Views » February 14, 2008
How Black is Obama?
The notion of inherent 'blackness' is a concept of commerce, coined to justify European plunder and maintain an enslaved workforce.
How can racism still be a problem if so many white Americans are willing to support a black man like Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president?
This rhetorical question worries some analysts, who warn that Obama’s prominence, ironically, could set back the struggle for racial equality. They argue that his transracial appeal would convince many that the country has “transcended race,” making them less supportive of efforts to redress slavery’s legacy. Of course, Obama’s intentions have little to do with this effect.
His path-breaking campaign and its implications are elements of a racial dynamic set in motion long before his white Kansan mother met his black Kenyan father. Their interracial union produced a son whose fame has triggered a substantive conversation about race and culture in a nation where it is long overdue.
Race as a concept emerged contemporaneously with the first burst of European capitalist expansion in the 18th century. Scientific texts like Carolus Linnaeus’s 1786 work, Systema Naturea, had begun classifying humans according to new racial taxonomy, and African people usually wound up on the bottom rung of humanity’s ladder.
These scientific “proofs” joined theological treatises and philosophical musings to implant white supremacy as European conventional wisdom. This mindset helps explain how the Founding Fathers rationalized (and condoned) the existence of racial slavery in a nation ostensibly based on freedom and liberty.
American slavery added wrinkles to the reigning conventional wisdom. In our version of human bondage, only Africans and their progeny were eligible–or “enslaveable”–and this perverse eligibility spanned generations.
This involuntary workforce was a collection of kidnapped Africans from a variety of ethnic groups. A brutal slave system and rigid racial hierarchy transformed these enslaved Africans into African Americans–a distinctive ethnic variation in the far-flung African diaspora.
Just one drop of African blood conferred blackness, and that helped ensure a ready supply of enslaved workers. Children sired by white slave owners and enslaved women helped pad the workforces of many plantations and account for the wide range of complexions in the black community today. The notion of an inherent “blackness,” then, is a concept of commerce, coined to justify European plunder. (Similarly, hundreds of European ethnicities were conflated into a confining notion of “whiteness.”)
Despite Obama’s hybrid racial pedigree, he is “black” by the one-drop tradition. Unlike most black Americans, however, his history is not framed by generations of racial subordination. This distinction is significant. Because Obama’s ancestral narrative lacks slavery, his self-image likely lacks the wounds from that history. Although he had a more varied source of identity, Obama identifies as an African American and became conversant with the racial choreography of American culture. White Americans likely sense the lack of racial grievance and respond gratefully. This gratitude helps explains why Obama mania has swept the nation.
He openly embraces aspects of his blackness, as well, which allows whites to see him as an authentic repository of their historical guilt from which he can then absolve them.
In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama notes “race fatigue” and writes that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites … tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country.”
Some critics argue that Obama is intentionally accommodating this race fatigue. “Obama is playing to the perverse racial politics of the post-civil rights era,” writes Paul Street in the webzine ZNet, “wherein the leading architects of policy and opinion have declared ‘race’ as a barrier to black advancement.”
This is a complicated tale. When detractors of Obama note he lacks an ancestry framed by chattel slavery, they are making a valid point. What’s more, white Americans are likely to view Obama’s rise as a sign that racism is at bay.
However, they also may grow to understand that Obama’s success charts the potential for many African Americans for whom the legacy of slavery lingers too long.
Obama’s role as an exemplar of America’s promise may prompt new efforts to open that promise for the millions of African Americans trapped on the low end.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is the host of "The Salim Muwakkil" show on WVON, Chicago's historic black radio station, and he wrote the text for the book HAROLD: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years.
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Reader Comments
This article is so very silly in such a wide variety of ways, where to begin?
First one should note that white slavery also existed in the US. Might as well attempt to be somewhat accurate.
Second, it must be just a tad insulting to tell black folks that they are not *really* black, unless they have slavery in their past.
One might have also added in that the black folks kidnapped from Africa were largely kidnapped by other black folks. Perhaps this is not so relavant to the discussion, given that black folks here are doing so much better than those left behind. . .
Didn’t OJ prove that black folks can get away with murder, even when the evidence was crystal clear? Justice in our society is more linked to economic *class*, rather than race.
Obama is not so much black by the “one drop” “principle, but rather by the color of his skin and the fact he is fully 50% black (and 50% white). Hell, that makes him “blacker” than most US blacks!
“Because Obama
Posted by wolf on Feb 14, 2008 at 9:29 AM
I disagree with wolf that race is not an issue in America today. I do not disagree that guilt over slavery is non-existent, or at least very rare.
Slavery happened. The enslaved were Africans. The history of the African slave trade has helped motivate nations to fight current practices of human trafficking and slavery.
Racism exists in America on an individual basis, just as do many other biases. Someone could easily vote for a Black person to be president but still not want to have a neighbor on the same block who is Black. The word Black can be substituted for any other racial or ethnical category.
John McCain was born in Panama. He was a prisoner of war. Those are rare in today’s America. These set him apart from many White Americans by experience, just as Obama is set apart from many Black and White Americans by experience. Neither of them have the experience of having a relative slip across a border in order to have a better job to provide for a family back in Mexico. Hillary Clinton is from an era in which women struggled to be accepted in most professions. There are many women of voting age who did not share that experience. Similarly, the much vaunted Cuban American voters are split by generation between those who fled Castro and those who fled post-USSR Cuba. Ultimately, the question for any candidate is if voters see him or her as American enough.
Millions of Americans are trapped on the low end, regardless of skin color or of sex. Affirmative action and gender equality are not intended to help every individual. The goal is to provide opportunity in the categories so an individual in any category can have an opportunity for reaching higher. We will not achieve racial equality until Blacks and Whites and Hispanics start to see each other equally. For now, we are in a backlash. I caught a PBS special in which it was stated African American churches and other organizations were started because it allowed their members to have a place where they could be in charge. I regularly have the feeling that Blacks in America are still wanting to exclude Whites so they can run their own communities. Blacks must become as comfortable with Whites as Whites must be comfortable with Blacks for there to be racial equality.
Posted by SillyLeftist on Feb 14, 2008 at 3:28 PM
If race were not a highly significant matter in the U.S. today, it would not be so important to settle on Obama’s racial identity. His skin colour defines him. If this were not the case, he could be running as a white man, given that his mother was white. Race is determinative. What it MEANS is as complex as Muwakkil’s article indicates, whether the author has it exactly “right” or not.
The fact that Obama does not have slavery in his past also has some significance. This is a powerful ghost from history that plays itself out in so many complicated ways, just as the Holocaust plays out in the lives of Jews (and everyone else). To suggest that people whose recent ancestors have not suffered that experience are not constructed differently from those whose ancestors did is naive.
Posted by hesperia on Feb 14, 2008 at 10:52 PM
“We inherit not ‘what really happened’ to the dead but what lives on from that happening, what is conjured from it, how past generations and events occupy the force fields of the present, how they claim us, and how they haunt, plague, and inspirit our imaginations and visions for the future.” -Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History
Posted by hesperia on Feb 15, 2008 at 12:41 AM
I cannot ever agree that a man’s skin color defines him! It is the defining of men and women with that single physical attribute that has led to the long tale of suffering that is race relations in America.
However, whether or not Obama is descended from slaves, the one thing that can always be said is that a non-“white” has not only made a serious run at the presidency, but has been taken seriously as a candidate by people across racial categories and across regions. He is supported or opposed on a variety of grounds, over and above the issues traditionally linked to race.
He’s a candidate who is “black”, but he’s not really a Black candidate at all, in the sense that his race and the political agendas derived from racial issues are not the center of his candidacy.
That may cost him votes from those who want him to be a racial candidate, but as an important milestone in the history of the United States, I think it’s a measureable and striking step in the right direction.
Posted by Kuya on Feb 15, 2008 at 12:49 AM
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