An interesting commentary on Race in the race

[TheMercenary]

The Way We Live Now
Mixed Messenger
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.

It’s true that, over the past months, Obama has increasingly positioned himself as a black man. That’s understandable: insisting on being seen as biracial might alienate African-American leaders and voters who have questioned his authenticity. White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” Yet, even as he proves his black cred, it may be the senator’s dual identity, and his struggles to come to terms with it, that explain his crossover appeal and that have helped him to both embrace and transcend race, winning over voters in Birmingham, Iowa, as well as Birmingham, Ala.

Mixed-race marriages were illegal in at least 16 states when Obama was born, though the taboo was historically inconsistent — white men could marry Asian women in some places, for instance, while marriages like mine, which go the other way, were forbidden. Since 1967, when those laws were declared unconstitutional, the rate of interracial marriage among all groups has skyrocketed. And those couples have children. Of the seven million Americans who identified themselves as mixed-race in the 2000 census (the first in which it was possible to do so), nearly half were under the age of 18. Almost 5 percent of Californians now identify themselves as mixed-race; by comparison, fewer than 7 percent are African-American. Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, is the most diverse state in the Union: 21 percent of residents identified as “Hapa,” a Hawaiian word meaning “half” that has gone from being a slur against mixed-race Asians to a point of pride — and has increasingly been adopted by multiracials of all kinds on the Mainland.

But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.

Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown).

Hapas muddy discussions of affirmative action and the gathering of health-care statistics. When a Centers for Disease Control researcher who called to survey me about my daughter’s vaccinations asked about her race, I answered, Caucasian and Asian. There was a pause, then she asked, “Which would you mainly identify her as?”

More than anything, though, Hapas remind us that, while racism is real, “race” is a shifting construct. Consider: Would Obama still be seen as “black enough” if the wife by his side were white? And don’t get my husband started on why Tiger Woods — whose mother is three-quarters Asian and whose father was one-quarter Chinese and half African-American — is rarely hailed as the first Asian-American golf superstar.

Race is thrust on Hapas based on the shades of their skin, the shapes of their eyes, their last names. (Quick: What race is Apolo Ohno? How about Meg Tilly? Both are half-Asian.) But ethnicity, an internal sense of culture, place and heritage — that’s more of a choice. Cultivating it in our children could be the difference between a Hapa Nation that’s a rich, variegated brown and one that fades to beige. I know that challenge firsthand. Because we are trying to raise our daughter as bicultural, much in our family is up for grabs, from the food we eat — and what we say before and after eating it — to the holidays we celebrate to whether we call her rear end a tushie or an oshiri.

For the moment, she attends a Jewish preschool (where, as it happens, a quarter of her class, not to mention an assistant rabbi, is Hapa) and identifies so strongly with my heritage that my husband has begun to feel uneasy. He recently suggested that, for balance, we enroll her in Dharma school at the Japanese Buddhist church. Let me be clear: he is an atheist who grew up Methodist; I hew to a kind of social-relativist concept of “oneness.” And our daughter is going to spend her days shuttling between two temples?

I sometimes wonder what will happen in another 50 years. Will my grandchildren “feel” Jewish? Japanese? Latino? African-American? Will they be pluralists? “Pass” as Anglo? Refuse categorization? Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes. Regardless, watching Senator Obama campaigning with his black wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and all of their multiculti kids, it seems clear that the binary, black-and-white — not to mention black-or-white — days are already behind us.

Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of a memoir, “Waiting for Daisy.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/ma...gewanted=print

[TheMercenary]

Another one.

March 23, 2008
Code-Breaking
What Politicians Say When They Talk About Race
By JANNY SCOTT
Americans and their political leaders have been tongue-tied on the subject of race. We were reminded of that last week when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race means to blacks and whites. He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity and at length. Whether the speech helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and major-party candidates addressing the American people.

The rest of it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/we...w/23scott.html

[xoxoxoBruce]

Both articles make some very good points.
Both sides have legitimate bitches, that the other side has trouble grasping. Both sides feel the other is a threat, and in their own way, they're right.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

My stepkids are half-white, half-Vietnamese (my husband is the white one.) Let me just tell you, this shit gets so old. Talk about fostering weird insecurities in the kids, when random people start asking about details of their "adoption" when they are right fucking there and certainly old enough to understand what's being asked... we even had an Indian woman actually accuse him of lying once.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

My stepkids are half-white, half-Vietnamese (my husband is the white one.) Let me just tell you, this shit gets so old. Talk about fostering weird insecurities in the kids, when random people start asking about details of their "adoption" when they are right fucking there and certainly old enough to understand what's being asked... we even had an Indian woman actually accuse him of lying once.

I am sorry to hear that. We will never get past the race issues in this country if we don't stop using them as discriminators in all facets of our life. We must give up this idea that race is what separates us. All groups do it when it meets the needs of people. I long advocated the removal of pictures for promotion packets at HQ DA. The system is so entrenched in the process there is little room for change.

[richlevy]

You can thank the Supreme Court (no sarcasm) for dumping a very stupid set of laws. I wonder if our current court would have had the balls to do it.

The plaintiffs, Mildred Jeter (a woman of African and Rappahannock Indian descent)[1][2] and Richard Perry Loving (a white man), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and a non-white person. Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban. They were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which defined "miscegenation" as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On 6 January 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that
“ Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

40 years ago a judge could get away with saying this bullshit. Fortunately, the 'great middle' of American public opinion has swung to the point where anyone saying something like this from the bench would at a minimum be held up to public ridicule.

We have and are making progress.

BTW, miscegenation laws were found unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[piercehawkeye45]

Besides the census, race in the United States is nothing more than culture (ask yourself when did the Irish become 'white'), so only when we give up race culture and multiculturalism and replace that with a more humanistic culture, can race and racism actually disappear.

Obama is the reaction to improving race relations in the United States but it is nothing more than a response. If we believe that we can get rid of negative race relations or racism all together in America by voting for Obama, we will do nothing more than shift our focus from the real problems and most likely regress in this area.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Besides the census, race in the United States is nothing more than culture (ask yourself when did the Irish become 'white'), so only when we give up race culture and multiculturalism and replace that with a more humanistic culture, can race and racism actually disappear.

Obama is the reaction to improving race relations in the United States but it is nothing more than a response. If we believe that we can get rid of negative race relations or racism all together in America by voting for Obama, we will do nothing more than shift our focus from the real problems and most likely regress in this area.

The solutions are decades away. This is a start.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Obama is the reaction to improving race relations in the United States but it is nothing more than a response. If we believe that we can get rid of negative race relations or racism all together in America by voting for Obama, we will do nothing more than shift our focus from the real problems and most likely regress in this area.

I hate the thought of anyone voting for, or against, him because he appears to be black.

But in reality, I suppose black voters will feel smug in showing up whitey and white voters will feel smug in this token act of proving they aren't racist.
Of course those that vote against him, because of his color, will feel smug too.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I hate the thought of anyone voting for, or against, him because he appears to be black.

But in reality, I suppose black voters will feel smug in showing up whitey and white voters will feel smug in this token act of proving they aren't racist.
Of course those that vote against him, because of his color, will feel smug too.

Just about everyone should feel pretty good after this election.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Just about everyone should feel pretty good after this election.

See, I've been saying he's a uniter.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

If we believe that we can get rid of negative race relations or racism all together in America by voting for Obama, we will do nothing more than shift our focus from the real problems and most likely regress in this area.

Did you catch the part where when Obama was born, interracial marriages were still completely illegal in 16 states? And now not even one generation later, a biracial man has a good chance of being elected president. (Do you imagine, by comparison, that even if gay civil unions were completely legalized across the country today, America would really be ready for a gay president in another 45 years?)

No, obviously all racial tensions will not magically disappear through a single election, but I don't know anyone who thinks they will. Certainly no one has implied it in this thread, and neither did the two articles quoted. I think you greatly underestimate how much progress has been made in this country, and greatly overestimate what degree of "regression" is really likely in this day and age. Even Reverend Wright doesn't raise the call for black people to refuse to marry whites.

[TheMercenary]

A few more reformists speak:

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/03/22...-of-amerikkka/

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

The Way We Live Now
Mixed Messenger
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
...Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, is the most diverse state in the Union: 21 percent of residents identified as “Hapa,” a Hawaiian word meaning “half” that has gone from being a slur against mixed-race Asians to a point of pride — and has increasingly been adopted by multiracials of all kinds on the Mainland...

Am I the only person who thinks this is a horrible word? If there was a child in my life of mixed race or dual heritage or whatever I would be damned if I wanted them to think they were any kind of "half". Whatever they are, they are "whole". But maybe it's a more complex word than this brief article allows.

...Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes.

This part I don't get. Why would African-Americans feel alienated by mixed race people creating their own culture from the ground up. Isn't that what the descendants of slaves, separated from land and family and sense of community had to do?

Just an added note - the three African men I work with on Saturdays have a strong belief in family, charity (ie giving) and community. I know if I asked them how to "solve" the problem of the balck underclass in the US their answer would be, "Make them stay in school and get a good job, otherwise forget them!" I can't help thinking that Europe fucked a whole continent with slavery and colonialism, and America has mostly had to deal with the fallout.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

This part I don't get. Why would African-Americans feel alienated by mixed race people creating their own culture from the ground up. Isn't that what the descendants of slaves, separated from land and family and sense of community had to do?

My personal experience is that it is a threat because the more dilute the races become, the less handouts and ability to live off the "race card" will become more difficult. I already see it among economic differences between blacks/mixed race couples in my neighborhood and those who remain in the lower social-economic ladder. The average home in our neighborhood is between $250k and $350k (this equates to a home in NJ between $500k and $700k). We have 49 homes. 9 homes are owned by Black/mixed-race/mixed marriage families. Everyone of them stand-up neighbors who I would do anything to help. We are a pretty close and fairly isolated neighborhood. Now when they talk about blacks who are on the dole nice things are not said. I think they just figured out how to make good on the American dream as so many other non-black immigrant families have whom also started with nothing when they got here. Differences between and amongst blacks who have become financially stable is contributing to the stress among those at the lower end of the economic continuum among like races. The more successful that people of color become, the more difficult it will become for their like races to use the basket terms of excuses that help them stay trapped in poverty. The sense of family is based on one of a strong maternal figure. Many of them are minus the father figure. I see it everyday at work. Just my opinion.