Over the past week, a number of Daily Kos Diaries have generated some lively discussions over bigotry – ethnic, racial, religious and where those intersect. A few Diaries took on specific issues. Virgil Goode and Keith Ellison. "Hate speech." Reparations for slavery. A few were metaKos, the fundamental issue being - Is this site "too white" and can or should or will something be done about it? In case you were engaged in the Shopocalypse and missed all or most of this commentary, I recommend taking a trip to jotter's daily compilation of high-impact Diaries.
A bit of this commentary about bigotry focused on Barack Obama. While some, like Barack Obama is the next generation by PsiFighter37 and The Obama Dilemma by HairyTrueMan touched on racial matters tangentially, others took the matter head-on as in KDANTEATER’s A Black Person Cannot Be Elected President of the United States and ormondotvos’s One-Drop Racism. Barack ain't black.
Before anybody puts me on the chopping block and hauls out the hatchets, let me say from the outset that I have not lined up behind any candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. I come neither to praise Senator Obama nor to diss him. I’ll save that for the primaries. Rather, I’d like to spark some discussion that goes well beyond Obama. Civil discussion, I would implore, but I’m a realist about such matters.
Early last month, in his regular column in the New York Daily News. novelist and music critic Stanley Crouch wrote What Obama isn't: black like me. The column has made it into a few other newspapers as well, including, last Sunday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, where it was titled He does not share our heritage. Some snippets:
If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time. ...
If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time. ...
Of course, the idea that one would be a better or a worse representative of black Americans depending upon his or her culture or ethnic group is clearly absurd. ...
So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American. ...
If we then end up with him as our first black President, he will have come into the White House through a side door - which might, at this point, be the only one that's open.
I urge readers to follow the link and check out Crouch’s whole column. It’s more nuanced than any collection of excerpts can show.
Let me interject something here. Because I know from personal experience and many conversations that some people may have the mistaken impression that this is about skin color, or rather about hue. They take "not black enough" literally because Barack Obama is light-skinned.
It’s certainly true that actual skin color of blacks has, throughout American history, had a social and political impact. "High-yellow" tones of "quadroons" and "octoroons" – African-Americans with so much intermixture of white "blood" that they could often "pass white" or, at least, be more accepted in white society than darker-tinged blacks – have been a fact of life that has generated significant bigotry among both whites and blacks in American society. Examples of this skin-tone prejudice abound, including the differences of privileges granted lighter-skinned "house slaves" and darker-skinned field hands," the 19th Century institution of plaçage, the 20th Century choices of the film industry. It can also be found among some American Indians, a vicious bigotry based on "blood quantum" and looks. "Half-breeds" who look more like our white ancestors than our red ones get told "you don’t look Indian" by non-Indians and (less often) "you’re not a real Indian" by full bloods, even when we’re tribally enrolled. My grandfather was a dark man, half Seminole and an eighth or so black; my grandmother light and blue-eyed, a mixture of Seminole, Scottish and African, by blood, three-quarters Indian.
So, while skin color does matter, "not being black enough" is not specifically about hue, but rather attitudes about "being black." Take the example of Clarence Thomas, several shades darker than Obama, and a man viewed as "not being black enough" by large numbers of African-Americans for reasons having nothing to do with hue. Of course, there is for African-Americans an oppressive history that has been affected by hue, which means that actual skin color does get interwoven into the socio-political realm, unconsciously or consciously. Humans are as socially complex as we are intellectually, and we escape these surface judgments only with relentless diligence, although, as should be expected, the younger generations seem to be doing a better job of casting them off.
As Crouch himself pointed out, the is-Obama-black-enough? theme isn’t new. It arose during his 2004 Senate primary campaign, and laterthe ultra-rightwing Alan Keyes, who dropped into Illinois for the general election after the Republican candidate fled the contest when embarrassing divorce records were made public.
Keyes accused Obama of "wrongly claiming an African-American heritage." His own ancestors, he said, "toiled in slavery in this country. ... My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage."
At the Democratic Convention that summer, Obama stepped onto his biggest public platform ever and delivered a galvanizing speech that included these words:
"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. In no other country on earth is my story even possible."
Obama obliterated Keyes at the ballot box with 70 percent of vote.
In her March 15, 2004, pre-primary election column in the Chicago Tribune, Obama unfazed by foes' doubts on race question, Dawn Turner Trice wrote:
He's biracial – his mother was white, his father Kenyan. He was reared in Hawaii and Indonesia. He's an attorney, having graduated with honors from Harvard Law School.
The question, floated chiefly by envious political foes, had been: Was Obama "black enough" for black voters? Well, on the eve of the primary, that's no longer a question; and frankly, it was insulting and should never have been an issue. ...
Obama clearly has crossover appeal with white voters. And yet, he's at home in his own skin.
He said that as a young man, he struggled to define his community. But that definition went beyond race and included geography, as he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia; and class, as he had friends who were the children of rice-paddy farmers and dignitaries. ...
"My view has always been that I'm African-American," he said. "African Americans by definition, we're a hybrid people. One of things I loved about my mother was not only did she not feel rejected by me defining myself as an African-American, but she recognized that I was a black man in the United States and my experiences were going to be different than hers."
At the same time, Obama says, when he takes his daughters to Hawaii to visit his grandmother – his mother is deceased – they visit a little old white lady from Kansas.
Those daughters, and Obama’s African-American wife, are "black" in the way most Americans – black, white and other – typically define the term – descendants of American slaves.
Subsequent to Crouch’s column, Los Angeles Times contributing editor and radical centrist Gregory Rodriguez wrote Is Obama the new 'black'?
Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness not just as a racial (shared biology) identity but as an ethnic (shared historical experience) one. And isn't that what the switch of terms from "black" to "African American" was all about?
What Crouch is arguing is that what the majority of black Americans share is their ancestors' experience as human chattel, brought to these shores in the grips of chains. Slavery and segregation not only forged a rigid racial line between black and white but created a shared ethnic experience. For Crouch, the fact that Obama's father — whom Obama met only once — was a black Kenyan who came to the U.S. to study at Harvard and the University of Hawaii removes him from the traditional black American narrative. ...
It's true that in our country, blackness is not a choice but rather something thrust on people who have any hint of African lineage. Traditionally, anyone with "one drop of African blood" has been considered black. But in recent decades, more children of black-white unions are choosing to buck the "one-drop rule" and call themselves biracial.
But in this respect, Obama is a traditionalist. He clearly chooses a black identity, but he does so even as he embraces his Midwestern Anglo roots. In other words, rather than straddling two identities or creating a new mixed one, he prefers to place himself within a single category and then expand it.
In her early December piece, Black Enough?, Luiza Ch. Savage, Washington Bureau Chief for the Canadian weekly MacLean’s, wrote:
It is true that immigrants from Africa and the West Indies, like Obama and former secretary of state Colin Powell, whose family came from Jamaica, have had greater success in the U.S. than descendants of American slaves. And the implications of that success are the subject of debate. New Yorker writer and author Malcolm Gladwell, the son of a Jamaican immigrant mother, suggested in an autobiographical essay that the success of immigrant blacks falsely suggests to some people that "racism does not really exist at all." "It implies," he went on to say, "that when the conservatives in Congress say the responsibility for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action but with the poor themselves they are right." Could an Obama candidacy, let alone a presidency, send that message even more strongly? "There is no question that a black president -- similarly to two black secretaries of state -- makes it easier to claim that structural inequalities are less important, and it's simply a matter of individual decision-making and individual effort," says [Princeton Professor Melissa] Harris-Lacewell.
The issue has caused a fair amount of anxiety in recent years on top American campuses where affirmative action programs appear to have disproportionately benefited children of Africans and West Indians. In 2004, African American alumni of Harvard University raised concerns that an estimated half to two-thirds of the incoming black freshmen were immigrants from Africa or the West Indies or the children of such immigrants, not the descendants of American slaves. Descendants of slaves began to describe themselves as "descendants" to distinguish themselves from the rest.
Harris-Lacewell adds that Obama has said he does not "have a lot of patience with identity politics, whether it's coming from the right or the left." That includes impatience with claims of "color-blindness as a means to deny the structural inequalities" in society. "It also includes those self-appointed arbiters of African American culture who declare who is and isn't 'black enough.' "
For many Americans, even these days, the problem is rather different. For them Barack Obama is too black. They still apply the one-drop rule even if they’ve never heard of it. They don’t question a person who self-identifies as African-American. If he says he is, he is, and there’s no voting for him because of it, no matter what his views on a hundred other issues. Those who will tell you this openly are fewer each year, but, as we have bitterly learned, covert racists will tell pollsters they’ll vote for a black candidate and then bail at the ballot box. So exactly what constitutes the percentage of "too black" attitudes among non-blacks is not all that easy to know. Obviously, those concealed attitudes play out in whole lot more places than the ballot box, as every African-American knows all too well.
Racism is a pernicious, persistent fact of life in America, a relic of the past, yes, but simultaneously a stone in our throat, altered from the days of lynching, it’s true, but still a major factor in the filling of our prisons. If this weren’t the case, Stanley Crouch wouldn’t be writing what he’s written and I wouldn’t be writing this. What is perhaps the most pernicious, 140 years after slavery was abolished, 40 years after the civil rights movement won its legislative victories is the idea that if we’re a particular "color" we must be of one mind with all others who appear, on the surface, like us. Nothing could be more wrong. And it’s always been so. In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass had his free-black detractors. Half a century later, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were rhetorically at each others’ throats.
Alhough you would scarcely know it now, at the height of the civil rights movement, there were many blacks who objected to Martin Luther King Jr.’s politics and his methods. And though some find it hard to believe, there were whites who saw Malcolm X’s as the man with the answers. It may seem like a revolutionary idea to many non-blacks, but African-Americans speak for themselves as individuals. They are no more likely to follow blindly someone of the "same" skin color just because of that fact than any other "racial" group will do.
Like any candidate, if Obama runs, he will have to prove himself to individual African-Americans just as he will have to prove himself to each of us whether we are red, white, black, yellow, brown, leftist, liberal, moderate, male, female, gay, straight, blue-collar, white collar, immigrant or native-born, religious or not.