The Racial Narrative vs. Reality
By Anita Finlay ("Ani") on December 2, 2008 at 11:10 AM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Current Affairs, Hillary Clinton, Race, Race Card
In her Washington Post editorial, He’s Not Black, Marie Arano discusses the election of Barack Obama and mentions something no one bothers to talk about:
He is also half white.
Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.
We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.
That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”
The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.
To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.
Well, this was originally what Barack Obama was supposed to be – a post-racial candidate. Ms. Arana indicates there is much racial mixing in our society and others so as to render old labeling out of date and useless. However, as fascinating as this article is, as she details her own rich cultural heritage among others, and it is certainly worth a read in its entirety, she seems to be placing the blame on the media and the American people for the labeling of Barack Obama as black.
While she is right that the media did push this narrative for all it was worth, Ms. Arano neglects to mention that a great deal of the responsibility for that label belongs with President-elect Obama himself. He did nothing to disabuse the media of this notion which he could have done at any time by continuing to trumpet his own mixed heritage.
Even Obama himself seems to have bought into the nomenclature. In his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” he writes, “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” You can almost feel the youth struggling with his identity, reaching for the right words to describe it and finally accepting the label that others impose.
It was a label he imposed. In his run for the presidency, his first campaign narrative was that he was the post-racial candidate. How nice if he would have stuck with that. Instead, he very clearly brought race to the forefront of his campaign by playing the race card with impunity almost every day since January.
He was very clear to define himself as bi-racial, for instance, when he was campaigning in New Hampshire, very early in this years’ primary season. However, at the next primary, in South Carolina, he suddenly became “black” and there was absolutely no mention of his white Kansan mother. It was as if she did not exist. Is this not disrespectful to an equally important part of his heritage? It is easy to understand why he did this in a state with so large an African American population. I am sure I remember several articles before Super Duper Tuesday indicating that certain AA voters were not relating to him as being ‘AA enough.’ Was this a reason for his assuming an affectation once he got out on the campaign trail in these states?
Subsequently, his white grandmother who raised him and put him through private school only got a rather negative mention in his ‘monumentally important’ speech on race, and he soon after referred to her in a very insulting, limiting and quite frankly, inaccurate fashion as ‘a typical white person.’ So much for post-racial. His speech on race was a very well orchestrated diversion, since his candidacy was in much hot water after his close 20-year relationship with the racially divisive Reverend Wright was revealed just a few days earlier. Again, he played the race card rather than answering the question of what he was doing in that church in the first place, deflecting blame onto the ‘racial divide’ in this country rather than taking responsibility for his actions.
He claimed this ‘narrative’ of the black candidate for himself, as opposed to a bi-racial one, because he needed to pull the African American vote away from Hillary Clinton and aim a wrecking ball at the popularity the Clintons always enjoyed within the African American community. Professor Sean Wilentz’ brilliant article in The New Republic, “Race Man,” has often been referenced here, and details just how the Obama campaign played the race card to their advantage to accomplish this very mission.
Ms. Arana further states:
The explosion of “minorities” in the United States in the past half-century has guaranteed that ever more interracial mingling is inevitable. According to the 2000 Census, there were 1.5 million Hispanic-white marriages in the United States, half a million Asian-white marriages, and more than a quarter-million black-white marriages. The reality is probably closer to double or triple that number. And growing.
The evidence is everywhere. If not in our neighborhoods, in our culture. We see it in Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Ben Kingsley, Nancy Kwan, Ne-Yo, Mariah Carey. Yet we insist on calling these hybrids by a reductive name: Berry is black. Kingsley is white. Kwan is yellow. Even they label themselves by the apparent color of their skin. With language like that, how can we claim to live in a post-racial society?
Interracial mingling is a very positive thing – showing that we are breaking down all sorts of barriers and just taking each person as we find them, without regard to labels or skin color.
Few who see Barack Obama, it seems, understand that he’s 50 percent white Kansan. Even fewer understand what it means to be second-generation Kenyan. It reminds me of something sociologist Troy Duster and bioethicist Pilar Ossorio once observed: Skin color is seldom what it seems. People who look white can have a significant majority of African ancestors. People who look black can have a majority of ancestors who are European.
In other words, the color of a president-elect’s skin doesn’t tell you much. It’s an unreliable marker, a deceptive form of packaging. Isn’t it time we stopped using labels that validate the separation of races? Isn’t it time for the language to move on?
How much more honest would Obama’s campaign have been if he had moved on from labels as well, being that he promised to do so. It is exhausting that those who choose to write articles about this subject turn a blind eye to his part in its current cause. Our ‘language’ isn’t the only thing that needs to move on.
The ‘unreliable marker’ of which Ms. Arano speaks is indeed a deceptive form of packaging. Contrary to what he would have you believe as being a detriment in his campaign, President elect Obama’s skin color was something he used to his advantage. He enjoyed a solid 90-95% voting bloc within the African American community, while doing basically nothing to earn their votes, apart from using his appearance as a victory in itself for those voters.
While many may understandably take his election as a great triumph and a huge leap beyond our painful past, he has set race relations back in this country with the insulting ‘labels’ he and his surrogates suggested in order to corner those who did not believe in him into voting for him. Politics is a bloody business, and obviously, President-elect Obama, his campaign manager, David Axelrod, and their surrogates used every trick to get to victory.
Earlier, Ms. Arano mentioned that “progress had outpaced vocabulary,” but it was the Obama campaign that pretended we had made less progress on racial issues than we actually have. When voters who chose not to embrace Obama’s candidacy were routinely referred to as racists, Archie Bunkers, and low information voters, so as to deny the fact that there were myriad excellent reasons for people not to support him, how can we as a society possibly have a real discussion about the issues Ms. Arana poses?
Clearly, since Obama received more “white” votes than any candidate since Carter, the ‘racist’ narrative he imposed is not an applicable one. He is a bi-racial President-elect. Why can’t this be celebrated as a way to move us forward just as much as him being the first black President?
It will be interesting to see if he now tries to mend the fences of the pain he caused. Somehow, I tend to doubt it will be addressed at all.
by Ronald Scott
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