Mixed Race Studies

President Barack Obama defeats Romney to win re-election

BBC News
2012-11-07

President Barack Obama has been re-elected to a second term, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

America’s first black president secured more than the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to win.

In his victory speech before supporters in Chicago, Mr Obama said he would talk to Mr Romney about “where we can work together to move this country forward”.

Mr Obama prevailed despite lingering dissatisfaction with the economy and a hard-fought challenge by Mr Romney…

Read the entire article here.

“Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s 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 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.

My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
—Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral”

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” said Cornel West in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig in May 2011. “It’s understandable,” he continues, “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s 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, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

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 “distorted” is the better description from West’s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (“deracination”) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

“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.”

When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics—the 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 performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain 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 “scientist and strategic consultant,” explained Obama’s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have “a 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 appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in” (emphasis added).

These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people—psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors—for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama’s 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, “are real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate” in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible—rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing—that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.

Janny Scott’s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama’s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s 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…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University
Student Center
2250 North Shefield Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01 through 2012-11-04

“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?,” the biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 1-4, 2012.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
 
Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

For more information, click here. View the final schedule here.

I will deliver my paper, “Barack, Blackness, Borders and Beyond: Exploring Obama’s Racial Identity Today as a Means of Transcending Race Tomorrow,” during the Session Three panel titled, “Assessing Mixed—Race Iconography: Barack Obama and Tiger Woods” from 14:15-15:45 CDT (Local Time) in Room 313.  The abstract of my paper is below:

The racial identity of President Barack Obama has been the topic of considerable discussion and debate. Despite the fact that Obama has always identified unambiguously as black—most significantly in March, 2010 after filling out his census form—commentary continues to the point of unilaterally referring to him as “biracial” within some camps.
 
Using three separate frameworks, I explain why Obama is indeed black.  Firstly, I show that Obama is black within the framework of self-identification as crafted by the multiracial identity movement. Secondly, I show via an ethnological framework that Obama’s heterogeneous ancestry reinforces rather than weakens his cultural connection with black Americans.  Lastly, and most importantly, I show within a sociological framework, that Obama is black because we perceive him as such.

Furthermore, I show how the multiracial movement reifies rather than blurs racialized boundaries; and that Obama’s blackness creates one of the greatest challenges to this movement.  Rather than concluding with a seemingly triumphalist Afro-centric focus, I will instead explain how Obama’s “blackness” from “white/black” parentage can be used to exemplify the social construction of race and can provide us a means to create meaningful discourses that may lead us beyond the illogical nature of racialization.

Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

The Washington Post
2012-10-28

Peter Wallsten

Barack Obama stood at the lectern, trying to figure out what to say — or at least how to say it. He started speaking, then stopped, then started again, each time searching for the right tone, the right cadence, the right words.

The audience was a small group of advisers, including two African American scholars who were counseling him on how to get his message across most effectively with black voters. Obama, whose memoir years earlier had explored his mixed-race background and search for racial identity, wanted to connect with African Americans but remain true to his own style and voice.

“I can’t sound like Martin,” Obama said at one point, according to the scholars. “I can’t sound like Jesse.”

Obama was still more than a year away from becoming America’s first black president, but already he was parsing that identity in his mind…

…Obama rarely discusses his innermost feelings about being the first African American to occupy the Oval Office, according to friends and associates, preferring to keep his thoughts closely held, shared with only a select few. He has shown himself to be drawn to the symbolic, or even aspirational, aspect of his presidency.

One of the iconic images of his tenure is a 2009 photograph of Obama leaning down to let a 5-year-old black boy, Jacob Philadelphia, touch his hair. The boy wanted to see if his hair felt like the president’s. The image, captured by White House photographer Pete Souza, has been on display ever since, just outside the Oval Office in a hallway that Obama passes through regularly…

…If the election of four years ago put to rest the notion that the United States was not ready to elect a black president, this year poses a new question: Can an African American president, after four years as a fixture in Americans’ lives, win reelection?…

Read the entire article here.

The Price of a Black President

The New York Times
2012-10-27

Frederick C. Harris, Professor of Political Science;  Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Director of the Center on African-American Politics and Society
Columbia University

WHEN African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support Barack Obama at a level approaching the 95 percent share of the black vote he received in 2008. As well they should, given the symbolic exceptionalism of his presidency and the modern Republican Party’s utter disregard for economic justice, civil rights and the social safety net.

But for those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “beloved community,” the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment. Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality. The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.

These are not easy words to write. Mr. Obama’s expansion of health insurance coverage was the most significant social legislation since the Great Society, his stimulus package blunted much of the devastation of the Great Recession, and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul added major new protections for consumers. His politics would seem to vindicate the position of civil rights-era leaders like Malcolm X, who distrusted party politics and believed that blacks would be better positioned to advance their interests as an independent voting bloc, beholden to neither party…

…But as president, Mr. Obama has had little to say on concerns specific to blacks. His State of the Union address in 2011 was the first by any president since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor. The political scientist Daniel Q. Gillion found that Mr. Obama, in his first two years in office, talked about race less than any Democratic president had since 1961. From racial profiling to mass incarceration to affirmative action, his comments have been sparse and halting.

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama weighed in after the prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The president said the police had “acted stupidly,” was criticized for rushing to judgment, and was mocked when he invited Dr. Gates and the arresting officer to chat over beers at the White House. It wasn’t until earlier this year that Mr. Obama spoke as forcefully on a civil rights matter — the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida — saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”…

…Mr. Obama deserves the electoral support — but not the uncritical adulation — of African-Americans. If re-elected he might surprise us by explicitly emphasizing economic and racial justice and advocating “targeted universalism” — job-training and housing programs that are open to all, but are concentrated in low-income, minority communities. He would have to do this in the face of fiscal crisis and poisonous partisanship…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

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.

The Choice

The New Yorker
2012-10-22

The Editors

The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in Washington—Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009—the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didn’t matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen.

Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage…

….Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics

The New York Times
2012-10-20

Jodi Kantor

When President Obama greets African-Americans who broke barriers, he almost invariably uses the same line.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you,” he said to Ruby Bridges Hall, who was the first black child to integrate an elementary school in the South. The president repeated the message to a group of Tuskegee airmen, the first black aviators in the United States military; the Memphis sanitation workers the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed in his final speech; and others who came to pay tribute to Mr. Obama and found him saluting them instead.

The line is gracious, but brief and guarded. Mr. Obama rarely dwells on race with his visitors or nearly anyone else. In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary…

…“Tragically, it seems the president feels boxed in by his blackness,” the radio and television host Tavis Smiley wrote in an e-mail. “It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency,” he continued, adding that “African-Americans will have lost ground in the Obama era.”…

… Her husband is more circumspect, particularly on the question of whether some of his opposition is fueled by race. Aides say the president is well aware that some voters say they will never be comfortable with him, as well as the occasional flashes of racism on the campaign trail, such as the “Put the White Back in the White House” T-shirt spotted at a recent Mitt Romney rally. But they also say he is disciplined about not reacting because doing so could easily backfire.

“The president knows that some people may choose to be divided by differences — race, gender, religion — but his focus is on bringing people together,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, wrote in an e-mail.

Even when Newt Gingrich called him a “food stamp president” during the Republican primaries, the most the president did was shoot confidants a meaningful look — “the way he will cock his head, an exaggerated smile, like ‘I’m not saying but I’m saying,’ ” one campaign adviser said…

…Out to Change Stereotypes

Shortly before his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama took his family to see the Lincoln Memorial. “First African-American president, better be good,” a 10-year-old Malia Obama told her father, who repeated the story later, a rare acknowledgment of the symbolic shadow he casts.

For all of Mr. Obama’s caution, he is on a mission: to change stereotypes of African-Americans, aides and friends say. Six years ago, he told his wife and a roomful of aides that he wanted to run for the White House to change children’s perceptions of what was possible. He had other ambitions for the presidency, of course, but he was also embarking on an experiment in which the Obamas would put themselves and their children on the line to help erase centuries of negative views…

Read the entire article here.

Racializing Obama: The Enigma of Post-Black Politics and Leadership

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2009
pages 1-15
DOI: 10.1080/10999940902733202

Manning Marable (1950-2011), Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies
Columbia University

In the 1990s, a new race-neutral, “post-black” leadership of African Americans emerged who favored political pragmatism and centrist public policies. Barack Obama, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick were representative of this group. During his successful 2008 presidential campaign, Obama minimized the issue of race, presenting a race-neutral politics that reached out to white Republicans and independents. Yet despite his post-racial orientation, critics repeatedly attempted to “racialize Obama,” questioning his racial authenticity, religious affiliations, and Americanism. Despite extremist attacks, Obama successfully won the election by building an unprecedented coalition of blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asian Americans, women, and youth. The question remains whether the pragmatic, centrist Obama will commit his government to oppose all forms of racial inequality and oppression.

The historical significance of the election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States was recognized literally by the entire world. For a nation that had, only a half century earlier, refused to enforce the voting rights and constitutional liberties of people of African descent, to elevate a black American as its chief executive, was a stunning reversal of history. On the night of his electoral victory, spontaneous crowds of joyful celebrants rushed into streets, parks, and public establishments, in thousands of venues across the country. In Harlem, over ten thousand people surrounded the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, cheering and crying in disbelief. To many, the impressive margin of Obama’s popular vote victory suggested the possibility that the United States had entered at long last an age of post-racial politics, in which leadership and major public policy debates would not be distorted by factors of race and ethnicity…

…Obama undoubtedly took most of these factors into account—the possibility of a “Bradley/Wilder effect” on whites’ support of black candidates, African-American grievances surrounding the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, the recent debacle of the Katrina Crisis, and the rise of the postracial politics of a new generation of black leaders—to construct his own image and political narrative essential for a presidential campaign. Early on in their deliberation process, the Obama pre-campaign group recognized that most white Americans would never vote for a black presidential candidate. However, they were convinced that most whites would embrace, and vote for, a remarkable, qualified presidential candidate who happened to be black. “Race” could be muted into an adjective, a qualifier of minimal consequence. So ethnically, Obama did not deny the reality of his African heritage; it was blended into the multicultural narrative of his uniquely “American story,” which also featured white grandparents from Kansas, a white mother who studied anthropology in Hawaii, and an Indonesian stepfather. Unlike black conservatives, Obama openly acknowledged his personal debt to the sacrifices made by martyrs and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet he also spoke frequently about the need to move beyond the divisions of the sixties, to seek common ground, and a post-partisan politics of hope and reconciliation. As the Obama campaign took shape in late 2006–early 2007, the basic strategic line about “race,” therefore, was to deny its enduring presence or relevance to contemporary politics. Volunteers often chanted, in Hari Krishna–fashion, “Race Doesn’t Matter! Race Doesn’t Matter!,” as if to ward off the evil spirits of America’s troubled past…

Read the entire essay 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.