For all of the incessant talk of "black" and "white" and "multi-racial" and "race" which has filled the airways over the past weeks, Americans are incredible in their disconnect from the reality of the racial system and the way in which they resist being dragged from their cocoon.
"Race" as a concept is as "real" as witches were in colonial Salem, MA. Looking back on that time from our perspective, we can see that the guys who decided to hang people for consorting with the devil were more than a little wacky.
But, be that as it may, the wackiness of it didn't prevent the people who were accused of witchcraft from being hanged. They suffered the effects of witchcraft just as thoroughly as if they had been accused of capital murder and hanged for that. Race in America is similar.
Think about it for a minute. A person whose ancestors were over 80% from Europe and less than 20% from Africa was "black" in Virginia and probably would still be considered so. In fact, in Virginia in the 1920's if a person had any ancestor born in Africa in the prior 500 years they were black.
On the other hand, in Ohio in the 1850's, if more than one-half of a person's ancestors were born in Europe, that person was white. In other states at other times, if more than one-fourth of a person's ancestors were born in Europe, the person was white.
Some of Jefferson's descendants by Sally Hemmings are white while others are black. Today, some persons who have one parent who identifies as white and another who identifies as black choose to identify as white. Others choose to identify as black. Still others choose to identify as multi-racial. Still others reject all such "racial" choices. Still others alter their choice of identity over time.
Just looking at the way in which race is handled on the census forms should give any thinking person reason to wonder what this system is all about and whether it has any basis in reality. The answer is, it doesn't. But, like the "witches" of Salem, being designated by a racial name carries consequences. Emmet Till and thousands of others who carried the mythical designation "black" died unjustly as a result.
So, yes, the American racial system is a confusing mess. Yet, the people who call themselves "white" seem to think that they are referring to something about themselves and others which is as real as their eye color or their gender.
People like Wolfe Blitzer, Geraldine Ferraro and countless other people blather on like they know what race means and that meaning is fixed.
But race has never been fixed in America. And Barack Obama's rise as the leading contender for the Democratic nomination for president demonstrates this every time he talks about his mother, his father and his grandparents. In other words, Barack Obama himself should be a source of cognitive dissonance for every pundit who lets the words "white" and "black" drop from their tongues.
But, in America, it is far easier to pretend that the unreal is real and ignore the contradictions than it is to face them head-on. Slaveholders preferred to fight a disastrous civil war rather than allow slavery to end through the mechanisms of democracy, in part, because they believed their own propaganda about how horrible life would be if persons of African descent became citizens. Their philosophical descendants took a similar, though less traitorous path in opposing the end of legalized segregation.
Since the end of the Jim Crow era the American racial landscape has slowly shifted so that persons who fall outside of the "white" category have become more and more populous and some have even risen to positions of power. The lines which separate those who could rise to power from those who could not have eroded and continue to erode.
Race, which ultimately is a system for sorting out those who are fully citizens from those who are not, no longer serves as the leak-proof barrier it once did, any more than gender once served as the leak-proof barrier preventing white women from intruding on the power base of white men.
It seems to me that Barack Obama has reflected on both the function and limitations of the racial system. He has proven to himself that it is sufficiently weak to permit someone who has an admitted African father to rise to high political power. And so, it also seems to me, that he is proposing, by implication initially and more openly as of yesterday, that electoral politics can and ought to be a tool in dismantling this fiction of race which we have built over these past 200 plus years.
Where once it took civil war or mass demonstrations and civil disobedience (both methods requiring the mass participation of the so-called "white" people for their success) to move forward in that struggle, now he perceives a significant faction of the "white" block, together with a coalition of the "non-white" can further erode the systemic injustice through national elections.
If we are lucky, his message will connect with a sufficient number of Americans to turn his plan into reality. Because to continue to live with the underlying contradiction of inequality in the land of equality is to continue the moral erosion which deflates the promise of this country.
Obama's reflections on the racial system and his proposed method of addressing the contradictions of that system make other candidates in this race seem diminished in comparison. Where is Hillary Clinton's speech reflecting on the history of gender discrimination (including the racism of "white" women in the feminist movement) and her proposals for ending it?
What are John McCain's thoughts on these most difficult issues?
Their silence ought to make voters wonder who among the three of them will lend the most of their considerable powers of analysis to other problems, emerging from that process to give us their best counsel, as I believe Obama has done on the issue of race.