Mixed Race Studies

Post-Raciality or a Re-Imagining of Whiteness: an Interview with Clarence E. Walker

Platform: Journal of Media and Communication
Volume 3, Issue 1, Media and “Race” (April 2011)
pages 26-34
ISSN: 1836-5132

Sandy Watson, University of Melbourne, Australia

Clarence Walker is recognised as one of the leading historians of American race relations, and is noted for his advocacy of critical historical analysis of race relations and discourses as a way of understanding the present. Walker has written widely on issues relating to black American history, including five books covering variously race and politics (2009), race and the national imaginary (2010); Afrocentrism and discourses of black Africanism (2001, 1999) and the history of nineteenth century black religion (1982).

Introduction

Walker’s most recent work, with Gregory Smithers, explores the emergence of discourses of post-raciality during the 2008 United States election campaign (Walker and Smithers 2009) where Walker argued that the historical superficiality of journalism exacerbates racial tensions rather than creating greater cultural understanding on racial issues (2009, p. 39). In this interview, he discusses the applicability of what he describes as reactionary discourses (that of post-raciality, colour blindness and colour neutrality) in the context of shifting media usage and tensions arising from perceived challenges to the dominant, white-centred national imaginary.

The critique of white-centred accounts of history has been central to Walker’s recent work, and was the subject of his compelling book Mongrel Nation (2010), in which he argues for the need to recognise the interracial founding of the United States. The book contextualises the controversy surrounding 1990s claims that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, had one or more children in an interracial relationship with a slave girl called Sally Heming. These accounts were refuted heatedly by segments of academia who pointed to Jefferson’s documented concern about the dangers of amalgamation as an indication of the unlikely nature of his having an interracial affair. Walker argues persuasively and with historical force that such refutations need to be contextualised as reactionary discourses within a history of white-centred historicising and imagining of the national identity in the United States…

PLATFORM: The idea that American society is post-racial gained renewed ascendancy with Barack Obama’s election as the first (self-identifying) black President of the United States. However, narratives of post-race have been circulating in the US since the Civil Rights Act (1964). Can you elaborate on the nuances between narratives such as post-raciality, colour-blindness and race neutrality as a basis for informing analysis of their presence in political and media debates over the past two years?

Clarence Walker: In my view these are all reactionary movements. They are constructed around an attempt to efface race as a site of conflict in the American past and present. To say that one is colour-blind rather than colour-conscious is to say that you see something in someone that you don’t want to see, that is their colour. It’s also to say that you think that these issues are somewhat superficial and that if we want to wish them away we can. You can see this in the whole construction of Asians as some kind of model minority here because they’re successful academically and economically, at least in some sectors of the population. You can also see it in the hysteria over immigration with the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking people over recent years.

It is the case in America that most white people do not want to talk about race. They prefer to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has effaced the racial problem, and that if there is a racial problem here it is because black people are basically angry or have refused to accept this new reality in which race is no longer a problem. But if race is no longer a problem, then why are there so many young black men between the ages of 18 and 25 including Mexicans also in American prisons? They constitute approximately one and a half million of two million people in American prisons.

Yet the Obama election was very much a racial election, despite these discourses of post-raciality. It was racial in the sense that it required white people to overcome their historical animosity towards the idea of a successful black candidate. I tend to think that up until the leaking to the media of the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as Gregory Smithers and I discuss in The Preacher and The Politician, there was little attention to the fact on the part of many white Americans that Barack Obama was black. In the case of black Americans there was great suspicion of him because he was not associated with the two historically defining moments of black American history, one being of course the question of slavery and Jim Crow, the other being the Civil Rights Movement. It was only when Jeremiah Wright’s comments were leaked and it came out that Obama was associated with this Church which was part of a Christian black nationalist movement, a particular congregation that was Afro-centric and black nationalist, that attention started to be paid to the fact that Obama was black. This led to speculation about whether Obama therefore might have a subtext of black militancy that he wasn’t talking about. This was one of the signature moments in terms of race becoming part of the election debate.

The Obama presidency has if not reignited the other being the issues about race and colour then certainly shown that they haven’t gone away. In many ways the emergence of this black man as the President of the United States is comparable to the emergence of prominent Jews in France and Germany and the political and cultural life of those countries in the nineteenth century. There were elements in those societies who were opposed to Jewish civil and political equality just as there are elements in this country who feared the election of Obama or any black person as the President of the United States.

The discourse of post-racialism which emerged in relation to the 2008 campaign was itself really a product of the chattering classes, by that I mean the media commentators and academics who talked about the ‘Obama moment’ as the post-racial moment. For example, I teach a course called the History of Race in America here at the University of California and I have just finished teaching 80 undergraduates. I have talked about this subject in the way I have done for the 37 years of my career in that I don’t mince words and I am very direct about what I want to say. Many of my students find this very disturbing because their views have been shaped by the media and some of them were very resistant to the notion that this in fact was not a post-racial society because we had a black president and that because he was of mixed race nobody talked about the fact that he had a white mother. I said to my students, “How would his history have been different if his mother was black and his father white rather than the other way around?” It had never occurred to them that this would have created a different historical narrative and a different historical actor, and one whom many white people in this country would never have voted for because his cultural experience rather than being that of a white working class family would have been that of a black family…

PLATFORM: I’d like to return to a consistent theme in your work, that of the argument that a critical appraisal of historiography is vital in understanding contemporary debates and discourses on race. In Mongrel Nation you particularly emphasised the resistance of historians and others to the notion of an interracial founding of America rather than the dominant constructions of whiteness that have underpinned renderings of history in the US. This was in relation to claims that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children in an interracial relationship with Sally Hemings. How can this historical perspective inform our understanding of the role of discourses such as post-racialism?

CW: In the national imaginary up until recently the United States was historically imagined by historians as purely a white nation. This is changing with the work of the very distinguished historian Annette Gordon Reed and others, as well as in my work, where you see a rethinking of the American past that is more in line with what the country was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what it is like today. The resistance to this arises out of the fact that it is very hard for some people, older people in particular, to think of the United States as anything other than ‘whiteland’ or ‘whitetopia’ and the fact that they refuse to come to grips with this. You see this most clearly in their hostility to Barack Obama. His election is something that is contrary to fact. If this is a white nation then what is it doing with a “coloured” president? And if this is a white nation, then what does it mean for the future? It means that we will have an Asian president, it means that we may even have a Muslim president, we may even have a woman president, and I hope we do. It’s not just that every generation writes history according to its own desires but that there has to be a recognition in the United States that although it was the product of white colonial settlers that the country did not remain white very long…

Read the entire interview here.

Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008

Communication Studies
Volume 62, Issue 4, 2011
Special Issue:“Race Matters” in the Obama Era
pages 389-405
DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2011.588074

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama from the election campaign period of 2007–2008. These images were largely user-generated and disseminated and fall into two camps that each represent a form of anti-Black racism: overtly racist images and inferentially racist images. While representations of Obama as an ape, thug, or terrorist were generally recognized as clear forms of anti-Black racism, images I identify as inferentially racist operate within a postracial ideology in which Obama is figured as a messiah, whites’ “Black best friend,” or a mythical creature. For some viewers, these inferentially racist images did not incite the controversy of those read as overtly racist because the former were read as positive portrayals of uplift and progress. Yet, these inferentially racist images are reliant upon the same stereotypes of Blackness as the explicitly racist pictures, as Obama becomes a positive figure only when he can metaphorically transcend his Blackness.

Within a week of moving to an area of South Seattle designated by the 2010 U.S. Census as the most diverse in the country, I was cautioned by a well-intentioned, liberal White neighbor about the frequent incidence of car burglaries in the neighborhood. In our shared parking lot the neighbor told me, gesturing to her Obama/Biden bumper sticker, that her car was burgled “even though we have an Obama sticker!” I was so baffled by this comment that I mumbled a goodbye, got into my car and drove away, my mind exploding with questions. Did my neighbor think that car burglars were united in their proclivity to be Obama fans? Was she really assuming that all car vandals in South Seattle were Black? Did she mean that since she was ‘‘down with the cause’’ by publicly endorsing Obama, her car should have been immune from what she imagined to be Black-perpetrated crime? Was her bizarre performance of Obama-fandom intended to make her appear antiracist for us, the new family of color next door?

Since Obama’s presidential election campaign I have come to intimately understand that signifiers of our first African American president are deployed by some people to express anxiety, desire, guilt, discomfort, and, oftentimes, fear of Blackness. Such fear, which I read in the case of my neighbor as an assumption of Black criminality, must be seen as part-and-parcel of a more coded, more polite, but still virulent and destructive racism against African Americans that occurs, confusingly, through a celebration of Barack Obama. This complicated performance of support, when accompanied by controlling ideas of Blackness, reveals a barely sublimated anti-Black racism that flourishes in popular discourse because, in the words of Henry Giroux, ‘‘since it is assumed that formal institutions of segregation no longer exist,’’ racism against Black Americans also no longer exists (Giroux, 2003, p. 193). I use the phrase “anti-Black racism” as opposed to “racism” or ‘‘prejudice’’ not just to signal discriminatory feelings of Whites towards people of color but instead to signify the institutional, structural, and cultural forces that foment the inequality of people of African descent in our society.1 The featuring of Obama images, whether on a bumper sticker, t-shirt, poster, mug, or Facebook profile picture, is not a simple matter of one’s displaying political affiliation. As Obama is the first African American U.S. president, the production, consumption, and circulation of his image denotes conflicting emotions of race, identity, Blackness, belonging, and, yes, sometimes entrenched-yet-coded anti-Black racism…

Read the entire article here.

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood

Racialicious
2011-10-31

Jen Chau, Guest Contributor

In the past couple of years, I have noticed a certain complacency that I never noticed before, in my eleven years of leading Swirl. The same passion and the same excitement around building multiracial communities had faded a bit. In the one year leading up to the Presidential election, we launched five new chapters (the norm had been a chapter every year or every other year). People were excited by the energy created by Obama’s campaign, and they were motivated and eager to be a part of creating supportive and inclusive multiracial communities.

And then once Obama was firmly placed in the White House, something happened. It got quiet…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s Racial Identity Is His Call

Poynter.
2008-12-16

Tom Huang, Sunday & Enterprise Editor
The Dallas Morning News
Also Ethics and Diversity Fellow at The Poynter Institute

Not long ago, I sat on a journalism panel in which the question of “What are you?” came up…

…I thought about the “What are you?” question when I read Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama’s racial identity.

Obama self-identifies as African American, because, as he’s explained in the past, “that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”

 It turns out that some people are less than comfortable with that. Some argue that it’s too simplistic to call him “black.” After all, he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. Others argue that it’s more accurate to identify Obama as “biracial” or “multiracial.”…

…Well, let’s give the individual the power of self-identification. If Obama wants to be identified as “black,” let’s give him that choice. If Tiger Woods wants to be identified as “multiracial” (or “Cablinasian,” for that matter), more power to him.

The reality is we still live in a society in which racial constructs, however antiquated they might be, still matter. They help us be mindful about how our cultural traditions have shaped our identities. They help us remember how centuries of oppression and discrimination shaped our politics, economic divide and social strata…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President

ABC-CLIO Praeger
September 2011
276 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38533-9
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-313-38534-6

Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York

Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.

Barack Obama is the first American president born and raised in Hawai’i, the most diverse state in the Union, and the first American president to have spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim-majority nation, namely, Indonesia. What effect did these—and other early experiences—have on the man who is now, arguably, the world’s most popular political leader?

The first 18 years of President Obama’s life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai’i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted “outpost” patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader.

Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama’s early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author’s on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama’s character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

Features

• Foreword
• Photographs
• Timelines
• Figures
• Appendices

Highlights

• Offers the first systematic study of Barack Obama’s Indonesian and Hawai’ian years and their effect on his adult character and political identity
• Shows how Obama’s early experiences fostered a repertoire of social and psychological skills ideally suited to dealing with the complex cultural and geopolitical issues that confront 21st-century America
• Provides new keys to understanding Obama by looking at the varied cultural and religious influences that shaped his attitudes, beliefs, and hybrid cultural identity
• Examines Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation, based on her social anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, for clues to the perceptual prisms she inculcated in her son, Barack Obama

The immediacy of Obama’s interracial parentage, along with his transnational experience of being reared in Hawaii and Indonesia, by his white mother and her relatives, along with his Indonesian step-father, has imbued his consciousness with a broader vision and wider-ranging sympathies in forming an identity. This in turn enhances his image as the physical embodiment of the principles of equity and inclusiveness. Yet Obama has never said he identifies as multiracial. This was underscored when he checked only the “Black, African American, or Negro” box, rather than multiple boxes, on his 2010 census form. In the media, and more generally, Obama is considered black or African American.

G. Reginald Daniel, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

University of Virginia Press
October 2009
160 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN: 0-8139-2886-9

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

Gregory D. Smithers, Visiting Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright’s sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America’s fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obvious.

With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency.

The authors situate Wright’s preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama’s connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim.

Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. The Preacher and the Politician is a concise and timely study that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

Table of  Contents

• “They Didn’t Give Us Our Mule and Our Acre”: Introduction
• “The “Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost”: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Black Church
• “I Don’t Want People to Pretend I’m Not Black”: Barack Obama and America’s Racial History
• “To Choose Our Better History?” Epilogue
• Text of Barack Obama’s March 18, 2008, Speech on Race
• Notes
• Index

Editorial: The Illusion of Inclusion

Wasafiri
Volume 25, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 1-6
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2010.510357

This special issue of Wasafiri – ‘Black Britain: Beyond Definition’ – focuses on writers who are of black and mixed heritage. Labelling us in this way can, of course, be problematic. The badge ‘black writer’ or ‘Black British writer’ or ‘postcolonial writer’ isn’t one many of us deliberately choose to wear. It has a homogenising, ghettoising effect. Why should the profession to which we belong always be qualified in this way? Martin Amis and Ian McKewan only ever get labelled ‘white male writers’ to draw attention to their role in the status quo. Most of the time they are simply ‘writers’ or ‘British writers’.

The label may be frustrating, but in this context it provides us with a convenient shorthand for assessing a literature sector to which we have always had limited access. Grouping everyone together in this way allows us to explore some important questions: What is Britain like for black people today, both in terms of the wider society and the literature sector? Who is writing what? Who is getting published? Who isn’t?

The answers we get reveal that the society we inhabit in 2010 is still far from egalitarian although, compared with some of our European neighbours, we do now enjoy a degree of integration that is positive and progressive. That said, at an organisational level, there is a subtle, often unconscious or unthinking discrimination that is deeply pernicious and alienating for those who are excluded by it. And this needs once again to become the focus of national debate.

…The Obama Effect

Ever since Barack Obama became US President, a noticeable shift has been taking place in the British media’s conversations about race. The ceiling, some decided, really is made of glass and not the reinforced concrete they’d previously assumed. The term ‘post-racial’ has started to be bandied around as if his singular success meant the sudden emergence of a meritocratic society here in the UK.

There is now a sense that those who still dare to mention the R-word are just pesky killjoys. Fingers point towards Obama or any number of black figureheads in this country. In the same way that feminism became a dirty word in the nineties with women declaring ‘I’m not a feminist but … ’, likewise with racism. It’s just not that cool any more to point it out…

…In today’s UK, 48% of Black Caribbean men and 34% of Black Caribbean women have white partners, and one in ten children lives in a mixed-race family (Platt 6). This suggests the triumph of love over loathing, integration over separation, connection over tribalism. Inter-racial couples are not pelted with pebbles by Outraged of Suburbia when they go for their Sunday passeggiata through the local park. Cute black babies are very on trend; so fashionable, in fact, that famous people travel many thousands of miles to adopt them. And we all know that, for a long time now, the pampered princes of our national sport, once a bastion of racism, are as black as they are white.

While there are many such pointers to a more inclusive society, the racial hierarchies and infrastructure still exist. We may have detected some subsidence in that creepy Victorian house, built on the proceeds of empire and overlooking the graveyard of slavery, but the wrecking ball ain’t smashed it down to the ground yet…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the “post-black” Conjuncture

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 313-322
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526046

Ben Pitcher, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Westminster, London

This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obama’s presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a “post-black” politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of “post-black” as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the President’s symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who “owns” or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.

To think about what Barack Obama’s presidency means for U.S. racial politics invariably involves considering his relationship to a politics of blackness. For some, Obama’s mixed-race transnational heritage means that he is grounded in ‘‘the multicultural and global reality of today’s world.’’ For others, Obama’s claim on blackness is delimited by his not having been born to the descendents of slaves. The complex and subtle criteria of identity claims made of Obama reveal something of the complexity of race in twenty-first-century America and exemplify Gary Younge’s observation that however marginal race might be to Obama’s message, it is nevertheless central to his meaning.

While of course Obama’s autobiographical writings cannot exhaust or provide a definitive answer to this meaning, it is notable that they reveal a distantiated relationship to the politics of blackness. The first paragraph to the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father describes its author’s intention to communicate ‘‘the fluid state of identity’’ that characterizes the politics of race in contemporary America. Obama’s passage into a performative black male adolescence is archly self-conscious, the result of a ‘‘decision’’ rather than a question of necessity. Though he rightly acknowledges the inescapably determining power of race, Obama retains an ironic distance that resists an understanding of this determination as absolute. Even the final section of Dreams, which stages a trip to Kenya as a key biographical moment in Obama’s self-understanding, is undercut by an epilogue on cultural hybridity that refuses as a romantic illusion the search for an African authenticity…

…So what does Obama’s skillful negotiation of the politics of blackness mean for antiracism? Does Obama’s status as ‘‘a black man who doesn’t conform to the normal scripts for African-American identity’’ jeopardize his progressive potential, or is it a precondition of his success? Does Obama’s victory signal ‘‘the end of black politics,’’ or its radical reinvention?…

…For one thing, the immediate symbolic potency of the black president simply invalidates claims predicated on the explicit and straightforward marginalization of black people in America. Obama stands for the move of blackness from the margins to the mainstream. Obama was by no means the first black person to obtain access to a position of power, but his presidency represents a qualitatively new dimension; most important, it records a moment in U.S. racial politics when a critical mass of whites were prepared to cast their vote for a black person…

Read the entire article here.