Since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president, we as a nation have adopted, and tried to adapt, the concept of “post racial,” whatever the hell that means. Post racial what? Doesn’t the term suggest that until now, we were a country defined by race? Or, is it just about our national attitude about race? Wouldn’t “post-racism” be a better phrase? We are still a nation composed of many people of many races, and many combinations and variations of those races. How do you get beyond being whatever you racially are? And why would you want to?
That seems to be the point of an article by Krissah Williams Thompson in today’s Washington Post. Thompson examines her own racial perceptions and how they were shaped, altered, and crystallized while covering Barack Obama on the campaign trail, concluding that whatever “post-racial” is, she’s not that.
Another WaPo article today, by Marie Arana, claims that since his mother was white, Obama is not black. Arana, who claims to be of mixed race, and Thompson, self-identified as black, struggle to place the significance of the election of a non-white president in context, based on their own unique racial experiences. Neither is technically wrong in their conclusions, yet neither writer sums up the “post-racial” reality in any definitive way. Such a thing simply cannot be done.
Going back to a March 2008 article in The New Republic, the point was being made that Obama and “post-racial” racism was not only confounding the whole question of race in America, it didn’t seem that race was nearly as big a deal as many would have expected it to be. At least, not in any predictable way. Citing white supremicists like David Duke, TNR’s Michael Crowley found that Obama’s “blackness” was not as offensive to proponents of “white pride” as was the “betrayal” of Europeans like John McCain, and to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton (they hate her on principle.)
Yet, far from railing at Obama’s rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, “don’t see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton–or, for that matter, John McCain.” Sure, Duke considers Obama “a racist individual,” citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. “They say he’s for change. What change? He’s become almost a cult figure. I don’t see any shining light around Obama’s head. I don’t see any halos,” Duke said.
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But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It’s a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush’s immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America’s European-based culture. “I don’t think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain,” explains Duke. “In fact,” he added, “we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights.”
There have been those who have made the point that the election of Barack Obama is primarily significant for the sense of racial possibility it represents for young people. However, unless one is trying to suggest that anyone can be president as long as he’s a male with at least one white parent, that argument doesn’t really hold water. There has never been a female, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, or openly gay American, nor Viet Nam veteran, little person, or circus clown elected president, either. In fact, to be specific, there’s never been a traditionally defined black American president, and there still isn’t. Are those children not allowed to dream of what most Americans perceive to be ultimate success? What about those who don’t even rate a mention in articles like this?
There are those who feel that we are now “post-racial exploitation.” That, now that we have a black president, the need for black activism has been eliminated. Those “subconciously racist racists” eager to rejoice and celebrate the demise of the Civil Rights Movement are deluding themselves into believing that merely putting a black face on the conductor of the political machine of systemic racial oppression is the same as eradicating it. Nothing can be further from the truth. The “illusion of inclusion,” and the exploitation of tokenism is as much a part of America’s racial fabric as slavery, Jim Crow laws and minstrel shows. From “The Man In The Middle: The Black Slave Driver:”
Wise planters of the ante-bellum South never relaxed their search for talent among their slaves. The ambitious, intelligent, and proficient were winnowed out and recruited for positions of trust and responsibility. These privileged bondsmen—artisans, house servants, foremen—served as intermediaries between the master and the slave community; they exercised considerable power; they learned vital skills of survival in a complex, often hostile world. Knowing, as they did, the master’s needs and vulnerabilities, they were the most dangerous of slaves; but they were also the most necessary.
Let’s face it, “post-racial” is a public relations slogan for a successful presidential marketing campaign, nothing more. “Vote for me in spite of the fact that I’m not white and you’ll feel better, and, if you’re black, then vote for me because I look like you and this is as close as you’re gonna get to the White House,” was too long to fit on a banner. To be painfully obvious, if we were indeed “post-racial” we wouldn’t need a word for it. The subject simply would never have come up.
Newsbusters isn’t buying it, either.
