Black White Man

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-30/a-rapper-salutes-the-slave-trade/

The instances of racism that make me the most sad are those that are internalized racism.   When I was living in Africa, I saw it a lot.   One time, I was riding a bus and we were at one of the standard security checkpoints.   The soldier checking our papers started by saying that although he had black skin, he had a mind like a white man, so we better not try to get anything over on him.   In this country, I think that the problem is perhaps even more severe.   The only things that most Americans of any race learn about Africa are the old colonial images of spear-chucking savages, and the more modern images of Rwandan style civil war.   If this is all that young Black people are learning about Africans, then is it surprising that they consider European involvement — any European involvement — to be beneficial?   Soulja boy got a lot of bad press for his “shout out to the slave masters”, but really this is a failure of education which is much more endemic than one rapper.

Here’s a list which includes a fair number of historical and modern synonyms for “multi-racial”

I would like to start compiling a comprehensive list, including slang.  I’d like to try to include terms that some might consider derogatory, if you all will indulge me and try not to be insulted.   I’ve heard, to describe myself and my friends:

• Zebra
• Zebra head
• Oreo
• Reverse Oreo (white skin, black inside)
• Mulatto (oddly missing from the linked list)
• Metisse (in Francophone African countries, used to describe people of mixed White and Black ancestry)
• Coloured (in Anglophone African countries, used to describe people of mixed White and Black ancestry)

What else?

It seems like a lifetime ago now, but I used to work in market research.  My job was to craft online surveys for such luminaries as Ford Motors, Hillary Clinton and Christina Aguilara.   Needless to say, the question of race was often an important one, as corporations and politicos both tried to cater to (quite often) Hispanic and (occasionally) African American audiences.

When I was in High School and starting to define my complicated relationship to race, I was somewhat in favor of “Multi-racial” as a separate category.   But after working in market research for some time, I’ve come to really detest it.   Throwing a Black-White person like me into the same group as a Hispanic-Asian person, and thinking that your going to get any relevant data from the group is ridiculous.

I understand that the other alternatives aren’t particularly attractive either.

• You can allow people to check more than one race, but then you end up double- or triple- counting people with complicated ethnicities — making their opinions more important in some way.
• You can force people to choose only one race, which causes multi-ethnic people to complain loudly (myself included).
• Or you can allow people to check multiple boxes and then quietly recode them into a single race on the back end.   This is subversive and makes your own racial biases institutionalized (for example, that a Hispanic Black person is “really” one or the other).

But, really, I think that having a “multi-racial” category as separate from the other races is a cop out.   It’s worse than a bad solution — it’s an avoidance of the entire problem.   All it really does is cause the data supplied by multi-racial people to be thrown out (at least, any data as regards to race).

Let me give you an example.    I’ve been looking for schools for my son, who’s in preschool at the moment.   The Chicago Public Schools do a good job of giving you a break-down of each school by racial demographics.    This has been crucial to me, because I want my son to grow up in a multi-cultural environment that reflects his home life.   Unfortunately, the CPS data includes “multiracial” as a category.   Usually, you can guess at what it means.   If a school is 80% Black, 10% White and 10% Multiracial, chances are that the multiracial kids are Black and White.   But, it can get a little dodgy.   Some of the private schools, in particular, have higher “multiracial” percentages than any minority.   What am I to make of a hypothetical demographic like 60% White, 20% multiracial, 10% Black, 10% Asian.   Are there any Hispanic kids at a school like that?   Could be tons.   Could be none.   The multiracial statistic by itself obfuscates as much as, if not more than it clarifies.

Bitch if the New Black (via Jezebel)

Black is the New President, Bitch (via Jezebel)

For those of you who missed it, Saturday Night Live is slowly coming back to both political relevance and actually being consistently funny for the first time since Will Farrell left. I think this is the first time they’ve been both since Eddie Murphy!

In these links Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan play out for us a conversation that’s happening all over the country, but is too edgy for most of the mainstream media. Is Clinton a bitch, and do we want a bitch for a president? Does Obama have a shot at the White House because he’s Black, or despite it?

Personally I think that Tina Fey was on point for every single one of her arguments, while Tracy Morgan resorted to easy personal attacks on Senator Clinton… but my goal here is more to present the links than to comment on them, so I’ll stop there and let you judge for yourselves.

In the debate about whether or not racism still exists in this country, I think that the central point of disagreement is whether a country with equal laws can still be unequal.     The civil rights movement did an enormous amount of heavy lifting as far as equalizing the laws of the land.   There is no longer state-sanctioned apartheid, not to mention slavery.    And we are not only explicitly granted equality under the law, but discrimination is specifically forbidden.    So the argument that we are now in an equal society is persuasive, to the extent that the laws are now more or less equal.

But, discrimination law suits are much harder to win than a lot of people might expect.    It’s just too easy to claim you had some other reason for discrimination (the person was lazy, or had attitude or what-have-you).    This is basically what happens when policemen use racial profiling when making an arrest, or when juries convict, and therefore, to my mind, is the best explanation for the incredibly high rates of minorities in jail.

To support this idea, I fall back (as I always do) on the statistics.   More minority people in jail, fewer in college.   Lower average incomes.    Etc. etc. ad nauseum.    When confronted with these kinds of statistics, there’s only three explanations I can reasonably imagine:

• there is still racism, and/or classism
• past racism has effects which linger several generations
• minorities haven’t seized the opportunities given to them

To me, the last one smacks of the same “minorities are lazy” assertion  that has always existed in this country (and, in fact, is the etymology of the slur “nigger”).     If we, as a culture, maintained that people were lazy as slaves, and then were proven wrong; and then maintained that people were lazy under apartheid, and then were proven wrong; then why oh why would we continue to make the same argument?    I’m not even sure how you can rationally argue that an entire population of people are lazy.   Clearly, even if I concede that a whole group of people are lazy (which I don’t) then there should be some *reason* why they are lazy.    And if not, then you must be arguing genetics — which is the height of 19th century pseudo-science-style racism.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone who thinks that this country isn’t racist are themselves racist.    What I’m saying is that I don’t think they’ve really thought through their position.     I’m not sure how you can start with the idea that this country isn’t racist and end with any assumptions that are good; but I’d love to hear from someone who disagrees.

One of the great achievements of the last forty years in race relations in this country has been the formation of a strong and present Black middle class.     People like my mother blazed a trail, working their way up from poor rural Michigan farms, into the halls of medical school and onward to high paying government research jobs.    As a result subsequent generations have produced people like Obama and myself:

• many more of us openly mixed race then in previous generations
• we didn’t grow up in impoverished situations
• we’ve attended the best schools and had solidly successful careers from the beginning
• we have been raised mostly as minorities in a white context, rather than struggling up from segregated ghettoized neighborhoods

In cities with high concentrations of Black people (Atlanta, New York, and so forth) you’re even seeing the formation of entire Black middle class communities.     This, in and of itself, is a great thing.    But it requires that we, as Americans, now revise our definition of what it means to be Black and to add a lot more shading to our goals as a society.    Basically, I think that we need to start taking apart the assumption that poor Black people are representative of the Black community on a whole — in the past this was largely true, but it’s increasingly less so.

The assumption that there is one “Black community” leads the mainstream white culture to use the success of Black middle class people to argue or prove that there is no longer a problem with race relations in this country.    In reality the situation is still extremely dire for poor Blacks.    And in this way, I think, the Black community is quickly becoming more and more like the white community.

Poor white people have a very hard time.    All you have to do is watch an hour or two of the E! channel and you’ll see some ass or another making fun of “white trash” or “blue states” or some other term used to talk about poor whites in some way or another.     The idea that this kind of validation of bigotry against the poor may become the norm against Black people as well makes me ill to my stomach.    Not only do I think that we, as a society, have largely turned our backs on poor White people, but the proportion of poor Blacks compared to the Black community is much much higher than the proportion of poor Whites to the the White community on a whole.

I think that we’ve made a lot of progress on the race-relations front.  But I think that the problems we have remaining hit on deeper issues that we have in this country regarding class.    The intersection between racism and classism is a nasty place to be, but unfortunately, that’s where we are.    As a middle class Black guy, I really hope that we can avert people in my position being used as ammunition against the working class Black folk continue to suffer in a very oppressive society.

Chasing the dream (via MSN)

I’ve found the media coverage of this anniversary to be extremely interesting — and for once I’m not angered by the media to the point of speechlessness.    This is exactly the kind of discourse that I think our nation needs, and I found the article to be wonderfully balanced in that it presented arguments that we have achieved the dream, as well as arguments that we have not — often juxtaposing arguments within the same field, such as comparing perhaps racially equal housing policy with perhaps biased behavior on the part of real estate agents.

Since Obama’s speech, I’ve been trying to be conscientiously more open-minded to the point of view that there’s no longer racism in our society.   I completely reject the idea, but I think that the conversation about it is critically important to our society.    And in order to have that conversation, the people on my side of the argument have to be able to have a rational discourse without resorting to name-calling and without estranging and polarizing people who merely disagree.   MLK was a unifier and his appeal was universal.    He wouldn’t have gotten much done otherwise — ultimately the civil rights movement was won through votes cast by white politicians to enact civil rights legislation.

As someone who has felt a lot of racism, I can only imagine how angry the average dark-skinned black person is.    But I do believe that a lot of racism comes out of ignorance about how hard it is to be Black (or Hispanic, or a woman, or whatever) moreso than real malice.   Sure, the malice exists.   But it’s important I think to distinguish between people who are well-intentioned and people who aren’t.   We should be able to have the kinds of conversations which are kicked off by that MSN article with the well-intentioned bunch who simply happen to disagree with us, and that’s definitely something that I have to be a little bit better about.

Protesters Say Monument Stands For Racism, Bigotry

I spent a lot of time growing up in the South, and I’ve seen how pride in being a Southerner gets all wrapped up in pride about the Civil War.   I’m sensitive to it, and I can see the other side.   Especially since our country still grapples with the tension between states’ rights versus the power of the federal (or even international) government, the values of the Confederate uprising aren’t entirely something of the past.  Theres a mythos there that persists.

On the other hand…

Near my house here in northern Virginia there’s a plaque on a tree which memorializes that Yankee spies used to be hanged there.   This is directly on my way when I take my family out for our weekly Sunday brunch.    It’s both morbid and disturbing.   As much as I sympathize with the ideals of the Civil War extending past a battle over slavery — it was also about slavery.   As a “mulatto,” if I had lived at the time, I would certainly have been fighting on the side of the North, and I would also certainly have been ‘passing’ as white.   And who’s to say I wouldn’t have been discovered and strung up on that tree?   For that matter, whose to say that any of my white friends wouldn’t have been caught as spies and strung up on that tree.   Regardless of what the real underpinnings of that war were, regardless of what it means for cultural pride, there are appropriate ways to express your culture and commemorate history and there are inappropriate ways.   I’d like to think that the issue of confederate monuments would be a prime example of something that we could compromise on as a culture… but maybe I’m wrong.

Elise has a very good post about the drawbacks and benefits being raised in an interracial family.   It struck me that some people seriously consider the pros and cons of bringing children into multi-racial families — not because that’s a bad thing to consider, it’s a good thing to think about; but because it’s never been a choice for me, so I’ve never considered it a choice, really.    Of course, I didn’t choose being born into a multi-racial family myself, and I’ve always imagined myself in multi-racial families myself.   Whether I married a Black or a White woman, I’d consider that relationship to be somewhat multi-racial.

Reading over Elise’s post, one thing that struck me is that, to me, the ‘downside’ of not feeling like you fit in and that you’re not represented in popular media, which are very serious issues that I had growing up (and continue to have) is something very external.   There’s a system of racial categorization “out there” and I don’t happen to fit into it.    Conversely, the ‘strength’ of being taught about diversity and inclusiveness, which I find equally true in my case, I’ve always considered a personal strength.    So, in my mind at least, the ‘pro’ and the ‘con’ of being raised in a multi-racial family don’t exactly balance out.   They have a complicated synergy, as if being flip sides of the same coin.

I think that systems of classifying race are important, at least for the time and place that we live in now.    There are differences between people which are important for us to talk about (e.g. differences in culture, income, and health), and so we need language.    But any system has its flaws, and I think that problems I’ve had fitting in are useful in highlighting those flaws, without necessarily throwing out the whole system altogether.    So, I guess I see the ‘strength’ of diversity as being a cure for the ‘problem’ of not fitting in.    It’s not as simple as a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’, but more of an ongoing process.    There will always be ways to categorize people which will be simultaneously useful and also sources of division — the same thing happens on class, nationality, gender, religion, profession, etc. etc.   And so I think there will also be a difficult but important role for people who don’t fit into those categories.    I don’t think parents should be shying away from the concept, any more than I think that we should be encouraging multi-racial-ness.   It simply is what it is, something to be proud of, but not any moreso than people who are deeply entrenched in one ancestry should be proud of that.

http://usjamerica.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/racism-is-dead/ 

When I was in college in Boston there was an incident of a police officer leaving a noose over the parking space of another officer.    I was shocked by how little press it got.     Recently there was the Jena 6 incident.    And as I troll the Internet, I’m seeing more and more incidents of people leaving nooses out, and then being shocked when it’s taken seriously.

Really, America?    Do you not understand that gravity of that symbol?    In a country that’s so sensitive around the images of terrorism, I find the lack of sympathy around what are symbols of a older terror tactic to be staggering.