Earlier today hunter blogged about Christopher Hitchens' recent Wall Street Journal Editorial.
Although there is much to disagree with in Hitchen's editorial, it is not as obviously the product of an alcohol addled brain as Hunter might think.
The problem for Hitchens is that he gets the first step in analyzing race in America right. It's the second step which he screws up.
That first step in understanding why race in America so undermines what we are all about is to debunk the centuries old belief about human biology which justified race as a biological concept.
The idea of race is pretty straight forward. Pick a particular trait shared by a group. Then, keep track of that trait from generation to generation. You could have, for example, conducted a census of the U.S. as of 1800 and taken note of who was a carpenter. If you then made sure you knew which children, grandchildren, etc were descended from the "original" carpenters, you would have a race of carpenters.
Noah Webster’s Original 1828 Edition Dictionary, Volume II, Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York and London (1970)has this as the definition of race:
The lineage of a family, or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is the series of descendants indefinitely. Thus all mankind are called the race of Adam; the Israelites are of the race of Abraham and Jacob. Thus we speak of a race of kings, the race of Clovis or Charlemagne; a race of nobles, etc."
This tracing of lineage, in fact, is what happened in the U.S. where persons of African descent were concerned. However, the point in time which the Americans chose as the starting point was somewhere around 1500. In other words, in the U.S. by around 1900 or so, a person was considered "black" if that person had one ancestor born in Africa after 1500.
Now, the fact that a person has such an ancestor is of no greater biological significance than if the same person had an ancestor who was a carpenter in 1800. This is where Hitchens is correct. He is also correct when he says that we all have African ancestors. Every human being alive today shares a common maternal ancestor, who lived in Central West Africa some time in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years. The evidence of that is in our mitochondrial dna.
But, in the United States, having an ancestor born in Africa sometime after 1500 had consequences that having a carpenter ancestor did not.
It meant that you could be a slave, while someone who either did not have such an ancestor or was able to conceal the fact could not be a slave. After the abolition of slavery, it meant that there were limitations on your ability to act on your talents, live where you wanted or marry whom you wanted.
The U.S. racial system contains two false assumptions. The first is that there is something biologically significant about having and ancestor born in Africa (or Europe or China or India, etc) after about 1500. The second is that there is some connection between that ancestry and behavior. Slaveowners and other racists made use of both false assumptions to justify the existence of inequality in the land of equality. However, the fact that these two assumption are false does not render them meaningless.
A good analogy here is what happened to persons who were accused of witchcraft in Salem in the late 17th century. We know with certainty that the persons who were hanged in Salem did not engage in black magic or consort with the devil. (OK. Most of us know this). But the fact that there were no witches in the black magic sense did not prevent them from being hanged. The myth of witchcraft had very real and very lethal consequences for them.
This is where Hitchens comes up short. Deconstructing the biological basis for race is not the end of the analysis, it is the beginning. We have built a country around the assumption that there is something biologically significant in who one's ancestors are. The concept is embedded in law and has real, everyday consequences for everyone who lives here.
Persons who today identify as black or African American did not invent the system. But, in response to that system, there is a community of persons who identify in that way. Hitchens is correct to point out that Obama does not fit into the usual mold of persons who identify as black or African-American. But he is wrong to assume that is the end of the discussion.
How Obama identifies is not up to Hitchens or me or anyone other than Obama and the members of the community he wants to belong to. If race has no biological significance, it is nonetheless a social fact in this country. If Obama and the persons in the community where he lives see value in his and their identifying as black, then it is somewhat arrogant for Hitchens, or anyone, to presume to know better and declare this either not possible or somehow inappropriate.
Hitchens may fall into the group of individuals who, having seen the fallacy of the biological concept of race, declare the problem solved and cannot understand why anyone would pay attention to it any more. Ward Connerly is also in this group. So is William Bennett.
I for one will declare the issue of race irrelevant when a majority of persons who belong to communities which have been on the receiving end of this country's racist past decide that it is irrelevant.
As for Hitchens refusal to vote for Obama because he is black or for Clinton because she is female, I say what's the problem?
It is a statistical certainty that in a country of 300,000,000 plus there is at least one female (50% of the population) and one person who identifies as black (12% of the population) who is equally qualified to be president as any male who identifies as white (a group which comprises less than 50% of the population). I say that there is one example of each running for the nomination of the Democratic party.
So, if there are such persons available, what is the problem with allowing race or gender to influence the choice? It's not like we're choosing between Anne Coulter and George Washington. Or O.J. Simpson and Franklin Roosevelt. The Republic will survive, if not flourish, regardless of which one of the top three remaining Democrats becomes president.
Allowing race or gender to be one of the factors in the choice of equally qualified candidates is the essence of affirmative action, and there's nothing wrong with it. Unless you're the white guy who now has to compete in the real world and not the mythical world of the 19th century.