, there is also an awareness that hybridity carries with it some other possibilities and meanings, which are seen in a less positive light. These possibilities revolve around ideas of roots, genealogical kinship links, biology and essentialism. As Kapchan and Strong (1999, p. 242) put it, ‘There is hybridity that may refer to and reify history and genealogy, for example, and hybridity that seems to make a mockery of it’. In a similar vein, Young (1995, pp. 24
/5) distinguishes between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ modes of hybridity (see below). We are faced with a dualism in hybridity theory between potentially positive hybridity, which is dynamic, progressive, diasporic, rhizomic, subversive, anti-essentialist, routes-oriented and based on collage, montage and cut-and-mix; and a potentially negative hybridity, which is biological, genealogical, kinship-based, essentialist, roots-oriented and based on simple ideas of combining two wholes to make a third whole.

I argue that this dualism involves a narrow and stereotyped understanding of biology and kinship. Both of these domains are in fact characterized by dynamic processes of cultural practice which display their own tensions between roots and routes, between essentialisms and non-essentialisms, between being and becoming. Recognizing this does not dissolve the basic dualism outlined above—it makes biology and kinship straddle the divide, as hybridity itself is said to do—but it re-situates kinship and biology in important ways. It carries the theoretically and politically important implication that identities which invoke either kinship and/or biology (e.g. blood, genes) as tropes of belonging and identification should not necessarily or automatically be seen as essentialist (or needing justification in terms of their ‘strategic essentialism’), exclusivist, politically conservative, absolutist or fundamentalist…

…An illustration of the kinship assumptions that underlie thinking about processes of mixture is furnished by the recent literature on mixed-race identities in the USA. Root argues that mixed-race people ‘expose the irrationality by which the [racial] categories have been derived and enforced’ (Root 1996a, p. xxv). This idea that the US system of racial reckoning is irrational is supported by Spickard who describes the ‘illogic’ of American racial categories. Part of his argument is that all racial categorizations are illogical because they do not accord with the facts of biology—which, as he recognizes, only makes the categories illogical if they pretend to be based on biology. But ‘what is most illogical is that [in the USA] we imagine these racial categories to be exclusive’ (Spickard 1992, p. 20). For example, one could only—until 1997—check one census box for racial identity and this census practice broadly reflected social usage. To take the most common example, it is illogical to have to be either black or white, when so many people are black-white mixes. The US ‘one-drop rule’ that classifies anyone with ‘one drop of black blood’ as black is the mainstay of the either/or system—a system arguably now losing its dualist rigidity (Root 1996b, Azoulay 1997). This rule determines that ‘a white woman can give birth to a Black child, but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child’ (Nash 1995, p. 950, citing Barbara J. Fields). In one brutal sense, this system is highly logical: it defines a clear rule and follows it to a logical conclusion. In what sense, then, is it illogical, except insofar as any racial categorization is illogical? The intuition that the US system is illogical comes, I believe, from a sense of the ‘logic’ of a Western cognatic kinship model that assumes that a child gets equal amounts of its constitution from both parents. This does not necessarily mean people think a child born to a ‘black’ parent and a ‘white’ parent is literally physically half black and half white—although this mode of thought may, indeed, be widespread, in view of the fact that people routinely talk of having, say, black or white ‘blood’ in their veins, or of being, say, a quarter West Indian or half Scottish. Whether or not the kinship logic is understood in physical terms, it can also simply supply a way of thinking about the allegiances and ties that such a child would have ‘logically’ (i.e. ‘naturally’ by the precepts of Western kinship reckoning). It is against the background of this assumption that the US system appears illogical…

Read the entire aritcle here.

What Is The Real Issue With Obama Choosing Black?

The Atlanta Post
2010-05-04

Yvette Carnell

During candidate Obama’s run for Presidency, he said “I self-identify as an African-American. That’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed. And I’m proud of it.” Case closed right?  One would think so, but now that President Obama has checked “black” on his Census form, some of his detractors are criticizing him for running away from his heritage. So please allow me to set the record straight….

President Obama checked “black” on his Census form because, well, he is black.

It is a mark of evolution that Americans are allowed to identify themselves as “some other race” on their Census forms, but aren’t most of us multi-racial?  If Obama’s critics have decided that he should adhere to the strictest of rules where his race classification is concerned, then shouldn’t all Americans be held to that same standard?  And if we’re all held to that standard, won’t that make the task of completing the Census form an act in futility for many, if not most, Americans? We are a melting pot, and as such, a significant number of us are an amalgamation of a wide variety of races and are therefore, by definition, multiracial.  The only distinction is that race isn’t as much about definition as it is about identification…

…Some observers have even made the case that Obama’s choosing “black” on his Census form was a marginalization of his white mother and grandparents.  It was not. It was, however, an acknowledgment of the visual queues associated with race, and to a larger extent-racism.

What’s more, isn’t it a bit hypocritical for those who’ve fought for the right of multiracial and biracial people to choose a race category which more suitably fits the way in which they self identify, i.e. a choice more ethnically encompassing than purely Black, White, or Asian to now force President Obama into their preferred “multiracial” box?…

Read the entire essay here.

Obama Deception?: Empire, ‘Postracism’ and Hegemonic White Supremacy in the Campaign and Election of Barack Obama

Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (May 2011)
ISSN: 1925-3850

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

The essay provides a socio-historical account of the role that hegemonic white supremacy played in the Presidential ascendancy of Barack Obama. I suggest that Obama crafted his political ontology to articulate a discourse of post-racism. Deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society for a more just society. By trading on the racial ambiguity of his biography in a country that demands certainty of racial lineage, his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action. The result was a presidential campaign that traded on the hopes of African Americans and assuaged the anxieties of European Americans and others while propagating the interests of the ruling class and the military industrial complex.

Introduction

Written a month and a half into Barack Obama’s first term, the core elements of this paper were delivered as a lecture for African Heritage Month to a third year class on racism and anti-racism. My giving the lecture itself was unintended. It was a replacement for an invited colleague who had to cancel his appearance. In the months leading up to the election my colleague and I discussed, quite frequently, the policy implications of an Obama Presidency on US foreign policy and domestic relations. I expressed my concern and fascination during these conversations about the cult-like charisma driven preoccupation with Obama as the “new Black”. I was fascinated by many of my family and friends who seemed to bestow mystical significance to Obama’s biography/blackness as signs for/of change. Relatives, especially those in the US were caught up in the post-civil rights-ism euphoria. But I did not share this cheery view of Obama as a political actor. Not because I didn’t like him as a person, but rather because politics from the citizen’s perspective is not an appropriate forum for sentiments such as “like” and “dislike”.

Indeed, for the months leading up to the election I had numerous conversations with my colleague about the near unanimous suspension of critical judgment about Obama’s locus in the machinery of the US’s political and economic elite. With rare exception, I noticed Left blogs and news sites consistently took a wait and see attitude about whether Obama would rule differently than his predecessors. Whatever the case, race was explicit in ways it was not in previous presidential elections. African Heritage Month, too often given to romanticism, struck me as the most opportune moment to disrupt this uncritical celebration of how Obama’s blackness was being articulated.

My colleague and I agreed that what was needed was a critical but not cynical analysis of Obama’s platform and ways he deployed race and just equally how race was invested in the meanings imputed to his ostensibly progressive politics. After all, an aspirant for the most powerful political office of the most powerful country should not be regarded through a sentimental lens. Rather, the question of how sentiment played into the aspirations of those who favoured and disfavoured his candidacy and the extent to which Obama himself articulated a platform to suit these opposing forces were crucial for lucid and complex analysis that steered away from the facile. For us then, blackness and the discourse of “hope” were not grounds to grant Obama the benefit of doubt as to the possibility of economic and political reform and racial healing in the US. Maybe as Canadian men of African descent of a radical Left persuasion we felt little compunction that we were conceding to racism by virtue of a relentless critique of the first serious Black presidential contender. Indeed, based on the historical record, we knew both intuitively and concretely that Black people do not rise to positions of power and influence in the White world without conceding the necessity of sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. If Obama became president of an imperially dominant USA, he too would be bound by the inertia of this historical fact. This fact, in the lead-up to the election seemed lost on many commentators and those in civil society who favoured his candidacy. Interestingly, those on the right saw clearly the issue of empire and presumed the essentialism that blackness equaled radicality feared the worst because of an Obama Presidency. Events since his inauguration have shown the fears of the latter unfounded…

…I will argue in this essay that, as in Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about a blind Black man who is a white supremacist, the possibility of a Black American sustaining hegemonic white supremacy is a canard that overturns standard definitions of who can support hegemonic white supremacy. Chappelle’s character gives us choices. We can “re-fence” the apparent anomaly, holding it in abeyance because it does not accord with established patterns of thought and practice (Allport, 1954, p. 23). We can reject the apparent anomaly, since it may be presumed blackness disqualifies a person from sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. Or we can develop a critique equal to the conditions it attempts to explain (see Smith citing Lenin, 2003, p. 314); which is to say that given systemic White racism, the “order of things” makes racism an equal opportunity employer, with or without intent.  This critique suggests that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign depended on deploying colour blindness through blind faith in formal (but not substantive) equality. It suggests further that Barack Obama deployed the ambivalent blackness of his body and his personal biography to reorganize the terrain on which race-talk would occur during his campaign. Indeed, a central observation here is that Obama selectively and strategically appropriated the radical enterprise of anti-racism by deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness that undermined the need for anti-racism. On one hand he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society. On the other hand, he propagated the belief that where Whites voted for him, this confirmed the triumphal defeat of hegemonic white supremacy.

In either case, by trading on his blackness his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action (both of which, ironically, are belied by everyday white supremacist invective leveled against him). Through select and strategic claims of Black fraternity, Obama surreptitiously deployed anti-African American tropes that were passed off as pastoral concern for “his” people. In some ways, he extended a similar paternalistic narrative to the reproach of African leaders in his speech given in West African when he became President (Obama, 2009). The arguments are to be taken as a whole, aimed at unpacking Mr. Obama’s white supremacist presidential campaign and to suggest its effects are more than symbolic. Mr. Obama’s discourse on race, and his persistent “colour blindness” even into his presidency, negates the oppression of African Americans while deepening their exploitation. To a significant extent, Obama deceived no one even if he intended. The deceit that blackness equals progressive change is built into the normative structure of how race is understood in the US.

…Mongrel in the White House: The Post-Racial President

In so highly race conscious a society as the US, who would not find it disarming that its first recognized Black President should share publicly, in a jocular manner, that he prefers to adopt a dog for his daughters who, like himself, is a mongrel or a mutt (Gardner, 2008). Of course, for those whose social history is one in which the “one drop” rule prevailed to determine social caste and reflected abject sexual domination of Black women by White men and the lynching of Black men who married or cavorted with White women, the humour may be lost on them. Indeed, to make light of his “mongrelization” and to ignore its differential historical facticity, is, in view of white supremacy in the US, to attribute transcendence and maturity on the part of the White public and, of course, forbearance on the part of African Americans.

It is consequentially important, that there is little outcry today about the perpetuation of this eugenics impulse in the contemporary US relative to poor African American, and to a lesser extent Latina, Native American, and even poor White women (Roberts, 1992, p. 1961). So, far from a passing moment of humour, Obama used his own biography, not in a revolutionary way but as an ideological sociology of the self to demonstrate the choice of narrative of the nation he would align himself with. This narrative, a hegemonic narration of the (White) nation, is one in which radical stories are structurally excluded from consciousness and false ethical stances on racism are interpolated. I suggest that in crafting himself as the quintessential post-modern US subject, Barack Obama is able to deflect White criticisms that would otherwise doom an African American politician committed to revolutionary politics. I will now critically elaborate the false ethical complementarity Barack Obama drew between racism and anti-racism with an examination of his Philadelphia speech on race (and class) in the US…

Read the entire article here.

In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

Read the entire article here.