The other day I wrote about how some folks don’t believe that Obama is black. Now I’ve already noted Dickerson’s hypocrisy, but I should hasten to say that she isn’t alone. Stanley Crouch is on the same page, though to be fair he makes a subtly different argument.
But I’ll save my comments about Crouch for another time perhaps. And give him a partial pass because as a good Negro nationalist he’s never held much truck in a universal conception of blackness anyway.
Today? I point you to Gary Kamiya’s piece where he critiques Dickerson, in effect taking my own position…but for all the wrong reasons. Indeed, although I think that Kamiya is pretty decent normally, I’m really glad his piece wasn’t written on paper. It’d be a waste to kill all those trees for what is in effect a worn out call for us to move beyond “black” in favor of getting to black.
Check out this doozy:
A majority group’s racial identity, since it encounters no external obstacles, singling out or bigotry, is always invisible to itself. But — and now we come to the interesting racial questions posed by Barack Obama — I would argue that not all members of minority ethnic or racial groups, even ones that have historically been subject to racism, necessarily see themselves as “Asian” or “Latino” or “black.” They may just see themselves as Asian or Latino or black. This doesn’t mean they necessarily reject any cultural traditions or community ties: It simply means they see themselves first and foremost as human beings who happen to be a certain race or ethnicity.
Let me be clear. I am not talking about disavowing one’s culture or background, acting “white,” or any other external actions. I am simply talking about an inner freedom from a superficial definition imposed by others. This freedom can — and in the case of blacks, probably usually does — coexist with a stronger consciousness of one’s racial identity than exists for white Americans, whose racial status is invisible to themselves. For many minorities — even though their minority status makes their ethnicity more visible to others, and thus to themselves, and even though they may have suffered from racial or ethnic prejudice — visibility and prejudice alone do not necessarily create a race or ethnicity-based identity.
And the kicker:
Having no racial self-identification is a utopian state because it allows you to escape this malignant mirror. In America, the white majority is fortunate to enjoy this.
Now in making his case–which concludes by saying that what we need to do is recognize our common humanity by sloughing off the racial burden that people expect us to carry–he does recognize that racism plays a role by constraining our choices. But his end point is the same. Instead of being “black” we need to just be…black. Like Obama, I guess.
Of the various responses to the piece, I think that Malik probably comes closest to hitting the nail on the head. It’s always mildly annoying to read writers who acknowledge that they don’t really live with race write about race. Particularly when it looks like they are padding the word count to do so. How about this–Does Obama think he’s black? Does his mama think he’s black? Does his wife think he’s black? Do his children think he’s black?
When he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, who was he organizing? Where does he live?
(do the POLICE think he’s black?)
He’d have been much better off just saying that Dickerson is off her rocker for arguing that black people need to get beyond race, then arguing the contrary when we are presented with a black person who can do just that.
Oh. Girly girls.
I’ve only recently begun to talk about my family, and even then not really. My wife has another groove going though. She asks a question that is fairly pertinent to those of us (black and non-black) raising daughters. What makes a girly girl? My youngest daughter Niara is going to be a straight up headknocker when she grows up, but at the same time is beautiful in pink. The 21st Century. Go figure.
“So let me get this straight. We need to end blackness…but at the same time talk about Obama like a dog because he isn’t black?”
I had to rub my head too and started to believe that she didn’t understand her own theory. So I decided to stop being lazy and arrange some of the puzzle pieces for us here (I’m assuming the italics tag works).
Her basic premise is that: “Blackness is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, just as overt racism did.”
She explains:
“Blacks, and their supporters, create magazines, inaugurate academic departments, and publish bodies of critical theories devoted to the study and repudiation of ‘whiteness’–as morally, scientifically, and intellectually bogus an invention as ever existed. […] Whiteness, along with all the other ‘races’ whites created, is no more than the codification of hierarchies of relative oppression and expliotation. ‘Black,’ these ‘whiteness’ specialists tell us, has been arbitrarily formulated as the most depraved and degraded category of all. Yet it is blacks who fight hardest to maintain the tautology, to cram every possible “black” into the leaky lifeboat with them, to define the paramaters of the category most narrowly. […] Blackness is existential Play-Doh” it’s biology, its ideology, it’s sociology. The End of Blackness (132)
The line about defining the parameters of the category “most narrowly” seems to look like hypocrisy when compared to the Salon piece:
“Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.
But to say that Dickerson is a hypocrite on this account is to miss the entire point of her refreshingly cantankerous writing on the subject; also note the use of “we” in the last five words.
She explains further:
“In addition to blacks’ DuBoisian double consciousness, there are also two black ids. One seeks to transcend race, while the other seeks to make blacks powerful qua blacks so as to defeat whites. These ids struggle to either merge and expand or fully separate into lesser entities. James Baldwin knew that ‘freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.’ Decades later, we know that he meant a notion that was much more radical than freedom from whites. But how do blacks find themsevles when, for centuries, they’ve had to subjugate their will, their personal preferences, and even their thought process to the group’s survival? This subjugation has resulted in contradictions and complexities that can only surprise those with a vested interest in blindness…” The End of Blackness (200)
Compare with:
“Notwithstanding their silence on the subject, blacks at the top are aware (and possibly troubled?) by Obama’s lottery winnings: “black” but not black.”
From here, it is easy to see how Kamiya came up with:
“[…] People whose race or ethnicity defines their identity, or at least makes up a major part of it, are what I think of as quotation-mark people. They are not only mixed-race, they are “mixed-race.” Those whose race or ethnicity has little or nothing to do with their identity, with their sense of themselves, are non-quotation-mark people.”
When Dickerson doesn’t put black in quotation marks, she is referring to “blackness” as she defines it in TeoB, i.e., the blackness which is ripe with contradictions and plagued by the continued subjugation of the will of individuals to group survival (we can discuss later whether or not we should agree with this definition). This is what she means when she says that Obama isn’t black. She means primarily that he lacks this fundamental subjugation of the will–that historical tensing-of-the-bow, as it were–and the inevitable contradictions that come with it.
If Obama represents that which transcends race by virtue of his alienation from the experience of the descendants of West African slaves (and also his distance from the Movement generation, then she seems to mean that Obama isn’t black as “we” use the term, i.e., as defined by the essential folk culture which grew out of (and could only have grown out of) the experience of the descendants of the West African slaves. Indeed, she makes no call for introducing a strict formalism into the discourse of cultural criticism, such that we no longer need childish quotation marks. Instead, she is nobly content to use the definition of black as supplied by the essential folk culture; by doing this, she maintains the deliciously snarky theme of TeoB when she says that Obama isn’t black as far as the black leadership is concerned.
p.s. long time no speak Dr. Spence. 🙂
there is a lot here, and i appreciate you stopping by.
here’s a question you can answer for me. in TEOB it is clear that she is speaking for herself. i understand that black leaders are making claims about obama’s blackness. i don’t buy those arguments, but i understand them.
But when she says “we” is she saying she supports the claims of “black leaders” or is she doing something else?
Because that “we” signifies to me that she is explicitly going against her argument, in as much as the “we” are making different claims about blackness than she is….AND in as much as even identifying with a “we” based on nothing more than skin color goes against her primary claim in the first place.
A little more on Barack Obama’s “black”.black ness and…girly girls. http://t.co/5RjamA5o