The New York Times has recently featured a story on how Barack Obama and some other politicians of his generation have down-played the issue of race in their campaigns and in their approach to politics.
The underlying assumption seems to be that we are now in a "post-racial" period in this country. To me, it is more accurate to say that we have entered into a period of avoiding close examination of the system of race in this country.
What I was hoping for from the discussion in the New York Times was at least some tacit acknowledgment that race is an invention. But instead, as usual, the underlying premise remained unquestioned.
Barack Obama's candidacy offers the opportunity to ask ourselves what this racial thing is all about. First of all, he apparently identifies as a "black" man. However, we all know that it looks as if one half of his family came from Europe. There is even a town in Ireland claiming him as its native son.
I say "looks as if" because one never really knows who one's ancestors are. So, even though his mother's side of the family has this European aspect to it, like Dr. James Watson's, their DNA may tell a different story. And, even if there is an unbroken string of Europeans on his mother's side, that "string" for the purposes of the idea of race, only goes back a few hundred years because that is how long the current notion of race has been with us.
On the other hand, Obama's father's side is not the typical "black" or "African-American" story, since his father came to the United States: 1) voluntarily and 2) in the 20th century. So, unlike Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey (for example), his familiarity with the "black" experience has not been learned directly from family, but through his own, post-civil rights experiences and friendships. This is part of the reason, and perhaps the reason Obama addressed the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. He needed to make it clear that, although he was not directly descended from persons held in American slavery, (and therefore perhaps not "really black") he was aware of and committed to carrying on the work of those who are.
All of this should only make us look more deeply at what the racial system is all about. What does it mean that a person whose mother identified as a "white" person and whose father was a (temporary) immigrant from Kenya is "black?" If one of Obama's children marries a "white" person, will their children still be "black?" And, if so, why?
If race has no valid biological use (as opposed to gender) but we can see that it has within the last forty years and for hundreds of years before that, been used to separate and classify people, what was that all about?
The uncomfortable truth for those in America who can and do identify as "white" people is that race was one of the primary mechanisms for sorting out who could be a full citizen and who could not. The fact that the foundations for the idea of race were mythical doesn't change the fact that, in a country devoted to the "proposition that all men are created equal" those in power excluded entire classes of men and women for no other reason than having ancestors who were not born in Western Europe after about 1500 CE.
Not only that, but within this larger group called the white people were the original power brokers who further narrowed the category of acceptable citizens to "Anglo-Saxons," another mythical group created out of whole cloth to justify everything from the overthrow of the Catholic Church by Henry VIII to the execution of Charles I to the exclusion of persons of African descent from possession of any rights "which a white man was bound to respect."
Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt all fit neatly into the Anglo-Saxon myth. Jefferson mandated that Anglo-Saxon be studied at the University of Virginia, Lincoln served as an example of the strength of Anglo-Saxon blood overcoming abject poverty to rise to great political heights and Teddy Roosevelt was a great believer in the "white man's" burden, using it to justify invasion and war.
This devotion to Anglo-Saxonism peaked in the 19th century, both here and in England, slowly coming into disrepute by the middle of the 20th century. However, it is not dead. It is still openly proclaimed by white supremacist groups. Those groups, in turn, form the extremist fringe of right wing conservatism, whose nostalgia for the good old days of Anglo-Saxon dominance occasionally shine through at birthday parties for 100 year old "states rights" heroes.
So, if Obama wins the presidency it will be necessary for us to either ignore this Anglo-Saxon racist past or to resurrect some other part of our past and install it as the central story of America. Fortunately, there is some material to work with here.
First, start with the Declaration of Independence. However, in order to make this usable to a post-Obama America, we will have to pay more attention to those (including some non-Anglo-Saxons) who steadfastly refused to allow this country to forget those words. This will require elevating Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth to higher places in the pantheon of American heroes and distancing ourselves from Andrew (Trail of Tears) Jackson and other slave-holding Presidents, to say nothing of the outright rejection (finally) of anti-heroes like Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas.
It will require us to be more conscious of the link between the Declaration and the Gettysburg address and how Lincoln's justification for civil war (i.e. to preserve a nation devoted to equality) was not universally accepted or admired at the time, but more or less forced upon him by events which were as much in the control of the slave population's mass exodus from slavery as any military policy of his or his commanders.
It will require us to appreciate and celebrate the wisdom and insight of intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois and to validate the correctness of their stands against the retrograde racism of their time.
Finally, the election of Barack Obama offers us the opportunity to disband the so-called "white" people in favor of creating a new, improved group of Americans who recognize that all of our common ancestry is in Africa and that ancestry stretches back tens of thousands, not hundreds, of years.
However, my sense is that the "white" people in influential positions in our government, culture and media have yet to recognize this opportunity, let alone begin to devise ways of taking advantage of it. So, many of those who do not identify as white and who have similar positions of influence and have ambition as well, choose not to directly confront this situation either.
I suppose that Obama's election also offers an opportunity for further myth-making. One that does not require jettisoning the idea of race, but only adapts it to the new situation. This myth would permit the white people to stay white, the black people to stay black and those, like Obama, who don't fit neatly into any category of the racial system to pretend that none of this matters. To be "bi-racial" or "multi-racial" without having to acknowledge that such terms are about as valid as "bi-religious" or "multi-pagan."
This latter direction is the one which some Latin American countries took early in the last century. However, this was in fact just a way of smoothing things over so that the descendants of the original colonial elite could continue in positions of dominance. Which is why I prefer directly confronting the mythology of our racial past and at least attempting to replace it with something more inclusive and more useful to us in the future.