The American Race

The Best Of (the) Times

Two great columns on race and American identity, to ourselves and in the world, in today's New York Times.

Roger Cohen delivered another inspired, nearly rhapsodic piece about what the idea of Barack Obama means to the world.

And Nicholas Kristof here presents some intriguing (however intuitive, at least to me) research on nature versus cultural nurture in our perception of race. My favorite finding:

A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian-Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”

 More evidence of the amazing year of Obama opening once hidden doors in the American mind. 

Obama's Not Black (again)

First, just get your yuk-yuk on with this bit from Comedy Central's new "Chocolate News"

Now for why I went there. From time to time—ok, pretty much daily—I just have to check the modest stats on this blog. Over the many months since I first began writing about Barack Obama and the presidential campaign, at least 10% of my hits have been from this Google search: Obama not black.

I think this comes up because there are a great many people who don't want Obama to be both black and president of the United States. Their number may well include Obama opponents and many disinterested (read : people in other countries who just don't get the contradictions of the American way of race) folks as well as die-hard Obama supporters.

The American Race turns up on these searches because of this post —"If Obama's Not Black..."—from way back in (gasp) January 2007!

I wrote in response to what I (correctly) called the opening round of artillery concering race and American identity in what was already the beginning of the political two years of our lifetimes. My take; forget about determining  whether he's really black.

If he's not "black", I wrote, so what? 

Up To Our Ears In A Sea Of Race...

...and to be honest, I'm losing my will to swim across the current.

I don't know where to start, but I resist reducing this to yet another "moment" metaphor.
It's an old, old school temperature reading of the American character. I'm talking analog, and I'm talking rectal.That's been my emotional takeaway as I've listened to and read SO much first ever reporting on race and the closing days of the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain.

I'm not talking about the reporting and bloviating on the inescapable racial context of both campaigns' strategies and tactics, as worthy of thumb-sucking attention as it is. I'm taling about all the white people talking about their own race feelings, and that of their white neighbors, friends and relations.

My friends, as John McCain might start, I've been following this subject pretty much since I could read; I've never seen anything like this. I have never heard an "average Joe" white man squirm in abject frustration from repeated confrontation with the racial ignorance and animus of his own "people." That moment alone, part of an amazing episode (as there were any unamazing episodes) of This American Life on the McCain and Obama "ground games" in Pennsylvania.

Listen to "Dan's" story here and see what I mean.

Mind you, I'm not exultant. I'm empathetic. For the first time in a long time I felt like I might have been in that man's skin, because it sounded and felt like he had spent some time in mine.

Other good stuff, also on public radio (of course) has been the team up by NPR's Michelle Norris and Steve inskeep for an extended series of "focus group" report on race and the election. Their cross section is also taken from the Keystone State. Which goes to prove that, surprise, surprise, Washington and New York reporters need not traipse to all the way Missouri to discover authentic America, warts and all. Listen to the latest in the series here.

This categorically better than hearing talking heds like Cornell West or Abigail Thernstrom (or me) on this stuff, thoughtful and credible as they were on WNYC's Brian Leherer show Monday morning.

Here's the audio:

Why? Because THIS  is the conversation I'm talking about. People talking peer to peer, not party to party or philosophy to philosophy.

Take Your Deep Breath (here)

When this adjective defying season began in earnest—I'm calling it last November, 2007—nobody was sure about Barack Obama's race, religion or the meaning of his emerging candidacy, but everyone who was awake, across a wide range of viewpoints and media platforms, knew something very, very big was up.

Check this post from exactly 11 months ago, when the Times Roger Cohen and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan separately declared a major paradigm shift in the making.

And the earthquakes have kept on coming. Obama's racial ambiguity has melted into the comfortable (however loathsome) reality of the One-Drop Rule in effect: he is now unambiguously black. But, notwithstanding the increasingly rabid passion in some quarters to paint him a similar shade of black as old bogeymen like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrahahn, he remains a black man with no black baggage. The teflon I saw coating his blackness last January has hardened into steel.

Hilary Clinton's racinating (ok, my word) bullets ultimately bounced off, though they made enough of a dent to confirm the McCain strategists best worst instincts. The only way to beat Obama was to make him the alien (as in "he's just not like us") threat. Here's a partial list of the attributes that were supposed to prove it:

• He's an eloquent Ivy League intellectual
• He's a Muslim
• He's a friend of (a) terrorists
• He's a Chicago machine pol
• He's hiding something
• He can't really be known, much less trusted
• He doesn't share our culture

 McCain tapped the perfect pair of high heels on which to mount this barrage in Sarah Palin, and the base has been fed a rich diet of red meat ever since. But the problem is that the Republicans misread the depth and breadth of resonance for these race-rooted attacks in white America. In another year, even as recently as 2004, it could very well have worked. But not with the full fury of eight years of Bush Administration near-criminal negligence coming to a crecendo as the financial crisis hit.

Meet Aneesa

Aneesa is a teacher in Minneapolis who heard some of my 'conversation' with Greg from Rochester from last August here in The American Race, and later here on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.

When she first wrote, she was:

...struck by the fact that both you and Greg have ten year olds attending racially isolated schools.  I too teach at a racially isolated school.  That racial isolation in schools insulates white kids and black kids from a world that is not racially isolated.  I believe justice can prevail, and our society could be set up to heal our racial wounds if we could figure out how to intentionally plan integrated schools.

To that end, and a larger goal of harnessing her faith to the challenge of racial reconciliation, Aneesa is  a leader in ISAIAH, the Minnesota chapter of the faith-based Gamaliel organizing network. She summarized ISAIAH's belief and mission:

To create our health and the health of our democracy, major societal change is necessary.

• We will move our democracy and public institutions to:
• Create racial and economic equity with reparation for past harms
• Expand and protect that which must belong to all of us
• Pool our collective resources into public investments for the common good
• Create deep democratic participation in all aspects of our common lives
• Ensure hat "citizenship" extends to all stakeholders in our democracy

On Sunday, ISAIAH sponsored the fourth in a series of events  gathering people of faith, public officials and other leaders in Aneesa's community to rally and share the new vision. Some 4,000 people attended the third one; Aneesa had every hope that the latest one would draw at least that many.

I hope to get a report from Aneesa soon on how it turned out. Thank God for the means to seek His revelations from a much wider range of people than one could ever reach naturally, and the means to propagate the works of the Spirit in this way.

Like me, from this blogs Vision and call to The Revival, Aneesa says she feels called to bear witness and serve, "a special moment in history; a call to the revival first issued during the Civil Rights Era."

I very much welcome Aneesa to The Conversation.

Finally: The Bottom Line

When last I spoke on race and the race for the White House, I was sick in a few ways—including with myself—about the divisive roar of the Sarah Palin meme.

What a difference a little less than a month makes!

We've seen the race/culture war resentment factor swell the Palin-McCain ticket prospects to near bursting, only to see them deflate even faster as the financial crisis, and Barack Obama's cool performance during the last 2 weeks, bring a large chunk of the electorate to their senses.

I'm not the only observer who has said for months that the only factor explaining why Obama hadn't been winning in a walk, even before Hillary quit, was race. It was glaringly obvious as the madness of Palin mania first hit, but nobody wanted to say it.

Now, apparently, it can be told. Now that the true stakes of the choice between McCain and Obama have been brought home to the average Amereican pocketbook.

It's all here, in this MUST SEE video of AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka's passionate, address before the Steelworkers union.

Ta-Nahesi Coates (H/T to him, and Andrew Sullivan before him) calls it the "John Brown 2008" moment we've all been waiting for.

Judge for yourself. Now.