The American Race

New Census 'Race' Numbers: Stop the Madness (pt. 1)

There is so much to shoot at in the big story of how we're on track to become a so called "minority majority" nation by 2042 instead of 2050.

Let's start with this:

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

When so called non-Hispanic whites are a mere plurality, will we STILL be according them the (white) privilege of identifying everyone else as part of a "minority group"??

As Wynton Marsalis once said, "I'm an American, and no one is more American than me. So how can I be a minority in my own country?"

See the NY Times story here. See the Census Bureau release (strangely unlinked in the Times) that started the madness here.

Let BloggingHeads Agree: It's Race-Over

This bloggingheads.tv segment, part of a longer dialog between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury speaks volumes about the race-political moment— on the literal and meta levels.

Here's the telling exchange:

Loury: I wonder if the throngs of black people who are voting for Barack Obama have any idea that they are voting for this transformation ... of the significance and understandings of race that you just got through enumerating.

McWhorter: I doubt it.

Loury: I seriously doubt it. In a way, you’re talking about the end of race as we know it. A whole new day: Race-over!

Yes, yes, and then some. And the question, for another post, is are we ready. All of us.

McWhorter is a former Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist and a fellow at the conservative-to-libertarian Manhattan Institute. Loury, an economist now at Brown University, is best known as the black star (or 'star black') "movement” conservative who fell hard off the wagon a few years ago when he discovered (not necessarily in order of importance or time):

• His own personal brokenness and unresolved character flaws
• The true brutality of the hard right’s view on race issues
• That the “movement” may have used his black skin to “screen an anti-black agenda,”
• Jesus, and his infinite mercy and forgiveness

(Quotes are from the excellent 2002 New York Times  Magazine profile “Glenn Loury’s About Face.”)

The meta part is the unspoken, personal hallelujahs shouting between their cordial lines. Because neither man has much investment in race as we have known it. These guys have been looking, perhaps in vain, for a reason to call race 'over' that would actually stick for a long time. Now it's time appears to be here.

I have been professionally acquainted with McWhorter, though I don’t know him well. (Full disclosure: he wrote a slammin’ review of my book, “American Skin,” in the Wall Street Journal). Yet I suspect he too has been somewhat liberated from the racial expectations of white conservatism. I may be projecting, but with age I too feel increasingly freed from the ideological expectations of whites who dominate the liberal/progressive space that I call home..

Actually, I also suffer feelings of abandonment by politically correct, multi-culty pundits and gatekeepers of mainstream media. But I’ve been getting over it; and now there is Barack Obama.

So the three of us, united by our history of apostasy from white and black thinking about race now agree on two things:

• Black folks may not realize the true intellectual and historical impact of the lever they’ll be yanking come November.
• The white folks yaking on radio and TV and mainstream print don’t get it either.

 In fairness to black folks, like most Americans, they do deserve credit for common sense discernment, in the long run. You don’t need a Harvard phD to distinguish between what Al Sharpton says about the meaning of being black, and what Barack Obama’s candidacy actually does to the meaning of being black.

I’ll go out on a limb: hard-core white Obamaniacs also deserve credit, if only for knowing that wherever it is that their white political elders have led this country on race—from Regan to the Bushes to the Clintons—it’s about time to go somewhere else, fast.

As I’ve been saying ever since my first post on Obama in 2004 (this blogs third ever post) the reality of his candidacy, the meaning and the power of it, is a shock wave directed at the main pillar of American racial identity. It's nothing about his policies, ideology or even his character in the conventional sense. It's everything to do with who he is, and what he is not.

Not black, like Homer Plessey was ruled black in 1896, the ruling that defined the American Negro (and thus the American white) race for generations to come. Not white, as Plessey had plead in vain. He is standing on being authentically American in a way as no white man running for president—or Hillary—has ever done before.

Yet it's still so, so hard for this to sink in. Why?

Black Is Not One Race.... duhhhhh

Sorry, but I'm compelled to get a quick hit in on the story I've been waiting for the tweezers of journalism and sociology to finally grasp:

Black is not a race. Specifically, we have been wrong to maintain the idea of a discrete, unitary black race. Black or African-American is really an ethnic group, at best. The first nail in the coffin of the "one drop rule" that creates us as a race has just been driven.

So, check out the hefty coverage of the groundbreaking Pew/NPR poll discovering a sea change in black perceptions. And really listen to what the leading--really the only--black political analyst at NPR, Juan Williams, is saying about this.

Check the Pew poll itself here.

This is big stuff. It comes as the annual study contrasting black vs. white television viewing preferences (a study I used to write about every year for over a decade) finds so much conversion of tastes as to declare in the headline "One Big American TV Audience" It comes as the New York Times discovers that "black skater youth" is not an oxymoron. Check out the discussion in Bold As Love.

I'm really packing it in here, because I'm still vain enough to want to be one of the first to dig into the standout stat: 37% of African Americans polled say blacks are not one race anymore.

It is one thing when "US" more affluent and/or well-educated, over 40 blacks (like me) complain—often bitterly and ALWAYS  in private and among ourselves—about the problem of "THEM" —the younger, poorer, less educated, hip-hop steeped black America— who don't share our values (or appear to have no values) but, unfortunately, share our skin color.

But it's quite another thing when a poll discovers that the 18-29 age group is even MORE likely  (44%) to say they're not in the same race as us  older folks. As  Juan Williams points out this morning, the fight to free a unified black race has been a token of fatih for many, many black generations, especially the boomers who wanted to believe that deliverance had come to pass after the Civil Rights movement. Even as we moved to the suburbs and otherwise penetrated the mainstream by the 80's we always maintained the thin fiction of racial solidarity with those left behind in the projects that produced the rap/hip-hop culture that now claims hegemony over what it means to be black.

But when so many in that very younger hip-hop cohort seem ready to sue for separation, it's a watershed moment. Why? Imagine the moment when American Jews stopped being a "race," like the Irish-Americans before them. When all the Jews fortunate enough to find themselves in Scarsdale were comfortable believing they had more in common with the goyim neighbors than their distant cousins still living in the South Bronx or the Lower East Side. How the Irish became white isn't just historical fact, it's  literally a book title. So is the story of how Jews became white folks, and what it says about race in America.

Yes, the Irish and the Jews were Caucasians, and the color-line was firm and all encompassing as the Great Wall of China then. But that was then. The color line just ain't what it used to be. Already, it no longer confines people of clear African decent who happen to also be Hispanic to the so-called black race. It no longer confines Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter, though in theory they are no less black than I am. It only nominally confines Barak Obama.

Yes, the door to opt out of an Irish or Jewish race was open much wider, and eventually taken off the hinges (which is why the self-identified American Jewish population continues to dwindle toward statistical insignificance). But the door to a new perception of black racial identity has long been open wide enough to escape for those who wanted to.

Many have literally done it by passing for white in broad daylight. But a great many more have been doing it in the dark of the privacy of their own homes and families for a very long time. Especially here in New York, where you don't have to look very hard to see Caribbean and African from Africa Americans consciously distinguishing themselves from black Americans.

There won't be a book "How The Blacks Became White." But there will be a work of history called "The End of the Black American Race." The first hot draft is all over NPR today, and many other media outlets near you. It should be in the New York Times, but their Pew poll story, borrowed from the AP, missed the lede, in my not so humble opinion.

Who Are We, Why Are We Here? (pt. 2)

No, this will not be an existential disquisition: I do not have the time. This follows my recent post of the same title that asks the same questions. Here's my first answer to the first question:

I believe we are one race, of one nationality that fuses many distinct cultures within one founding principle: we are all created equal.

 

This belief is the spring of the American secular faith.You don't have to believe in God, as I do, to hold this faith. But it is nevertheless true that Christian faith holds that God made us equal with the intention that we are to be one people, in Him. Historically, periodically, this faith calls the American people into action to make their beliefs manifest in our society. That's where the Abolishonist, suffragette and Civil Rights movements came from.

Yes, historically, many Christians have also been convicted that slavery was bible-endorsed, that womens' subservience to men was absolute and unconditional, and blacks were not created equal and therefore had "no rights a white man was bound to respect."

But they have always turned out to be proven wrong.

They have always been knocked down (though never entirely out) by a fresh gale of the spirit that first breathed life into the country. Of course, the Founders did NOT fully understand or appreciate that spirit. But, then again (with all due respect) they weren't really
committed Christians. (That's why they separated Church from State, which, of course, was the best thing the State could ever do for the Church, but I promised I would not digress.)

I write live from the Pentecost 2007 conference in Washington D.C. Their vision is nothing less than putting overcoming poverty by a date certain on the national agenda. As I write, several hundred participants have "taken their vision to the streets" between the historic National City Christian Church and Capitol Hill. They are roaming the halls of Congress to begin a campaign of lobbying members from every state to sign on and join the ... Revival.

Oh yes, I said Revival. Don't act like I didn't warn you.

There's a serious river starting to roll. I really got pulled in in the wake of the iMuss. But that was just an eddy compared to the movement for social, economic and, yes racial justice I'm seeing flow out of the convictions of the people I've been talking to (over 600 registered) non-stop since Sunday. As as the late Harry Bates (you didn't know him, your loss) once said about a hot soul group (the Temprees, you don't know them, either) :

It's the wave of the future, and everybody's gettin' wet!

Sooner than later, if you care to put yourself in the path of change around race, racism and justice, and what comes next, you've got a soaking coming.

Who Are We, Why Are We Here?

Credit for this epiphany to Racialicious and it's Addicted to Race podcast No. 69 of  May 12, 2007

A four minute commentary in the podcast from contributor Liam McGrath is must listening, because it challenges "us" to really stop, drop (our egos) and think about why we pursue the conversation about race/culture/class/identity with such passion, and, more importantly, to what end.

Listen to it here:

McGrath humbly poses a string of questions that, beyond the sheer poetry of series, prods the honest listener to commit to something, or admit they're only in this for some form of hyphenated "self" : -gratification/-advancement/-soothing or -immolation.

The one that hit me between the eyes, as addressed to myself, was: "Am I hear to teach, or to change people's minds?"

I don't have all the answers to McGrath's questions, but I know they are excellent and his stated two points of conclusion could not be more on time:

1. Those who follow need to check their overlapping and possibly conflicting motivations.
2. Those who would lead must identify a tangible goal, and address the most salient common motivation that might inspire followers to join hands to achieve it. (NB: Having the conversation, for it's own sake, should not qualify as a goal.)

If you care about the politics of race/culture/class/identity, four minutes with McGrath's comments will be a most profitable investment of your time. Especially if you also care about making the world a better place with respect to those issues.

Which, of course, is really the only question that matters.

Like a good preacher, no one listening can escape being pierced by some part of his questions. I really, really want to hear from people after you listen.

And, in the same spirit of inquiry, I leave you a question of my own: What's the difference between pursuing racial justice and pursuing racial reconciliation? Which is more important to you?

Why Black Rock? (oh, and another thing)

Sometime after posting "Why Black Rock?" recently, I reran the first few episodes of the mind-opening 1995 PBS series "Rock & Roll" (wasted a half-hour trying to find link to the normally great PBS web page for this classic). I was blown away, again, by this quote from Ben E. King (you know, the original "Stand By Me" vocal?) the former lead singer of The Drifters.

James [Brown] covered what blacks felt they needed...to survive the Beatles. The Beatles had all of what the whites [rock n' roll acts] needed to keep them going. The thing we had created with the Drifters was in the middle of all that. There was no separatism there. We had collected a people to listen to a music. But when [The Beatles] came along... with that long straight hair... that changed the whole attitude of the music in a racial way. So there was no competition...we couldn't compare with that if we tried for another 200 years. Maybe...if we had had Michael Jackson...maybe.

King was talking about the moment in rock history when race was allowed to divide the consumers and the creators of the music then known as rock n' roll. Until the Beatles and the "British Invasion" followed, that category included everything from the most sophisticated versions of black "doo-wop" (e.g. the Drifters) to Elvis to Ray Charles to California surf sounds (Beach Boys) to early Motown and "girl groups" like the Shirelles and the racially ambiguous Ronettes.  And much more. The Beatles—still arguably the most important musical group of the last 50 years—had no idea of the collateral damage they caused. But, as the Shirley Reeves of The Shirelles points out in the documentary, many black acts were pushed off the pop charts as British acts covered their songs.

My point: We need "black rock"—the spirit if not the music of a specific group— to point the way back to the hot minute when the Civil Rights movement and the racial unity in the music of a new generation were about to merge. As King (Ben E.) said, they had collected a people, despite the mountain of political contradictions and sheer racism that stood (and in some ways still stands) between them. These are the people I call "The American Race."

It wasn't just The Beatles or their hair, of course. It was the strain that the bitter, inconclusive first finale of the Civil Rights movement (the assassinations and riots of 1968) put on the entire culture, musical and political. James Brown moved into (but didn't exactly invent) funk with the anthem "Say it Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud." No non-blacks were invited to follow him.

Meanwhile the white session musicians that were instrumental in creating  the funkiest, grittiest  "soul music" churned out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala. (think Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin) had their collaborations abruptly cut off within a year of Martin Luther King's murder. Their interviews are telling and deeply moving.

I think the Rock & Roll series (a co-production of WGBH, Boston and the BBC) is available on DVD. This is the kind of "where we came from" that matters for anyone concerned about where we're trying to go.

GhettoNation: A Call To Treason

Even JCPenney...featured commercials showcasing eight-year-old all-American white kids break-dancing to "Baby Got Back" to sell backpacks during the chain's back to school campaign. (Why is this ghetto? Because now there are eight-year-olds going around singing "Baby Got Back" as if it were "The Wheels on the Bus.")
                            —from Cora Daniels' "Ghettonation"

I had to write about Cora Daniels' "Gettonation" (published yesterday by Doubleday) because it makes the case that the browning of American pop culture I heralded in my book "American Skin" has proved to be more of a curse than the blessing I hoped it would be.

In "Ghettonation," Daniels takes us on a journey across the cultural landscape of "ghetto" the adjective that has all but replaced "ghetto" the noun. It's really a journey to self, to the current state of mind-set that too often validates the lowest common denominators and worst, nihilist instincts that our selfish, free market capitalist democracy can unleash.

One of Daniels' unique contributions to this discussion is the observation that the  ghetto mind-set knows no race, ethnic or class distinctions. She regales us with the time Martha Stewart, not long out of the joint, assured Patti LaBelle that, "Oh, I can ghetto when I need to."

On her television show—ghetto!

The other singular contribution is Daniels' ongoing confession that, despite punching her ticket at Yale and making it in professional journalism, she herself is still ghetto— in some ways. She comments on the frontiers of Ghettonation from her home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, a ghetto neighborhood not unlike the one she grew up in, except the disfunction has been turned inside out, and loud,  for profit.

I am ghetto... (T)he only stuff to drink in my fridge is Crayola-bright color and comes in two-liter bottles...Movies to me are BYOF (as in Bring Your Own Food) experiences. C'mon, what could be better than having some Popeye's chicken, a glass of orange soda, and a twenty-five cent bag of Cheez Doodles while watching an overpriced movie? You know you'd like some, too...

I am not ghetto. I have a husband instead of baby daddies. I drive a car that is completely paid off but so nondescript that even I forget what it looks like sometimes. And when I drive and listen to music, I can still hear the passengers speaking in the backseat. I also own only one pair of sneakers, which I allow to get dirty.
                        —Cora Daniels, from "Ghettonation"

Once Upon the N-Word (pt. 3)

I say the word every morning when I get up. I say it a hundred times. I say nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger! It makes my teeth white!
          — Paul Mooney, in Jabari Asim's  “The N Word”

True to it’s billing, “The N Word: who can say it, who shouldn’t, and why” (Houghton Mifflin, April 2007) lays out all you need to consider before enlisting— or desisting— from the movement to cut Mooney’s toothpaste out of American culture.

Assuming, that is, you even care at all. (An unscientific sampling of the black blog-sphere suggests it’s just not a priority for a lot of folks. )

Washington Post book editor Jabari Asim’s book is richly researched (20 pages of footnotes/bibliography) without reading like a Masters thesis. In mostly bright, tight and often wry strokes, Asim makes a very good case for dreaming “a world where “nigger” no longer roams, confined instead to the fetid white fantasy land where he was born.”

Unfortunately, Asim is somewhat reluctant to deny Mooney and other ‘artists’ the right to let their ‘niggerizing’ (his term) imaginations run free. But don’t let that stop you from reading this important book, and  sharing his dream, as I do.

Here (from the press release) are the bullet points promised in the N Word subtitle:

WHO CAN SAY IT:
Artists: writers, comedians, and musicians, especially those who use the N word with an awareness of the term’s historical baggage. Satirists such as Mark Twain and Dave Chappelle have used the N word to reflect and ridicule America’s tortured history of race relations and to expose powerlessness and anti-black sentiment

Journalists: Reporting that Officer Fuhrman used “a racial epithet” really doesn’t tell the story as completely as “Fuhrman referred to blacks as ‘niggers’ forty-one times during the recorded conversation.” Censoring the word harms the public’s right to know.

Historians: Writing that blacks lived in marginalized communities such as Nigger Hill and Niggertown, and were confined to “nigger pews” in church, more effectively relates the hardships that African Americans were forced to endure than merely writing, “Blacks lived in segregated communities and went to segregated churches.”

WHO SHOULDN’T?
White people in casual conversations, either with blacks or among themselves: Because the N word can’t escape its racist history, even casual use is still racial abuse. This is true even when the “er” in “nigger” is replaced with an “a” – and white kids are addressing each other.

Black people in casual conversations, among themselves or with anybody else: “Nigger”-slinging among African Americans is tantamount to bowing down before centuries of entrenched, systematic racism. Using the N word is the furthest thing from “keeping it real.” It is the most inauthentic designation a black person can use regarding another black person. Even in a friendly setting, the exchange of insults masquerading as endearments is little more than a failure of the imagination. And it’s so much easier just to say “brother,” “sister,” or “friend.”

No one in the public square: While courteous behavior cannot be legislated, we have a moral obligation to encourage it. Politicians and public servants who have uttered it not only showed reprehensible judgment but also betrayed the public trust.

Pop quiz: Is the term “niggerati” (you know, like ‘literati’, with attitude) hip-hop, Black Power or Harlem Renaissance? (Answer, courtesy of “The N Word” in the jump.)

Once Upon the N-Word (pt. 2)

Yesterday, in a telling report on the anti-n-word movement, NPR gave voice to Tim Gaylord, a black high school teacher in a predominantly African-American New Jersey suburb.  He's passionate about getting students to sign a pledge not to use the word, in any form. For Gaylord it’s not about the values/culture war between black boomers and hip-hoppers. It’s about the fact that:

...for 400 hundred years, we’ve been told that n-i-g-g-e-r-s are stupid. They’re lazy. They’ve got to go to the beauty shop and get their hair straight so they can look pretty.

I agree, and I felt his pain when one student, not feeling the race love behind the growing crusade, tells the reporter that,

“it doesn’t make a difference. We will always be called niggers no matter how old we get or how far along we are in the future.”

As Gaylord shot back on tape, the young man was manifesting a “slave mentality.” The fatalism and disconnection from history in the young man's words was painful. But what's more painful is the story’s point that youth —of all colors —are not likely to even consider abandoning the n-word until it becomes unacceptable in the hip-hop music and pop culture they take as defining.

And that, the story continues, is not likely to happen any time soon.

Once Upon the N-Word (pt. 1)

“Niggers 'n flies, I do despise. And the more I see of niggers, the more I like flies.”

I picked up that little ditty in college over 30 years ago. It was taught to me —a son of Jamaican immigrants who never used the n-word —by some of the first real (read: of Southern American descent) African-Americans I ever met. It was part of my black acculturation —like my discoveries of collard greens and the blues — at the dawn of modern black cultural identity politics.

So much for the notion that the embrace of the “n-word” is a wholly-owned perversion of the hip-hop/gangsta rap generation.

Now comes the rapidly gathering storm of campaigns to abolish it. Politically, the first move was a fine proposed by the mayor of Brazoria, Texas, for using the n-word in his town. That was the white mayor of a mostly white town. More recently tony Westchester county New York passed a resolution condemning it. Last week the big city itself passed a symbolic measure calling for New Yorkers to stop using the n-word.

The New York City Council measure was pushed by the really earnest, ‘straight outta Brooklyn’  group abolishthenword.com. (Their moving flash movie intro page deserves an award by itself.)

If an n-word ban can make it here —the original font of rap/hip-hop culture —it should make it any and everywhere, right? But what if they called for an n-word ban, and nobody showed up? (NYC Council Bans n-word, but some youths say: So What? (Newsday,AP, 3.1.07)

If black culture is now defined by the choices of the stereotypical outlaws from ‘mainstream’ middle-class values, what makes anybody think that the average guy (black, white or whatever)  flashing the world the top of his Calvins in hiney-sight gives a good you-know-what about a symbolic city council resolution? And it’s not just because self-interested and influential apologists —including Russell Simmons, Jay-Z and Jamie Foxx —cannot bring themselves to stop sucking the n-word pipe. 

After all, they do get paid on every exhale.

The good news: there’s a real movement to redeem black identity from certain perversions of commercial pop culture. The bad news: it’s gonna take rehabilitating the last 200 years of black identity formation, not just the last 20. 

Next post (on this subject): Culture crit Jabari Asim’s forthcoming book THE N WORD: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why (Houghton Mifflin, April 2007) lays down a history, and a pretty good yardstick for measuring progress of the race —the American race —on this critical issue.