Mixed Race Studies

Black Skin, White Skulls: The Nineteenth Century Debate over the Racial Identity of the Ancient Egyptians

Parallax
Volume 13, Number 2 (2007)
pages 6-20
DOI: 10.1080/13534640701267123

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

Not so long ago, the question ol the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians passed beyond the narrow confines of academia onto television and into the national newspapers when, in the wake of  Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. he and certain Afrocentric historians like Molefi Kete Asante, were criticized by Mary Lefkowitz and others for not respecting proper scholary standards However, my aim in this paper is not to expose the errors made on either side of the argument, still less to decide the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians. This latter task assumes that we have agreed on ways of classifying the races which, given the fact that contemporary biology does not recognize racial classifications, we do not. My aim in this essay is to perform the long overdue task of documenting how the Ancient Egyptians were racially identified during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, I will support, suitably modified, the contention of the Haitian thinker Anténor Firmin, that it was not until 1842 that the Philadelphian physician, Samuel George Morton, became the first person to present a sustained scientific argument according to which the people of ancient Egypt belonged to the White race. The debate between Bernal and Lefkowitz reminds us that many people today are still heavily invested in the question of the racial identity of the Egyptians. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to know why it was such a major issue in the nineteenth century.

At the end of the eighteenth century the argument was already beginning to be heard that if the people of ancient Egypt were African in a way that attached them to the so-called Ethiopian, Black or Negro race, then the attempt to match the hierarchy of civilizations to the hierarchy of races, which Europeands had already defined in the late eighteenth century, could not be sustained. The stakes were particularly high as the Greeks had been explicit about their debt to the Egyptians. In 1787, Constantin François Volney had published his Travels through Egypt and Syria and had declared that the Copts, who at that time were widely thought to be the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, still had largely Negro characteristics. Four years later, Volney published The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, some editions of which include the lines: ‘A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzed hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.’ Volney did not initiate this idea, which relies on the testimony of, among other ancient authors, Herodotus, who described the Egyptians as having black skin and wooly hair…

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Race and Genomics. Old Wine in New Bottles? Documents from a Transdisciplinary Discussion

NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
Volume 16, Number 3 (August 2008)
pages 363-386
DOI 10.1007/S00048-008-0301-6

Staffan Müller-Wille
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society
University of Exeter

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Berlin, Germany

From July 25 to 29, 2007, the biennial meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology(ISHPSSB) was hosted by the University of Exeter. About 430 papers were submitted, and we had the pleasure to put together a programme as well as a plenary session of invited speakers on a topic of their choice. After some discussion within the programme committee, we decided to organize a session of four speakers who were asked to address, each from a different disciplinary perspective, the recent re-emphasis on racial categories in genomic studies of ancestry, public health, pharmacology, and forensics.

The topic was not only chosen because of its timeliness. It so happened that the ISHPSSB meeting also coincided with the tercentenary of both Georges Buffon and Carl Linnaeus. Both are arguably the founding fathers of modern biology, with the emphasis they put on the reproduction rather than the generation of living beings (Müller-Wille/Rheinberger 2007). But there is also another legacy of these naturalists, one which is more problematic. This is racial anthropology which both Buffon and Linnaeus, almost simultaneously, initiated by their proposals for a universal partitioning of mankind along lines of skin colour, temperament, and descent (Sloan 1995). This original classification of mankind into three or four major ”races”—a white, a black, and a yellow or red one—is still very much in place, even in the high-tech contexts of today’s genomics. According to its own rhetoric, for example, the International Haplotype Map Project studies human genomic variation through four sample populations” (see http://www.hapmap.org/abouthapmap.html). The choice of these sample populations, however, is revealing: the Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Japanese from Tokyo; the Han Chinese from Beijing; Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe. This choice was undoubtedly guided by the colour scheme originally proposed by Linnaeus and Buffon. The history of race in biology and medicine exhibits a curious mixture of archaic and innovative elements.

Until very recently there existed a broad consensus among scientists, as well as students of science, that racial anthropology belonged to a past thoroughly outdated by the combined efforts of mathematical population genetics and molecular biology, a consensus that dates back to the so-called UNESCO Statement on Race from 1951. However, in the wake of the completion of the Human Genome Project, and with projects like the Human Diversity Project, the HapMap Project, various national ‘biobank’ projects, and a diversity of private and public initiatives of ‘ancestry’ research, racial categories appear to have regained significance in recent years again, inside and outside of the biomedical sciences. Human genomic diversity is mapped against grids of racial distinctions, drugs and life-style recommendations target racially defined groups, and genetic tests offer the opportunity to determine ancestry in racial terms. Increasingly, close historical scrutiny also reveals that race was not only put back on the agenda again occasionally by high-profile publications like Richard J. Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), but that it has also formed a persistent thread in medical and population genetics research throughout the post-WWII era (Pogliano 2005, Wailoo/Pemberton 2006).

To set the stage for the plenary session, we included five questions in the letter of invitation that we sent to the four speakers. It may be useful to quote them here, as they were originally formulated: “What is it about racial categories—famously introduced in an ad hoc fashion by Buffon and Linnaeus, and again and again denounced as primitive and untenable by prominent life-scientists in the course of their long history—that lets them persist, even in the high-tech world of present day genomics and systems biology? Or is this resilience just an illusion? Has ‘race’, just like any other scientific concept, acquired very different meanings in different historical settings? In that case: How does ‘race’ in its present usage differ from ‘race’ in the past? And which recent social and political developments have triggered its renewed significance?”

The four statements that were given in front of the delegates of the ISHPSSB meeting on the morning of July 26, 2007, were very different in style and perspective. We will not endeavour to distil a common take-home message from them, but will let each speak for themselves. One common structural element to all of them, however, is probably worth pointing out, as it may reflect the specific historical moment in which the session took place. This is the acknowledgement that “race” is not per se an “irrational” concept, but a highly variable and diverse concept that was and continues to be shaped by the ways in which science and society are articulated.

…Is there a Biological Concept of Race?

Jean Gayon
Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne
Institut d’histoire et philosophie des sciences et des techniques

Most contemporary biologists have abandoned the use of the term “race” in scientific discourse. Other words are used to categorise intra-specific taxonomic diversity: sub-species, variety, strain, local population, deme, etc. These words are ideologically more neutral than “race.” Nevertheless, biologists find it difficult when they discuss with a public that continues to use the vocabulary of “race.” For example, when a biologist says “races do not exist”, the exact meaning is generally unclear. Does he or she mean that the notion of race is confused? Or that the term does have a precise meaning, but that what it refers to does not exist, either in nature in general, or among humans in particular? This is the question I want to examine in two steps. First I will consider what the category of race could mean for modern biologists as a whole; then I will examine those aspects that specifically relate to humans…

…To conclude, I would like to relativize the biological approaches to the notion of race in the case of humans, and say that in humans, the most important aspect of race is not the biological aspect, but rather race as a social signifier. In a remarkable book published around 30 years ago, the sociologist Colette Guillaumin argued that we should distinguish two levels of discussion in the question of human races: the “concrete” level which, she argues, is that of biological research, and the “symbolic” level, which relates to the function of the signifier “race” in modern societies. Guillaumin insisted that the question of race as a social signifier is separate from that of the result of scientific debates on races as natural objects. Race as a social operator is not so much a concept as a fetish-notion. What is important is not whether it exists or not, but what it produces in practice. “That [i.e., race] does not exist. That leads to death. It is a murder machine, a technical murder machine. Of proven efficacy. It is a way of rationalising and organising the murderous violence and the domination of some social groups over other social groups that have been rendered powerless.” (Guillaumin 1972: 65)…

…Race in History

Renato G. Mazzolini
Università degli studi di Trento
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali

The only way I may contribute to the issue under discussion is by briefly talking about my own research and then by addressing four of the five questions that have been put on the floor by the organizers of this session (see introduction). Let me also state straight away that I feel more confident with literature published between 1600 and 1850 than in contemporary scientific literature on race and that my knowledge is limited to ideas and theories put forth in western Europe and North America.

It is generally assumed that the term race took on a taxonomic meaning at the very end of the eighteenth century. Many of the authors I studied worked before that date, before the notion of race was solidified, and they investigated skin colour (Mazzolini 1994). It should be noted that in the period running from the early seventeenth century to 1800 human pigmentation…

• was the object of intense anatomical, microscopical, physiological and chemical investigations giving rise to a number of theories which attempted to explain how human differences in skin colour came about;
• was used as the principal marker for classifying human varieties from a zoological point of view;
• was viewed as the main trait indicating interracial crossing and thus provided an element of analysis for what is often called pre-Mendelian genetics;
• stimulated scholars to think about the original colour of mankind by appearing in pathological conditions such as albinism;
• was the cornerstone on which the notion of race was constructed;
• was used to construct powerful models of somatic identities (e.g. white, black, yellow, brown and red) which still have far more devastating effects on human relations than the very notion of race.

Theories of skin colour cannot be understood without considering slavery and colonialism. At the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century skin colour was linked to history, civilisation and social structure. And so was the notion of race, for which skin colour remained the main marker of racial differences (Mazzolini 2007). For this reason I stress that race is a biopolitical notion, that is, a notion that has been used in daily life as well as by the life sciences and the social sciences, with the result of reciprocal contaminations. At a historical level this is quite evident. Some scholars distinguish four distinct ideas of race: status-race, formal-race, historical-race, and culture-race. From my point of view, it is interesting to note that in all these four ideas of race, colour plays a significant role…

…Race and Biology. Beyond the Perpetual Return of Crisis

Jenny Reardon
University of California, Santa Cruz
Sociology Department

The use of racial categories in biology has once again arisen as a problem in political and scholarly arenas. As the editors of this issue note, “until recently there existed a broad consensus among scientists, as well as students of science, that racial anthropology belonged to a past thoroughly outdated by the combined efforts of mathematical population genetics and molecular biology.” Several other similar moments of consensus preceded this one. In each moment, natural scientists, social scientists and the popular press concurred that a new powerful science had emerged that could reveal the truth, and thus counter social ideologies, about “race”: the science of population genetics in the 1950s, molecular biology in the 1970s, the genome sciences and bioinformatics in the 1990s and today. In each case, a crisis reoccurred as social ideologies of race once again became associated with biological ideas and practices. In the brief space at my disposal here I would like to reflect on what produces this experience of the cyclical return of the problem of race in biology. I would like to then offer a diagnosis of what is unique about the current moment of return, and how we might respond to it…

…An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Impact of Genomics on the Meaning of “Race”, and the Future Role of Racial Categories in Biomedical Research

George T. H. Ellison
St. George’s-University of London

Richard Tutton

Simon M. Outram

Paul Martin

Richard Ashcroft

Andrew Smart

As an interdisciplinary team exploring the use of racial categories in biomedical research from the perspective of epidemiology (GTHE), anthropology (GTHE, SMO), sociology (RT, AS), bioethics (RA) and science and technology studies (RT, PM, AS), what we hope to offer to this trans-disciplinary dialogue on “race and genomics” in the NTM. Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine draws on: our analysis of the longstanding debate within the biomedical literature concerning the meaning and aetiological utility of “race” as well as interviews with 22 geneticists working on the editorial boards of high-impact genetics and biomedical journals and 36 researchers working on UK-based biobanking and pharmacogenetic projects– interviews which examined variation in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of racial categories, and the perceived utility of these categories in the analytical design of research, the interpretation of research findings, and the translation thereof across different research and clinical contexts (see Outram/Ellison 2006a, Martin et al. 2007).

At the outset, however, we feel it is important to acknowledge that much of what we hope to contribute here has already been said, and said more eloquently, by a good many commentators and analysts before us. Not least amongst these is the Loyola University epidemiologist Richard S. Cooper, whose 2003 article in the International Journal of Epidemiology (bearing the uncannily similar title “Race, genes, and health—new wine in old bottles”) addressed many of the questions posed by the organisers of this trans-disciplinary dialogue. Cooper felt that advances in genetic technology should have been able to resolve the contentious and questionable use of racial categories as “surrogates for genetic effects at the population level” (i.e. as markers for potentially important differences in genetic variation amongst human populations) during the important period—what anthropologist Mike Fortun (2007) has called the “meantime”—between the conceptualisation and invention of genomic technologies and their widespread use in biomedical research. Richard Cooper also recognised that there was a “tension between reaffirmation of tradition and transformation of biological concepts” in which the new genomic technologies have, somewhat paradoxically, been used both to confirm that there are measurable differences in genetic variation between traditional “racial” groups and to demonstrate that these differences are far smaller than those found between individuals within such groups (cf. Reardon in this issue). And although Cooper has long questioned the value of using “racial” categories as markers for genetic variation in biomedical research (see also: Cooper 1993, Cooper/Kaufman 1998)—even for the modest “racial” differences in genetic variation that have been confirmed by advances in genomic technology—he accepts that the meaning of these differences in genetic variation remain open to interpretation, and that the claim that “race has little or no biological [i.e. genetic] meaning” has been an unhelpful “irritant to geneticists who see the importance of population variation [in genetics] in an array of conditions.”…

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Studied in race crossing VI. The Indian remnants in Eastern Cuba

Genetica
Volume 27, Number 1 (1954)
pages 65-96
DOI: 10.1007/BF01664155

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

A preliminary account was given at the 30th International Americanist Congress, Cambridge, England, August, 1952. Received for publication July 27, 1953

This paper is in one aspect a study of the later stages of absorption of a race surviving in small numbers in a more numerous population of another race. In that respect it resembles the study of a small Negro element being partly absorbed into a Caucasian population in Canada (Gates 1953a). But in the present case the miscegenation of the Indians in Cuba has been first with the Spaniards and more recently with Negroes. It shows that the absorption of small numbers of one race in another requires many centuries before it is complete. The history of the Basques in Western France and Northern Spain shows that, even where the physical differences are of a very minor character, the differences in customs and in location will lead to the persistence of a race within a larger population for many millenia. The physical differences, where they exist, will persist indefinitely, long after the cultural differences have disappeared.

It has frequently been stated that the Indians of Cuba were exterminated by A.D. 1600, but this is not strictly true. Pichardo Moya (1945), who gives a full bibliography of Cuban history and archeology, quotes Morrell, who wrote before 1760, that traces of the last Indians still existed in the vicinity of Bayamo, Canéy and Jiguaní, possibly in Pinar del Río, around Alquízar, and certainly in Oriente. Pichardo…

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A Mystery of  a People

WUNC 91.5, Chapel Hill
The State of Things
North Carolina Public Radio
2011-07-28

Isaac-davy Aronson, Host

Questions of racial identity and cultural heritage have long surrounded a group of Appalachians called the Melungeons. In recent years, curiosities have been piqued about this loosely connected group of people, spawning DNA testing, numerous books, Web sites and a documentary film. Guest host Isaac-Davy Aronson talks with K. Paul Johnson, corresponding secretary for the Melungeon Heritage Association; and Julie Williams Dixon, a Raleigh-based writer and director of the film “Melungeon Voices.”

Listen to the interview (00:19:10) here.

Op-Ed: Moving Beyond Race-Based Health

The Herald-Sun
Durham, North Carolina
2008-08-22

Susanne Haga, IGSP Scholar, Assistant Research Professor
Duke Institute for Genome Science & Policy

At a time when genetics research continues to reveal just how similar we all are, it’s frustrating to see the continued reliance on race as a basis to treat individuals differently when it comes to their health.

I’m not referring to the inequitable treatment experienced by some groups with respect to access to health care services, but rather to the development of race-based products such as vitamins and drugs.

A company called GenSpec is selling vitamins specially formulated for African-Americans, Caucasians, and Hispanics.

While there are some differences in disease prevalence among races, there are no diseases or conditions—and certainly no nutritional requirements—that are exclusive to just one group. If we’ve learned anything from the last decade of genetics research, it’s that our DNA is generally colorblind.

Although genetics is involved in most if not all aspects of our health, the environment plays at least an equal role. Even if we knew which genes played a part in our dietary needs, it’s unlikely those differences would follow perceived racial divides…

…The recent increase in the numbers of people who identify with more than one race would seem to pose a rather large problem to the companies marketing race-based products.

Halle Berry, Tiger Woods, and Barack Obama are some of the more well-known names in this fast-growing group. Or perhaps these companies are smarter than we give them credit for.

One blogger, apparently of mixed heritage, asked if she should take the ‘Caucasian’ vitamins in the morning and the ‘African-American’ ones at night…

…Not only are companies misleading the public to believe that races are biologically distinct, requiring race-specific products, but the basis for their wares flies in the face of science. As we stride toward a more personal approach to health and medicine, we need to look beyond skin color. Population-based health and medicine should be a thing of the past.

Read the entire op-ed here.

The pitfalls of tracing your ancestry

Nature News
Nature Magazine
2008-11-13

Brendan Maher

Charmaine Royal of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy explains the limitations of genetic testing.

Ancestry testing is genetics’ most direct and sometimes tempestuous interaction with personal identity. An estimated half-a-million Americans will purchase genetic tests from companies this year and thousands more will participate in university research where such tests will be used. The tests raise ethical and legal questions, on which an 11–15 November meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hopes to provide some guidance.

Charmaine Royal, an associate professor at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy in Durham, North Carolina, who co-chairs a task force—looking at genetic ancestry testing—at the meeting, talks to Nature.

What prompted the ASHG to develop these recommendations?

People have been researching their ancestry forever, using stories and historical records, and people have taken advantage of genetic technology with the hope of learning more. But there’s this perspective that genetics provides the truth, and that may need to be challenged. In general, genetic ancestry testing is fallible just like many of the tools we use. Some people think that genetics will provide the be all and end all of information about their ancestry. There are limitations as to what ancestry can provide…

…What are the limitations of such tests?

The general limitation, I’d say, of all of these tests, is that they can’t pinpoint with 100% accuracy who your ancestors may or may not be. Some people are concerned that the biogeographical ancestry test reifies the notion of race. This is the notion that there are four or five parental groups from which we all came and there are discrete boundaries between these groups. But our genetic research has shown that those boundaries don’t exist.

In lineage testing, where someone is wanting to know which tribe or region in Africa they came from, the information that’s given is based on the present day populations. The names of those groups and those locations have changed over time and so people getting that information about present day Africans and extrapolating to who their pre-middle-passage ancestors may have been—that may not necessarily be accurate. So, those limitations need to be clarified.

Another limitation is that the outcomes of ancestry tests are very much dependent on what is already in a database—who a client’s DNA can be matched to. If a database is not comprehensive some potential matches will be missing, and nobody has a complete database. That’s a major limitation, probably one of the biggest…

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Miscegenation produced Eurasian children that were not European or Asian; they were a people without an identity that had the ability to change the European established racial hierarchy. Christina Firpo mentions that in Vietnam, Eurasians were clearly recognizable as being of French descent. But the French viewed this as a threat to their racial purity and superiority. A British travelogue writer noticed that Eurasians were divided amongst themselves based on how closely they resembled Europeans. The Eurasians with the skin tones and facial features that more closely resembled those of Europeans had higher social statuses than those that had features that more closely resembled Southeast Asians. ‘This made it seem like there were several racial categories within the Eurasian community. This confusion over racial hierarchies within the Eurasian community created confusion among the British. The British were confused as to how to categorize Eurasians racially. The British had established a strict racial hierarchy. They were also convinced that they would be able to maintain a racial purity amongst the Europeans. So they were not prepared when British men began to participate in miscegenation and producing another race. As Ann Stoler put it, Eurasians “straddled the divide” between colonizers and colonized. This “divide” blurred some of the racial lines between Europeans and Southeast Asians, which terrified the British.

Katrina Chludzinski, “The Fear of Colonial Miscegenation in the British Colonies of Southeast Asia,” The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History, Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 8: 54-64.

The American Negro and Race Blending

The Sociological Review
Volume a2, Issue 4 (October 1909)
pages 349–360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1909.tb01972.x

Frances Hoggan

The problem of the colour population of America is many-sided. Perhaps the most vital question to be considered is that of the amalgamation of the races: how far it has reached or may reach, and what good or bad results it has produced or may be expected to produce.

It may be affirmed unhesitatingly, that no two races of men can live side by side in the same country without more or less race blending. The question therefore narrows itself to one of amount and incidence. In the Southern United States, practically all mixed unions during the period of slavery were irregular unions between white men and Negro women, using the term Negro in its legal sense to include all degrees of intermixture down to one-sixteenth only of coloured blood. Comparatively few mixed marriages took place, although a few of the higher class Mulattoes belonging to Northern families are the offspring of married parents and bear no stigma of bastardy. In the Southern States marriage was hardly ever thought of, and even had it been the enactments against it, passed in different years in the various States, were so uncompromising and drastic as effectually to prevent its occurrence. The race blending of slavery was therefore one-sided, the fathers only being white, and it was outside of legal marriage. When the resulting offspring is studied the inferiority of the mother socially and culturally cannot fail to reveal itself in the child, and in addition to the maternal inferiority, the upbringing and general conditions of slave life were such as to render it next to impossible to emerge from servile habits and modes of thought. When, as was often the case, the master and the father were one and the same man, his paternity was ignored to an extent unparalleled in other countries where slave mothers were common. In contrast with the more humane Mahommedan law and customs, the American slave child was seldom freed, and he could be sold away from the mother, in which case he became a mere waif, with no trace of natural relationships, without recognised kindred, and without even the semblance of a home.  It would be difficult to find elsewhere such loose family ties as prevailed among the slave population of the United States, or a more unnatural conception of the role of the white father. When he was not at the same time the…

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The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool

The Sociological Review
Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955)
pages 65-75
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x

Maurice Broody

Some of the most urgent social problems of a cosmopolitan seaport city like Liverpool are problems of adjustment between ethnic minorities and the indigenous society into which they have migrated. This adjustment is often very difficult, and many immigrant communities suffer acutely as a result of prejudice and discrimination. Their problems have been the concern of both administrators and sociologists, and the research which has hitherto been undertaken in Liverpool into problems of race-relations has been related to the Negro communities, since it is they which are most adversely affected by racial discrimination.

The Chinese community, on the other hand, it interesting precisely because its adjustment is not regarded as a problem. In a report, which was published in 1930, Miss M.[uriel] Fletcher came to the conclusion that the Chinese, unlike the West African community, did not present a serious social problem. That judgment was confirmed four years later by Caradog Jones, whose comment on the Negro and Chinese communities still appears to be substantially true: Each community comprises about 500 adult males. In both cases, there has been widespread inter-marriage and cohabitation with white women. Here the resemblance between the two groups ceases. The Chinese appear to make excellent husbands and there is little evidence of any of their families falling into poverty, but the same cannot be said of the negroes and their families. The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

The comparatively untroubled adjustment of the Chinese may be explained partly by the fact, that local residents do not discriminate…

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The curious case of Barack Obama: A postracial black man in a racialized world

University of Houston, Clear Lake
July 2009
180 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1471005
ISBN: 9781109355192

Joel G. Carter

THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The University of Houston Clear Lake In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE

This thesis discusses the debate over Barack Obama’s race and the role it played in the 2008 presidential election, and analyzes how they expose the mechanisms that operate in a racialized society that still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and view the categorization as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after someone has been racially categorized, everything they do can be better understood through a racial lens. This discussion is organized around three racialized storylines: that Obama is (1) not black (enough), (2) black, but not too black, and (3) too black. Obama’s attempts to reshape racial discourse, which were rebuffed by the purveyors of the existing narrative, reveal that he is a postracial black man who exposes the entrenched beliefs about race that belie the notion that the U.S. is close to becoming a postracial nation.

CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• ONE: ON THE THEORY OF POSTETHNICITY
  • Postethnic Dreams from My Father
  • Terminology Disclaimers
  • Pre-emptive Pushback
• TWO: HE’S NOT BLACK (ENOUGH)
  • On Growing up White and Deciding to be Black
  • Genetic Authenticity
  • Cultural Authenticity
  • On Shelby Steele, Bound Men, and Unfortunate Subtitles
• THREE: HE’S BLACK (BUT NOT TOO BLACK)
  • Articulate, Bright, and Clean (Oh My)
  • Obama captivates White People, Wins Iowa
  • Those Amazing, Race-Transcending “Iconic Negroes”
  • The Huxtable Effect: Obama as The Cosby Show’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable
• FOUR: HE’S TOO BLACK
  • America’s Black Friend Has a Blacker Friend: Jeremiah Wright
  • The Big Speech on Race, or Obama Throws His Grandmother Under the Bus
  • He’s So Well-Spoken: Obama as the Master of Veiled Racial Rhetoric
  • The Bradley Effect and Hard-Working White Americans
• FIVE: THE ELECTION AND THE AFTERMATH
  • The Bradley Effect is a No-Show
  • On the Alleged Declining Significance of Race
  • A Generational Sea-Change?
• CONCLUSION: DEEPER BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story,… and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

—Barack Obama

In the middle of a divisive presidential race, and in front of throngs of supporters in Boston and millions of political voyeurs across the country and around the world, a tall, skinny man with light brown skin and a conspicuously deliberate syntax spoke into the microphone at the 2004 Democratic Party National Convention and declared, “There’s not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of  America.” Moments after the speech concluded, the political pundits were pontificating; the blogs were buzzing. Who was he? What was he? Three months later, he became the Junior Senator from Illinois. Two years later, he became a candidate for president, and 16 months after that, he became his party’s nominee. And that fall, in an electoral landslide victory on November 4, 2008, this man—Barack Obama—became the 44th President of the United States of America. The debate over what he is, and what that answer means for the country he was elected to lead, rages on.

The discourse surrounding Obama’s racial identity, deeply rooted in the complicated history of slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and black/white relations in this country, exposes how the United States, collectively, still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and, after this categorization is made, attempts to view it as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after a person has been racially categorized, everything he does or doesn’t do can be better (or best) understood through a racial lens. This is organized around what I call “the three memes.” …

…In this thesis, I make no attempt to engage in the sort of analysis that debates dueling definitions of blackness and racial authenticity in an attempt to declare that Obama is or isn’t black. My goal here is not to uncover the “actual” truth about Obama’s racial identity and castigate those who have not been able to do so or those who have tried but reached a conclusion different from my own. I am not looking at the inkblot and attempting to describe its “true nature,” instead, I am looking at the people who are. I dissect some of the statements made by the people who insist, suggest, or imply that a person’s race can be determined by an objective framework—say, the same type of framework that would apply to a determination of a person’s height, weight, or age. By analyzing how people respond to Obama’s racial identity, what I intend to show is that people sometimes speak as if Obama is mistaken when he describes his own racial identity—or, as Walter Benn Michaels might say, they speak as if “there is some fact of the matter independent of the perception.” Instead, I attempt to upend the argument that the U.S. is moving beyond race or is already postracial by showing just how large a force racialized thinking was during the campaign, and still is. The existing assumptions and prevailing conventional wisdom about race drown out what Obama actually says about his own identity and the role race plays in his life. A closer look at his statements—particularly Dreams from My Father, but also throughout his political career—reveals that Obama is more than the ultimate racial Rorschach test: he is a postracial black man, rendered invisible by a thoroughly
racialized society…

Purchase the thesis here.