At Last …?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race & History

Posted in Articles, Biography, Communications/Media Studies, History, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-19 02:43Z by Steven

At Last …?: Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Race & History

Dædalus
Winter 2011, Volume 140, Number 1
Posted Online 2011-03-09
pages 131-141
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00065

Farah J. Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies
Columbia University

In this essay, Griffin brings to the fore two extraordinary black women of our age: First Lady Michelle Obama and entertainment mogul Beyoncé Knowles. Both women signify change in race relations in America, yet both reveal that the history of racial inequality in this country is far from over. As an Ivy League-educated descendent of slaves, Michelle Obama is not just unfamiliar to the mainstream media and the Washington political scene; during the 2008 presidential campaign, she was vilified as angry and unpatriotic. Beyonce, who controls the direction of her career in a way that pioneering black women entertainers could not, has nonetheless styled herself in ways that recall the distinct racial history of the Creole South. Griffin considers how Michelle Obama’s and Beyonce’s use of their respective family histories and ancestry has bolstered or diminished their popular appeal.

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Why race still matters

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Philosophy, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-03-25 18:41Z by Steven

Why race still matters

Dædalus
Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
Pages 102-116
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124460

Ian Hacking, Professor of Philosphy
University of Toronto

Why has race mattered in so many times and places? Why does it still matter? Put more precisely, why has there been such a pervasive tendency to apply the category of race and to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? Call this the ‘first question.’ Of course there are many more questions that one must also ask: Why has racial oppression been so ubiquitous? Why racial exploitation? Why racial slavery? Perhaps we lend to think of races as essentially different just because we want to excuse or to justify’ the domination of one race by another.

I shall proceed with the first question by canvassing live possible answers to it that variously invoke nature, genealogy (in the sense of Michel Foucault), cognitive science, empire, and pollution rules.

One final preliminary remark is in order. Most parts of this essay could have been written last year or next year, but the discussion of naturalism, medicine, and race could only have been written in November of 2004. and may well be out of date by the time this piece is printed.

Why has the category of race been so pervasive? One answer says that the distinction is just there, in the world for all to see. Superficial differences between races do exist in nature, and these are readily recognized.

The naturalist agrees at once that the distinctions are less in the nature of things than they once were, thanks to interbreeding among people whose ancestors have come from geographically distinct blocks. Racial distinctions are particularly blurred where one population has been translated by force to live in the midst of another population and yet has not been assimilated—slaves taken from West Africa and planted in the Southern United States, for example. The naturalist notes that traditional racial distinctions are less and less viable the more children are born to parents whose geographical origins are very different.

Sensible naturalists stop there. The belief that racial differences are anything more than superficial is a repugnant. John Stuart Mill was the wisest spokesman for this position…

…In the United States, the National Bone Marrow Program maintains the master registry. Most people in existing registries have tended to be middle-aged and white, which means that whites have a good chance of finding a match. Hence there have been racially targeted programs for Asian and African Americans. In the United States and Canada there is also the Aboriginal Bone Marrow Registries Association, and in the United Kingdom there is the African Caribbean Leukemia Trust. Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches has been very successful, especially in the Los Angeles region. The African Americans Uniting for Life campaign has been less successful, for all sorts of historical reasons. An African American with leukemia has a far worse chance of finding a match in time than members of other populations have. That is a social fact, but there is also a biological fact: there is far greater heterogeneity in the human leukemia antigen in persons of African origins than in other populations. (This fact fits well with the hypothesis that all races are descendants of only one of many African populations that existed at the time that human emigration began out of Africa—populations whose characteristics have continued to be distributed among Africans today.)

If you go to the websites for the organizations that maintain the registries, you will see they do not shilly-shally in some dance of euphemistic political correctness about race. For them it is a matter of life and death. Without the Asian registries there would have been many more dead Asian Americans in the past decade. For lack of more African Americans on the registries there will be more dead African Americans in the next few years than there need be…

…How much more powerful pollution and the imperial imperative become when history puts them together! Pollution rules are important for maintaining the imperial group intact. As soon as pollution rules break down, men of the master group sire children with women from subjugated groups, and a new kind of person–the half-breed–emerges. The etymology of words such as ‘Eurasian’ embodies this phenomenon. We learn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaedia that ‘Eurasian’ was “originally used to denote children born to Hindu mothers and European (especially Portuguese) fathers.” There are pecking orders between conquerors, as well as among the conquered–and this British word was a put-down meant to keep the Portuguese in Goa in their place. Note also the dominance order between the sexes: a Hindu father and a European woman would yield, at least in the official reckoning, a Hindu, not a Eurasian.

The French noun métis, derived from a Portuguese word originally used for Eurasians, dates back to 1615. In French Canada it signified the children of white fathers and native mothers. Early in the nineteenth century it was adopted in English to denote the offspring of French Canadian men, originally trapper/traders, and native women. In other words, ‘Eurasian’ and métis alike meant the children of males from conquering groups of lower status and females from the totally subjugated groups–and then the offspring of any of those children.

For a few generations, one can be precise in measuring degrees of pollution. At that the Spanish and Portuguese Empires excelled. First came ‘mulattoes,’ the children of Spanish or Portuguese men and South American Indian women. With the importation of black slaves from West Africa, the label was transferred to the children of white masters and black slaves, and then to mixed race in general. The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] says it all: the English word is derived from Portuguese and Spanish, “mulato, young mule, hence one of mixed race.”

The Spanish cuarteron became the English ‘quadroon,’ the child of a white person and a mulatto. The few quotations given in the OED are a record of colonial history. Here is the first, dated 1707: “The inhabitants of Jamaica are for the most part Europeans … who are the Masters, and Indians, Negroes, Mulatos, Alcatrazes, Mestises, Quarterons, & c. who are the slaves.” The next quotation in the list is from Thomas Jefferson.

And so on: from Spanish the English language acquired ‘quintroon,’ meaning one who is one-sixteenth of Negro descent. The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica has it that “The children of a white and a quintroon consider themselves free of all taint of the negro race.” More importantly, from an 1835 OED citation, “‘The child of a Quintroon by a white father is free by law.’ Such was recently the West-Indian slave code.” Better to have a white father than a white mother.

In real life, interbreeding was endemic, so such classifications were bound to become haphazard. Only one option was left. The American solution was definitive. One drop of Negro blood sufficed to make one Negro. Which in turn implied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not, a choice turned into literature in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and, more recently, in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The one drop of blood rule perfectly harmonizes the imperial imperative and the preservation of group identity by pollution prohibitions.

Why is there such a widespread tendency to regard people of different races as essentially different kinds of people? That was our first question…

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The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-13 04:33Z by Steven

The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions

Dædalus
Volume 140, Issue 1 (Winter 2011 – Race in the Age of Obama, volume 1)
pages 174–182
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00069

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California, Berkeley

Nearly all of today’s confident dismissals of the notion of a “post-racial” America address the simple question, “Are we beyond racism or not?” But most of the writers who have used the terms post-racial or post-ethnic sympathetically have explored other questions: What is the significance of the blurring of ethnoracial lines through cross-group marriage and reproduction? How should we interpret the relatively greater ability of immigrant blacks as compared to standard “African Americans” to overcome racist barriers? What do we make of increasing evidence that economic and educational conditions prior to immigration are more powerful determinants than “race” in affecting the destiny of population groups that have immigrated to the United States in recent decades? Rather than calling constant attention to the undoubted reality of racism, this essay asks scholars and anti-racist intellectuals more generally to think beyond “the problem of the color line” in order to focus on “the problem of solidarity.” The essay argues that the most easily answered questions are not those that most demand our attention.

…In this essay, I focus on two highly diversifying demographic trends that continue to inspire post-ethnic/post-racial writers, and that get short shrift in the competition to show just how bad racism still is. One is the extent and character of cross-group marriage, cohabitation, and reproduction. The second is the extent and character of recent immigration, especially of dark-skinned peoples…

Yet marriage statistics do not measure the full extent of the blurring of color lines. Sociologists Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters argue convincingly that these statistics underestimate the rates of ethnoracially mixed families, especially when black people are involved. “Low levels of black marriage and higher levels of black-white cohabitation than of black-white marriage,” they explain, “radically complicate the interpretation of intermarriage rates.”

One of the most distinctive and revealing yet rarely cited of the relevant studies calculates the percentage of families who had a mixed race marriage within their extended kinship network. Demographer Joshua Goldstein found that among U.S. Census-identified whites, by the year 2000 about 22 percent of white Americans had within their kinship network of ten marriages over three generations at least one white–non-white marriage; in that same year, nearly 50 percent of Census-identified black Americans had a black–non-black marriage in their kinship system. The percentage for Asian Americans with Asian–non-Asian families was 84 percent. These figures rose dramatically from earlier Censuses. In 1960, only about 2 percent of Census-identified whites and 9 percent of Census-identified blacks had in their kinship network a single marriage across the color line. As late as 1990, these figures were only 9 percent for Census-identified whites and 28 percent for Census identified blacks.14 Goldstein’s statistics suggest that acceptance of crossboundary marriage and reproduction, already registered in popular culture and opinion polls, will continue to increase. Our social psychologists tell us that hostility to mixed race couplings, like opposition to same-sex relationships, diminishes with intimate familiarity: when someone in your own family is in one of these traditionally stigmatized relationships, the stigma loses some of its power…

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Somewhere between Jim Crow & Post-Racialism: Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-08-20 01:43Z by Steven

Somewhere between Jim Crow & Post-Racialism: Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Volume 140, Number 2, Spring 2011, Race, Inequality & Culture, Volume 2
pages 11-36

Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences
Harvard University

In assessing the results of the Negro revolution so far, it can be concluded that Negroes have established a foothsold, no more. We have written a Declaration of Independence, itself an accomplishment, but the effort to transform the words into a life experience still lies ahead.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? (1968)

By the middle of the twentieth century, the color line was as well defined and as firmly entrenched as any institution in the land. After all, it was older than most institutions, including the federal government itself. More important, it informed the content and shaped the lives of those institutions and the people who lived under them.
John Hope Franklin, The Color Line (1993)

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy–particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
Barack H. Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (May 18, 2008)

The year 1965 marked an important inflection point in the struggle for racial justice in the United States, underscoring two fundamental points about race in America. First, that racial inequality and division were not only Southern problems attached to Jim Crow segregation. Second, that the nature of those inequalities and divisions was a matter not merely of formal civil status and law, but also of deeply etched economic arrangements, social and political conditions, and cultural outlooks and practices. Viewed in full, the racial divide was a challenge of truly national reach, multilayered in its complexity and depth. Therefore, the achievement of basic citizenship rights in the South was a pivotal but far from exhaustive stage of the struggle…

…A second and no less controversial view of post-racialism takes the position that the level and pace of change in the demographic makeup and the identity choices and politics of Americans are rendering the traditional black-white divide irrelevant. Accordingly, Americans increasingly revere mixture and hybridity and are rushing to embrace a decidedly “beige” view of themselves and what is good for the body politic. Old-fashioned racial dichotomies pale against the surge toward flexible, deracialized, and mixed ethnoracial identities and outlooks.

A third, and perhaps the most controversial, view of post-racialism has the most in common with the well-rehearsed rhetoric of color blindness. To wit, American society, or at least a large and steadily growing fraction of it, has genuinely moved beyond race–so much so that we as a nation are now ready to transcend the disabling racial divisions of the past. From this perspective, nothing symbolizes better the moment of transcendence than Obama’s election as president. This transcendence is said to be especially true of a younger generation, what New Yorker editor David Remnick has referred to as “the Joshua Generation.” More than any other, this generation is ready to cross the great river of racial identity, division, and acrimony that has for so long defined American culture and politics…

…Consider first the matter of group boundaries. The 2000 Census broke new ground by allowing individuals to mark more than one box in designating racial background. Indeed, great political pressure and tumult led to the decision to move the Census in a direction that more formally and institutionally acknowledged the presence of increasing mixture and heterogeneity in the American population with regard to racial background. Nearly seven million people exercised that option in 2000. The successful rise of Obama to the office of president, the first African American to do so, as a child of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, has only accelerated the sense of the newfound latitude and recognition granted to those who claim more than one racial heritage.

Despite Obama’s electoral success and the press attention given to the phenomenon, some will no doubt find it surprising that the overwhelming majority of Americans identify with only one race. As Figure 1 shows, less than 2 percent of the population marked more than one box on the 2000 Census in designating their racial background. Fully 98 percent marked just one. I claim no deep-rootedness or profound personal salience for these identities. Rather, my point is that we should be mindful that the level of “discussion” and contention around mixture is far out of proportion to the extent to which most Americans actually designate and see themselves in these terms. Moreover, even if we restrict attention to just those who marked more than one box, two-thirds of these respondents designated two groups other than blacks (namely, Hispanic-white, Asian-white, or Hispanic and Asian mixtures), as Figure 2 shows. Some degree of mixture with black constituted just under a third of mixed race identifiers in 2000. Given the historic size of the black population and the extended length of contact with white Americans, this remarkable result says something powerful about the potency and durability of the historic black-white divide.

It is worth recalling that sexual relations and childbearing across the racial divide are not recent phenomena. The 1890 U.S. Census contained categories for not only “Negro” but also “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” and even “Octoroon”; these were clear signs of the extent of “mixing” that had taken place in the United States. Indeed, well over one million individuals fell into one of the mixed race categories at that time. In order to protect the institution of slavery and to prevent the offspring of white slave masters and exploited black slave women from having a claim on freedom as well as on the property of the master, slave status, as defined by law, followed the mother’s status, not the father’s. For most of its history, the United States legally barred or discouraged racial mixing and intermarriage. At the time of the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, seventeen states still banned racial intermarriage…

…Does that pressure for change foretell the ultimate undoing of the black-white divide? At least three lines of research raise doubts about such a forecast. First, studies of the perceptions of and identities among those of mixed racial backgrounds point to strong evidence of the cultural persistence of the one-drop rule. Systematic experiments by sociologists and social psychologists are intriguing in this regard. For example, sociologist Melissa Herman’s recent research concluded that “others’ perceptions shape a person’s identity and social understandings of race. My study found that partblack multiracial youth are more likely to be seen as black by observers and to define themselves as black when forced to choose one race.”…

…Third, some key synthetic works argue for an evolving racial scheme in the United States, but a scheme that nonetheless preserves a heavily stigmatized black category. A decade ago, sociologist Herbert Gans offered the provocative but wellgrounded speculation that the United States would witness a transition from a society defined by a great white–nonwhite divide to one increasingly defined by a black–non-black fissure, with an in-between or residual category for those granted provisional or “honorary white” status. As Gans explained: “If current trends persist, today’s multiracial hierarchy could be replaced by what I think of as a dual or bimodal one consisting of ‘nonblack’ and ‘black’ population categories, with a third ‘residual’ category for the groups that do not, or do not yet, fit into the basic dualism.” Most troubling, this new dualism would, in Gans’s expectations, continue to bring a profound sense of undeservingness and stigma for those assigned its bottom rung.

Gans’s remarks have recently received substantial support from demographer Frank Bean and his colleagues. Based on their extensive analyses of population trends across a variety of indicators, Bean and colleagues write: “A black-nonblack divide appears to be taking shape in the United States, in which Asians and Latinos are closer to whites. Hence, America’s color lines are moving toward a new demarcation that places many blacks in a position of disadvantage similar to that resulting from the traditional black-white divide.”…

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