A "Two-Man" Race?

January 29, 2008

So, former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards has finally seen the light. He has "suspended" his campaign for the presidency, he says, in order not to be an obstacle in the path of history. That is, he, like the rest of the world, recognizes that the worldwide rule of the "gold ole boys" of Europe and European descent is finally, after 516 years, approaching its end. Now a real campaign may begin. Now the real issues and problems facing America and the rest of the world may finally be put squarely "on the table, " addressed and redressed.

However, Senators Clinton and Obama now must confront and successfully navigate a complex, even confounding trifecta of racial, gender, and generational divides. These divisions will intersect, intertwine, separate, and conflate again and again until the nominating conventions this summer; and, depending on which one of them actually wins the Democratic Party nomination, will explode into bold relief during the one-one-one campaign against the Republicans. Thus now we have what is shaping up to be a classic battle: The white woman against the black man.

Interestingly, the last public speech given by 19th century escaped slave, black abolitionist, Minister to Haiti, Washington, D.C. Marshall, and orator extraordinaire Frederick Douglass was before a women's suffrage group -- a basically white women's suffrage group. Douglass, like Senator Obama, was what is today termed "biracial", only in reverse in Douglass' case: white father/black mother.

New Notes Of A Native Son -- Barack Obama And The Key To The Colors

James Baldwin once wrote that Europeans did not name their "whiteness" until they stumbled upon large numbers of chromatically black Africans off the west African coast circa 1444. Europeans had been simply but significantly "Portuguese," or "Frenchmen," or "Englishmen," or "German." Perhaps understandably, first-contact Europeans attributed the striking contrast in skin color between their "light" selves and the "darkness" of the indigenous Africans before them to some supernatural or cosmic force, their Christian god, or more likely, his alter ego, as being the most likely and available sources. Certainly from a Eurocentric point of view, some African populations then and now were and are so outrageously black that their whole bodies appeared to sparkle like diamonds under an unrelenting African sun. The Wolof peoples of modern Senegal come to mind. And until Europeans began to classify them as "black," that is precisely how they thought of themselves -- as Wolof, Asante, Yoruba, Hausa, Mandinka.

In her 2004 book, The End of Blackness, Debra Dickerson asserts that whiteness is not a particularly complex phenomenon. For her, whiteness at bottom is best understood as a simply but deadly color-coded system of classification and hierarchy invented by Europeans to explain group-based physical differences -- a "codification of hierarchies." The erection of a socio-political hierarchy based on superficial physical differences supplanted the previous nation-based hierarchical system and inexorably led to race-based explanations of different cultural practices, of different cultural practices, of different economic strategies and of different political structures. And, in keeping with an almost uniquely European worldview that competition rather than cooperation drives human "development" or "progress," darker hued peoples' cooperative and communal lifestyles rendered them as less "developed," even regressive. Perhaps, nay, indeed it was quite probable, that these darker peoples were not quite "human" enough for full membership within the "human" family. It is here that color, hierarchy, race and power intersected for the first time. It is here that white "racism," or more precisely, white supremacy was born.

Barack Obama's "blackness" has been questioned at least since he first surfaced on the American national political landscape in the summer of 2004. For so-called black Americans, the question has been: Is he black enough? His black American bona fides, and thus his authenticity are questioned because his black roots skip over the tortuous 246-year history of American chattel slavery and the subsequent and continuing 145-year history of Jim Crow-ism. For black Americans and their not-too-distant ancestors this is a lived history, a history that for better or worse defines and identifies them.

Without having had to experience the horrors of the Middle Passage, Obama's paternal line reverses and retraces its route -- back across the Atlantic to the Old World and further east across the entire African continent itself. There, in the heart of a tiny Kenyan village Barack Obama's father was born. There his paternal grandmother still holds forth as a matriarch of her clan. Barack Obama's African-ness is authentically African -- in a way that only a very few native-born "African" Americans can be.

Obama's mama is also deceased. A so-called "white' woman from the very white state of Kansas, some of her American antecedents held a significant number of slaves. Thus was conveyed Obama's authentic "American" identity, and importantly for presidential eligibility purposes, his American citizenship. During slavery, and in accordance with white America's color-coded racial hierarchy, Barack Obama would have been subject to the "One Drop Rule": One drop of "black blood" would have rendered him totally "black." He would have been further "classified as a "mulatto" or half-breed" and thus subject to enslavement for life just as were most other "American Americans."

Here is the sometimes conscious, but always subconscious concern of many contemporary Americans who think of themselves as white: Obama may ultimately be too black. Do his black African Kenyan roots ultimately trump his cosmopolitan background, his Harvard pedigree, his soaring oratory, his high intellect, and even his "white" ancestry by concealing an inevitable, surreptitious blackness, a vengeful militance that must surface once he is ensconced in the hallowed halls of white America's heretofore lily "White" House?

For a growing number of Americans who think of themselves as white anointing a "black" man as president, regardless of his African-ness or his American-ness, provides an opportunity to finally, completely and forever purge white America's second-most damning original sin. An Obama presidency allows whites to finally bury a 400-year old, blood-soaked consciousness of guilt. It would justify and legitimize their schizophrenic, hyper-hypocritical history. It is Obama's "non-whiteness" rather than his "non-blackness" that has positioned him to absorb white guilt, to whitewash their consciousness, to absolve them, to forgive them. Obama saves whites without shaming whites. They need not even acknowledge out loud their contemptible past because Barack Obama has saved them from themselves.

Of course, he can never be "white" in any "American" sense. He has denied both his blackness and his whiteness, but not his American-ness. Thus he has become, in the Boertrekker sense, an "honorary white."

Obama's color and lack of color, his mixture of the colors, allow these selfsame whites to engage in willful denial of continuing, institutionalized, even historical, white supremacy. The "end of racism" has arrived, they alternately roar in triumph or sigh in relief. Sadly, they have convinced no one, not even themselves. Their urgent pretensions to a faux "color blindness," as first espoused by the reactionary right wing racist icon Ronald Reagan, has also lost its currency. Their denials and pretensions have been exposed as fraudulent during the daily course of the preceding eight years of the George W. Bush regime.

Barack Obama's blackness and his whiteness must be understood within the context of America's long interaction with "colored" peoples, beginning, of course, not with Africans or African Americans, but with with America's "treatment" of America's only true "natives." The immediacy of that history, the urgency of that past runs right through to the citizens of Iraq today.

THE END