February 10, 2008

Identity Politics
=================

By JILL NELSON

SELLOUT
The Politics of Racial Betrayal.
By Randall Kennedy.
228 pp. Pantheon Books. $22.

A BOUND MAN

Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.

By Shelby Steele.

143 pp. Free Press. $22.

For Americans of African descent, one of the difficulties in writing
about identity is that the discussion, intentionally or not, is
simultaneously intensely personal and profoundly public. Our unique
experience and the racial identification manifested in melanin binds us
inextricably to both our individual, subjective, personal experiences and
to the collective experience of the group. Efforts to be seen as "an
individual" necessitate that we differentiate ourselves from some
supposedly monolithic black identity and authenticity. Like it or not,
our individuality is dependent on first identifying and, depending on
where we are coming from and where we are going, either embracing or
distancing ourselves from the group.

This is a convoluted process, particularly for those who pride themselves
on having escaped from what they view as the oppressive orthodoxy of
group identity to create a brave new egalitarian world in which black
individualism and responsibility trump racism and white privilege. It is
no coincidence that these runaways often make their living interpreting
for bwana what the natives' drums are saying, at the same time chiding
those natives for their old-school means of communication.+

Randall Kennedy's "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal" and "A Bound
Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," by Shelby
Steele, illustrate this dichotomy. Kennedy uses the historical and
contemporary notion of the race traitor as a prism through which to view
black identity, while Steele uses Barack Obama's candidacy as a window on
contemporary black identity and progress.

Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School and "Sellout," like his book
"Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," often reads like a
carefully researched legal brief, one that examines both real and
fictional black lives to make his argument. "When used in a racial
context among African-Americans, 'sellout' is a disparaging term that
refers to blacks who knowingly or with gross negligence act against the
interest of blacks as a whole," Kennedy writes. "Defining it that
cleanly, however, offers a misleading sense of clarity. 'Sellout' is a
messy, volatile, contested term about which disagreement is rife when it
comes to applying the label to specific persons or conduct."

Kennedy argues that the label demonizes the messenger and the message,
inhibiting necessary dialogue about ideas and actions that do not conform
to racial orthodoxy. In support of this argument, he cites the Yale law
professor Stephen L. Carter, author of "Reflections of an Affirmative
Action Baby." Carter, Kennedy writes, "maintains that, at least with
respect to certain topics, most notably affirmative action, a prevailing
orthodoxy exerts undue pressure, stigmatizing dissident positions to such
an extent that people holding heterodox ideas either silence themselves
or speak out knowing that they will pay a frightful price with their
reputations." Yet it is precisely Carter's own break with what he calls
the "traditional civil rights agenda" that accounts for his influence.

Kennedy is adept at pulling together multiple sources and reinterpreting
information to illustrate his points. He reminds us, for example, that
while his name may be shorthand for a sellout, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom "was a character who chose death at the hand of his notorious
owner, Simon Legree, rather than reveal the whereabouts of runaway
slaves." And in a chapter on "passing," he recounts the story of the
illegitimate children of the Irish-born Georgia planter Michael Morris
Healy and his slave Eliza Clark, who passed into the white world so
thoroughly that they hired out and then sold their deceased father's
slaves to finance their trust funds. "They kept as quiet as possible the
facts of their origins, distanced themselves from blacks and declined to
take any notable actions that would advance African-Americans," Kennedy
writes. One of the "white" children of Healy and Clark, Patrick Francis
Healy, went on to become the president of Georgetown University. His
brother James, a noted cleric, Kennedy writes, "opposed the racial
egalitarianism of Radical Republicans, concerned that they would wrongly
subordinate the restoration of sectional harmony to 'the protection, the
equalization and the super-elevation of the negro.'" (Ironically, Kennedy
points out, Healy was later celebrated in "The Negro Almanac" as the
"first Negro Catholic bishop in the United States.")

But some of Kennedy's interpretations can be deeply disturbing. "It
should be kept in mind that even conduct that might seem at first blush
to constitute a simple case of 'selling out' may, upon further scrutiny,
turn out to be ambiguous," Kennedy writes. Examples of what Kennedy sees
as ambiguity? A slave informing his master of a planned slave rebellion
because such an event might result in, Kennedy writes, "a sharp increase
in the suffering imposed on the slave community, including the
dismemberment of enslaved families by an enraged owner who had previously
been, in relative terms, a rather lenient master"; government informants
who spied on Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association because
of "fears that the dictatorial Garvey would impetuously inflame race
relations to the detriment of black Americans"; and those who informed on
the Black Panther Party for the United States government because they
believed elements of the B.P.P. "posed a menace to the goals of the
black-liberation struggle as a whole."

Kennedy asks: "Is it not clear that in at least some circumstances,
assisting law enforcement constituted a benefit, not a detriment, to the
cause of black communal betterment?" He cites criticism of Garvey by
Robert Abbott, the editor of The Chicago Defender (an influential black
newspaper at the time), and W. E. B. Du Bois, who called Garvey "the most
dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world." Yet as
odious as Abbott and Du Bois may have found Garvey, neither was a
government informant. I suspect they were clear that the oppression of
state-sanctioned racism trumped whatever disagreements they had with
Garvey. Kennedy leaves largely unexamined the fact that those "rogue
elements" in black liberation organizations who advocated violence were
often agents provocateurs.

Kennedy's chapter on Clarence Thomas is well researched and well argued,
but the conversation about Thomas has shifted and broadened in the 16
years he has been on the court. Kennedy argues convincingly that to
dismiss Thomas as simply a racial "sellout" is simplistic. Far more
disturbing is the spectacle of a descendant of slaves offering a strict
constructionist view of the Constitution as a static document, a posture
that is intellectually dishonest, mean-spirited and narrow-minded.

Kennedy acknowledges that the motivation to write "Sellout" was his
experience being labeled a sellout himself and, he says, concern for
black students at Harvard Law "who fear that appellation." Yet I would
argue that such name-calling is on the decline, particularly as issues of
class become increasingly important.

Shelby Steele's book seems similarly personally motivated. Underneath his
dissection of Barack Obama's identity is a Shelby Steele far more
fascinating than anything he has to say about Obama. Steele points out
the similarities between his life and Obama's: both had white mothers;
both worked as community organizers early in their careers; both had
access to opportunities earlier generations could not have imagined. Yet
Steele, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, seems
amazed by the difference in their choices and where these choices took
them. He marvels that Obama's embrace of black identity and community not
only didn't hinder him, but most likely helped propel him to where he is
now, the most viable candidate of African descent ever to run for
president of the United States.

Steele assigns particular significance to his and Obama's white mothers.
"The fact of an immediate white parent differentiates us and interrupts
solidarity with blacks. And all this is worsened by the fact that whites
are historically the 'oppressor' race," he writes. "Thus, by the dumb
logic of racial thinking, our very mother's milk comes through a
collaboration with the enemy." Whoa! Where was Steele's editor in the
face of this overwrought and overreaching language? As for having a white
mother, I suggest this is not something black people see as making
someone less black - although perhaps whites do. Most of us are racially
mixed. I've never heard a black person question Obama's blackness. Call
me cynical, but I suspect this nonissue was manufactured by a rival
campaign.

Steele characterizes black leaders as either "challengers" like Al
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who believe that "whites are incorrigibly
racist until they do something to prove otherwise," or "bargainers" like
Oprah Winfrey or Bill Cosby or Obama, who promise "I will not use
America's horrible history of white racism against you, if you will
promise not to use my race against me."

The most successful bargainers, Steele writes, become "iconic Negroes" in
the eyes of white America, bigged up but still bound, unless they see the
light of personal responsibility. Obama, in his view, is a "bound man."

"If Barack Obama crossed the road, so to speak, away from what government
systems can do, and began to talk about individual responsibility as the
purest and most immediate form of social power available to the poor, he
would surely suffer Bill Cosby's fate." Cosby, Steele argues, lost his
status as America's "iconic Negro" when he began publicly blaming the
problems of black Americans on their own lack of personal responsibility,
a position whites can't embrace without risking being accused of racism.

Steele misses the fact that Cosby has always focused on individual
responsibility, both as a stand-up comedian and in his sitcom. And his
contention that Cosby loses "iconic" status with whites is plain wrong.
Clearly, the black Americans who receive most-favored status are those
who can be relied upon to minimize white racism. The potential misstep of
Cosby, Oprah, Obama and Steele's other "bargainers" lies in pushing
whites to confront their own racism, not criticizing black people for
individual or collective failings. Steele's assertion that Cosby "no
longer sells Jell-O, or anything else, on national television" proves
this fall from grace is just silly.

In the end, Steele's portrayal of Barack Obama as a bound man is a result
of his own failure of imagination, as is his tired assertion that blacks
question Obama's blackness. Black Americans' slow embrace of Obama's
candidacy was strategic and pragmatic. We know Obama is black, and know
he knows it, too. What we also know is that to embrace him too
enthusiastically risks making whites uncomfortable with him and then we
all lose.

Perhaps most troubling about both Steele and Kennedy is the virtual
absence of any acknowledgment of the ways in which white racism, and the
more subtle and prevalent white privilege, influence black identity and
necessitate, for some, a strong collective identity as a defense against
white power. "Obviously, black responsibility is the greatest - if not
the only - transformative power available to blacks," Steele says. But
this is simply not true. Ditto for Kennedy's assertion that "open
expression of racial prejudice is politically and socially suicidal."
Tell that to Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Don Imus, to
name but a few. Lott and Imus were finally taken to task for their racist
comments, but after what has become an American ritual of denial, apology
and a brief stay in the woodshed, they were back.

Steele and Kennedy say they have been attacked as a result of ideas that
go against a black orthodoxy. It's difficult to be sympathetic. Both men
have been mightily rewarded. The irony is that the criticism these
authors evoke increases their visibility. Kennedy knows this. "Supporters
have praised me for being 'brave.' The fact is, however, that I have not
felt threatened by any ideological enemies. At no point have I felt that
I was putting myself into serious jeopardy."

In truth, black orthodoxy, as embodied both by the traditional entrenched
black (male) political leadership and by the more recently emerged black
(male) academics and public intellectuals, is passing into oblivion.
These books have a Rip Van Winkle feel to them, as if the writers fell
asleep at a crucial moment and missed a seismic shift. Both books,
especially Steele's, tell us more about what has been than what lies
ahead.

Jill Nelson is the author of "Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro
Experience" and, most recently, "Finding Martha's Vineyard."
==============================================

February 6, 2008First Chapter

'The Race Card'
===============

By RICHARD THOMPSON FORD

In November 1987, a deputy sheriff was dispatched to an apartment
building in Dutchess County, upstate New York. There a resident of the
building led him to a large plastic garbage bag that contained a
seemingly unconscious Tawana Brawley. Brawley's body was smeared with
feces, her clothes were torn, the crotch burned away from her jeans, and
she was not wearing a bra or underwear. An ambulance was dispatched, and
Brawley was taken to the hospital. When her clothes were removed, the
markings were stark and unambiguous: the words "nigger," "bitch," and
"KKK" were scrawled on Brawley's torso in black charcoal.

The sheriff's office, sensing that they were in over their heads, called
the FBI to report a likely civil rights violation. Doctors examined
Brawley for injuries and evidence of rape. They found neither. Brawley
could not - or refused to - speak to hospital staff and detectives about
what had happened. Eventually, communicating by nodding and shaking her
head, she indicated that she had been raped by several men. Then came the
bombshell. When asked if she could identify the attackers, the silent
Brawley scrawled two words on a piece of paper: "white cop."

When Brawley was released from the hospital, her family thought a warm
bed and an interview with a New York City television station might help
her to rest and recover. Against the advice of the hospital social
worker, her mother and aunt publicized the horrifying story. They did so,
they said, out of fear that the incident would be covered up by a racist
law enforcement establishment.

The last thing they needed to worry about was too little publicity. The
family enlisted (or was conscripted by) lawyers Alton Maddox and C.
Vernon Mason and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Thereafter, "Brawley's story"
(she never told her own story publicly, which gave her representatives
plenty of, let's say, interpretive license) was the featured topic of
discussion on innumerable news and current events programs, including the
archetype of talk TV, The Phil Donahue Show, and its down-market
competitor, The Morton Downey Jr. Show. Sharpton - not Brawley - named
names, accusing a local police officer, who later committed suicide, and
assistant district attorney Steven Pagones, who later successfully sued
Sharpton for defamation. Sharpton - not Brawley - spun a conspiracy
theory worthy of its own X File, implicating the Irish Republican Army,
the Cosa Nostra, New York governor Mario Cuomo, and a mysterious man with
a missing finger. (Could Dr. Richard Kimble's one-armed man have been out
of the loop?)

Something was badly awry. Even without Sharpton's embellishments,
Brawley's story - to the extent that she told one - didn't jibe.
Witnesses saw her climb into the garbage bag herself after looking around
furtively. All of the materials necessary to stage the assault were found
in her old apartment. She was seen at a party shortly before she was
discovered by police. When examined at the hospital, she showed no signs
of exposure despite subfreezing temperatures, suggesting that she hadn't
been outside for long. Brawley never had the chance to explain these
discrepancies, and she never had to explain them: on the advice of her
lawyers, she refused to cooperate with police and prosecutors, so she
never gave a detailed account of events. She was spirited away to
undisclosed locations while her handlers gave incendiary interviews to
the press and spun race-baiting conspiracy theories. Sharpton, in a
heartwarming display of sensitivity, said that asking Brawley to meet
with New York's Jewish attorney general would be like asking a Holocaust
survivor "to sit down with Mr. Hitler."

A grand jury found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded that the whole
affair was probably a hoax. To this day we cannot know whether Brawley
was assaulted by someone - named or unnamed, known to her or unknown -
whether she was cajoled or pressured into playing a role in an
elaborately orchestrated hoax, or whether she just made the whole thing
up. Owing in large part to the exploitation of the case by her lawyers
and handlers, any truth is so intermeshed with a tissue of lies that
there's no separating the two. As a result, "Brawley's story" is still
available for charlatans and demagogues to cite as evidence of an
elaborate white racist conspiracy. For such people and those who believe
them, the Tawana Brawley incident is a reason to resist law enforcement,
to distrust the criminal justice system, and to secede from mainstream
society into black separatist cults such as Louis Farrakhan's Nation of
Islam. (Farrakhan has vowed vengeance on Brawley's attackers: "You raped
my daughter, and I will kill you and dismember your body and feed it to
the fowl of the air," he frothed.) But for most people, whatever else it
was, the Tawana Brawley debacle was a prime example of the damage done -
to lives, to reputations, to careers, and most of all to the truth - by
playing the race card.

Almost all Americans agree that racism is wrong. Many believe that it
remains a serious problem that affects many people on a regular basis.
But a lot of people also worry that the charge of racism can be abused.
We can all think of examples: Tawana Brawley's claimed assault seemed to
have been a staged hoax. Michael Jackson - a musician who enjoyed the
most lucrative career in the history of recorded music - teamed up with
Brawley's former handler, Al Sharpton, to accuse his recording label,
Sony Music, of a "racist conspiracy" to undermine his popularity after
sales of his disappointing latest album are, well, disappointing. The
multimillionaire - who, through untold plastic surgeries, has achieved
the Aryan phenotype of Snow White - declared fearlessly, "When you fight
for me, you're fighting for all black people, dead and alive." (That
rumbling you hear is the sound of thousands of former slaves,
sharecroppers, and victims of Jim Crow turning in their graves.) Prince,
a musician whose contract was not quite as good as Michael Jackson's but
still extraordinarily generous, complained that he was a "slave" to his
record label (years later Prince made a deal with Jackson's old label,
Sony, apparently unafraid of the racist conspiracy). Clarence Thomas,
when charges of sex harassment surfaced during his confirmation hearings
for the Supreme Court of the United States, compared his critics to a
lynch mob. And of course there's O. J. Simpson. We all know what happened
with O. J. Simpson (don't we?).

The Race Card will examine the prevalence of dubious and questionable
accusations of racism and other types of bias. I will argue that the
social and legal meaning of "racism" is in a state of crisis: the term
now has no single clear and agreed-upon meaning. As a result, it is
available to describe an increasingly wide range of disparate policies,
attitudes, decisions, and social phenomena. This leads to disagreement
and confusion. Self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political
hacks use accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of
"bias" tactically, in order to advance their own ends. And people of
goodwill may make sincere claims that strike others as obviously
wrongheaded.

In a sense, the Tawana Brawley incident was a classic example of playing
the race card: Brawley and/or her handlers used a claim of racial bias in
order to gain something they didn't deserve - notoriety, attention,
money, public support for their controversial racial politics. But in
another sense the incident was atypical. Playing the race card typically
involves jumping to a conclusion not compelled by the facts; Michael
Jackson's album sales were disappointing - that's a fact - but it's far
from obvious that they were disappointing because Jackson was the victim
of racism. By contrast, it appears that Brawley or her handlers actually
fabricated the injuries, as well as disingenuously claiming that racism
was to blame for them. The Brawley incident didn't involve jumping to a
conclusion that the facts didn't support; it involved making up facts
that would support the desired conclusion.

Still, this unusual case demonstrates something about playing the race
card more generally: false or exaggerated claims of bias piggyback on
real instances of victimization. They "work" because there are enough
similar verified cases for the lies and exaggerations to seem plausible.
Brawley's story was plausible to many people because they knew of similar
incidents that actually happened. There are racist police, and they
sometimes abuse black people. When asked many years later whether he
would apologize for his role in the incident, Reverend Sharpton defended
his conduct: "Apologize for what? For believing a young lady?"5 People
who believed Brawley did so because they gave her, rather than the
police, the benefit of the doubt. They began with the presumption that
black people often suffer from racism and police often lie. People who
began with the opposite presumption - that blacks rarely suffer from
racism and police are usually truthful - never believed her. In the
Brawley case, the latter presumption yielded the correct conclusion. But
that doesn't make it a superior presumption in general. It would have
yielded the wrong conclusion in many other cases, such as when New York
police did indeed sexually abuse a black man - Abner Louima - and lied
about it in an unsuccessful cover-up attempt.

The cases of Brawley and Louima involved objective facts that people
could observe and verify. But many claims of racism don't involve such
hard facts; they involve prejudice or bias - a state of mind we can't
observe directly. Consider the following high-stakes struggle, where many
people think the winner played the race card.

. . .

The year 1991 marked the end of an era in American civil rights. Thurgood
Marshall - the first black Supreme Court justice, the lead attorney for
the NAACP in the historic racial desegregation case Brown v. Board of
Education - announced his intention to retire from the bench. Immediately
the speculation and maneuvering concerning Marshall's replacement began.
It was widely expected that another African American would be - indeed,
would have to be - appointed. Liberals and civil rights groups began a
predictable campaign directed at the Republican president - George H. W.
Bush - who would nominate Marshall's successor. It was crucial, they
insisted, that the nation's highest court include a person of color. The
Bush administration would demonstrate the racial insensitivity - indeed
bigotry - that its enemies had long suspected if it appointed a white
person to fill this vacancy. Partisan politics and ideological litmus
tests surely should be put aside in this instance. Marshall's vacancy
should be filled by a person who could understand and express the unique
experience of racial minorities in this country.

If it had its druthers, the Bush administration would certainly appoint a
conservative. And the most prominent conservative judges were white. But
Republicans couldn't afford to ignore the race issue. Part of the GOP's
long-term strategy involved improving its dismal level of support among
minorities. But the party couldn't shake its reputation as racially
insensitive or downright racist. Its long-lived "Southern strategy"
relied on race-baiting to deliver white votes to GOP candidates. Bush had
been elected, in part, on the strength of a notorious ad campaign that
many felt exploited racial bigotry. The ad pilloried Democratic candidate
Michael Dukakis for supporting a program that allowed prison inmates to
take "furloughs" from incarceration. The ad informed the public that a
convicted murderer, Willie Horton, beat a man and raped his fiancée after
failing to return from furlough. The ad prominently featured Horton's
menacing black face, complete with shaggy Black Panther Afro and beard.
Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, crowed, "By the time this election
is over, Willie Horton will be a household name." Atwater did not
exaggerate. By the end of the campaign, one might have thought Horton was
Dukakis's running mate. The ad may have helped Bush win the election, but
it didn't help Bush or the Republicans improve their standing with
African Americans.

Bush faced a dilemma. If he nominated a white conservative to the Supreme
Court, it would reinforce the perception that he and the Republicans were
insensitive to racial injustice, hostile to civil rights, even closet
racists. But the black judges with the stature and experience for the
position were civil rights liberals.

Beltway conservatives must have bristled at this bind. The liberals were
using a blatant racial quota - something conservatives vehemently opposed
on principle - to push the president to a more liberal nominee. Many of
the "New Right" became conservatives in reaction to this kind of identity
politics. They had seen their neighborhood schools forcibly integrated
through racial busing imposed by liberal judges. They felt that their
cherished family alma maters had succumbled to the cheap thrills of
radical chic and caved in to the pressures of black nationalist
mau-mauing and feminist hectoring. "Disadvantaged minorities" displaced
their sons in the entering classes of Ivy League universities; militant
feminists demanded integration, disrupting the comfortable esprit de
corps of campus men's clubs. The traditional liberal arts curriculum had
been watered down with overtly political ethnic and feminist authors, a
concession to a misguided and trendy pluralism. The grande dame of
classical education - Western Civilization - had been raped by radicals
and begat such bastardizations as "World Civilizations" and "Cultures,
Ideas, and Values." In the newly hyper-liberal colleges, they had been
forced to sit through what they felt were self-righteous screeds about
"white male oppression," and they were browbeaten by pious professors and
students alike, each competing to be more sensitive and tolerant than
thou.

And were the people who got into college through race and gender quotas
grateful to be there? Hardly. Instead, they harangued and harassed,
complained and cajoled for ethnic studies, feminist studies, special
theme houses, "sensitivity" days, mandatory tolerance workshops. They
held marches, sit-ins, and rallies for every conceivable left-wing cause.

And it wasn't enough for them to have their special self-segregated
programs (the rationale of integration was conveniently forgotten once
they had bullied their way in). They also wanted to piss on everyone
else's fun. The only silver lining in all this cloudy "social progress"
was that the introduction of large numbers of women made it easier to get
lucky. But the feminists were quick to put a stop to that: they pressed
for sex harassment codes, turned dorm counselors into antisex police, and
proposed fraternization rules so strict that you had to get a signed and
notarized consent form before you could so much as ask a coed out on a
date. They bullied the universities - successfully in many cases - to
kill off the Greek system just because a party or two got a little bit
out of hand.

When graduation finally came, these same malcontents followed the
conservatives right into government and private industry, making the same
demands there. So everyone had to sit through race and gender
"sensitivity training" at work. There were new rules everywhere to make
sure no one's delicate sensibilities were ever "offended." And now they
were doing it again, playing the race card to force the president of the
United States to choose a left-wing affirmative action nominee for the
Supreme Court.

But conservatives had an ace up their sleeves. A black conservative with
just enough experience to be a plausible candidate but not so much as to
have left a long paper trail of controversial published opinions. One can
imagine the number of champagne corks that popped the night someone -
maybe a young, up-and-coming member of the Federalist Society - made his
career in conservative politics with the suggestion "Clarence Thomas."
Imagine the strategy meeting of some unknown conservative think tank. The
jowly old guard grumbling; the fresh-faced Young Turks scowling.
Marshall's getting up in years; what to do if he retires while our team
is in the White House? How do we deal with the race issue? Then someone
says it: "Clarence Thomas." It was racial politics jujitsu: use the
enemy's strength against him. We have to pick a black nominee? Fine.
We'll give you a black nominee so conservative he makes Edmund Burke look
like Che Guevara. So what that he's just barely been appointed to the
federal bench? Are the quota-crazy affirmative action liberals going to
say that a black candidate is unqualified?

Clarence Thomas hit the liberals right between the eyes. Liberals had
pressed so forcefully, so righteously, so sincerely on the importance of
racial diversity on the Court. They had carefully honed all of the moves
in support of affirmative action. They had perfected the subtle and not
so subtle insinuation that anyone who suggested that an affirmative
action candidate wasn't qualified was a closet racist. Now all of these
finely tuned arguments would be redeployed in support of the most
conservative jurist since Hammurabi. The liberals would have to swallow
hard and accept Thomas or confront their own best arguments and the
charge of hypocrisy to boot.

Liberals were suddenly on the run. They had defeated other
ultraconservative candidates, such as Ronald Reagan's nominee Robert
Bork, focusing on their published opinions, public statements, and
scholarship to demonstrate that the nominees' views on hot-button issues
such as abortion and civil rights were outside the political mainstream.
They tried to do the same with Thomas. Prominent black law professors
testified, expressing concern about Thomas's hostility to school
desegregation and affirmative action, but Thomas had no scholarly career
and hence no scholarship. He had made few public statements and, since he
had served as a judge for only two years, had published few controversial
opinions. When asked about his views on abortion, Thomas stonewalled,
insisting that he had not considered one of the few legal issues about
which almost everyone - lawyer, Beltway warrior, and civilian alike - had
an opinion. The Harvard Law School professor Christopher Edley pointed
out that "when applied to fundamental matters, this [answer] is almost
disqualifying. A well-qualified nominee should at least be able to
suggest . . . the framework for his or her analysis. How else can you
discern someone's constitutional vision, which is the key question before
you?"6 But Edley's plea for a tough look at Thomas's qualifications fell
on deaf ears. Because his race subtly but effectively insulated him from
criticism about his qualifications, Thomas's inexperience was proving to
be an advantage. He didn't need to impress the Senate; he just had to
avoid giving them ammunition against him. Thomas was able to deflect hard
questions by demurring.

Conservatives were buying confetti and chilling bottles of Krug when
Anita Hill turned up in the District. Hill was a prim young black woman
who had worked with Thomas on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC). She claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her, following a
classic pattern: he asked her out, she declined, he started hassling her
with off-color jokes and references to porn. Hill was a believable
accuser, in large part because it was hard to imagine that this proper
woman could have invented a story that included a porn star named Long
Dong Silver and references to pubic hair on a can of Diet Coke. Someone
had to have exposed her to these ideas. Not that Thomas was an obvious
suspect, this tightly wound man, impeccably sexless in Beltway-standard
gray flannel and blue serge. But look closely enough and you could almost
see it: the leer, the gleam in the eyes, the licking of the lips. Could
he be Willie Horton's kith and kin after all - a sexual predator dressed
up for Court?

The Senate confirmation hearings began as a duller than average legal
theory symposium involving issues such as "fidelity to the Constitution"
and the meaning of "penumbral rights." After Hill's accusations they
morphed into a Jerry Springer episode that had put on airs. The nation
witnessed a parade of disgruntled former coworkers, jilted ex-lovers, and
other "character witnesses" testifying to the integrity or duplicity of
Thomas and Hill. The Clarence 'n Anita Show offered the viewing public
that most comfortable scene of American pop theater, wherein the vain and
cocky black man gets taken down a notch or two by the headstrong black
woman. Hill played a demure Sapphire Stevens to Thomas's somber Amos
Jones, with EEOC colleague and Thomas supporter John Doggett making a
cameo as Kingfish Stevens.

The daytime drama came to a head when a beleaguered Thomas described the
hearings as a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." Although race had
thus far served as a silent inoculation against critique, here it was
deployed openly as a full-strength antibiotic. Thomas sought to link his
struggle to sit on the highest Court in the United States to the
struggles of African Americans to avoid physical mutilation, torture, and
death. He implicitly evoked the experience of blacks such as Emmett Till,
a young black man from Chicago who was tortured and killed by whites
after teasing a white woman in Mississippi. He compared milquetoast
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to an angry mob armed with
firearms and strong rope.

No one dared openly scoff, but many found the analogy harder to swallow
than a diet cola of dubious purity. The irony of the moment was striking,
even in this, a political drama that Oscar Wilde could have written:
Thomas - a corrosive skeptic of accusations of racism during his tenure
at the EEOC - cried racism the moment his nomination was in real
jeopardy. When the chips were down and the stakes were high, this staunch
defender of color blindness shamelessly played the race card.

Irony notwithstanding, it's possible that race did play a role in
validating Hill's accusations. Clarence Thomas was about to enjoy the
highest honor the legal profession can bestow - an appointment to the
Supreme Court of the United States - when Democrats introduced the nation
to Anita Hill. At the very moment when Thomas should have been basking in
the admiration of his peers, he was forced to address charges of a most
embarrassing and sordid nature. Nothing could be less consistent with the
esteem in which members of the federal judiciary were typically held.
Nothing could have more effectively undermined the judge's persona of
cool rationality, objectivity, and cerebral detachment than the image of
the sex fiend so enslaved to bodily passions that he abused his authority
and preyed on his employees. Thomas must have been furious. Attack me for
my record, for my reasoning, for my ideology if you must. But this? This
is (literally) hitting below the belt.

Worse yet, these charges had an ugly racial overtone, intended or not:
the black man as sexual predator. That's how many of Thomas's colleagues
and much of the nation would receive them. The people who advanced the
charges and pressed the issue had to have known this. These charges were
probably more believable to many people and certainly much more damaging
psychologically to Thomas because of his race. In this light, the claim
that the hearings were a "high-tech lynching" isn't quite so far-fetched.
Even those disinclined to support Thomas on his merits might worry that
the stereotype of the oversexed black man colored, so to speak, the
proceedings, making the charges seem more plausible. Veteran antiracists,
well acquainted with theories of illicit and unconscious racism, might
doubt that it was mere coincidence that the first Supreme Court nominee
to face such resistance - based not on his record or his competence, but
on his sexual predilections - was a black man.

"I believe Anita Hill" became a slogan of left liberals during the
confirmation hearings. But like most slogans, it stood for more and less
than its literal denotation. It stood for a feminist conviction that sex
harassment demanded attention and condemnation. It stood for opposition
to Thomas and his ideological views generally. It stood for solidarity
with a brave woman who faced the full brunt of the right-wing public
opinion machine. It stood for all of these things, almost to the
exclusion of a sober and objective evaluation of her story and its
plausibility. Mightn't an embattled Thomas reasonably have suspected that
part of the reason so many believed her and not him, part of the reason
her story, tarnished by the passage of time, gained the luster of
plausibility and for many the gleam of Truth, was that her account
confirmed one of the most pernicious of racial stereotypes?

Excerpted from The Race Card by Richard Thompson Ford. Copyright © 2008
by Richard Thompson Ford. Published in January 2008 by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
----------------------------------------------------

February 10, 2008

The Big Blind
=============

By ORLANDO PATTERSON

THE RACE CARD

How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.

By Richard Thompson Ford.

388 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian
store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who
charged racial bias; a companion said it was "one of the most humiliating
moments of her life." Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite
status in our new gilded age - being waited on in luxury stores after
hours - but had she been the victim of racism?

In "The Race Card," a sharp, tightly argued and delightfully contentious
work, Richard Thompson Ford flatly disagrees, finding "something
Orwellian" about Winfrey's "egalitarian demand for one's rightful
position as V.I.P. - a civil rights claim to a colorblind hierarchy of
the rich and famous." Winfrey's complaint, Ford writes, is typical of a
class of grievances that has created a crisis in the social and legal
meaning of race: playing the race card, defined as making "false or
exaggerated claims of bias" that "piggyback on real instances of
victimization."

The sleazy Tawana Brawley episode - in which a young black woman
apparently falsely claimed to have been raped and smeared with excrement
by racists, and which her lawyers and Al Sharpton egregiously exploited -
is of a piece with Clarence Thomas's shameless accusation of a "high-tech
lynching," Michael Jackson's claim that the low sales of one of his
albums were due to a "racist conspiracy" by his record company, and
explanations of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that attributed it to
racism. Worse, even some whites now play the race card - recently, and
ignobly, demonstrated by former President Bill Clinton - which threatens
to become what Ford calls a "national patois," a dangerous and
shortsighted way of crying wolf that has the long-term effect of
undermining valid complaints from those who still suffer genuine racial
injury.

With a daring disregard for ideological propriety, Ford vivisects every
sacred cow in "post-racist" America. Inevitably he overreaches, and he is
occasionally quite wrong; but the end result is a vigorous and
long-overdue shake-up of the nation's stale discourse on race.

Ford, a law professor at Stanford, argues that there are four broad sets
of reasons for playing the race card.

The first is the phenomenon of racism without racists - that is, much of
the racial injury suffered today by blacks, especially the black poor, is
the consequence of past racist action by actors long dead. Katrina is the
most telling case in point. The fact that blacks lived in the most
vulnerable areas of New Orleans resulted from the apartheid racism of the
city's earlier history, a situation exacerbated by the government's inept
response to the crisis. But to accuse President Bush and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency of racism, Ford suggests, is to play the race
card and is counterproductive, alienating those in a position to help
while blinding us to the true nature of these racial injustices and the
policies needed to redress them.

Racism by analogy is the second source of the race card: the tendency of
nonblack constituencies - gay people, women, the obese, the unattractive
and the culturally different - to frame their grievances in civil rights
terms. Ford grants that the common-law emphasis on precedent encourages
the use of analogy, and that the extension is justified in some cases.
But the civil rights model is often inappropriate. The multicultural
movement, for example, threatens to transform all cultural claims into
racial ones. Ford thinks only racism, sexism and xenophobia deserve
remedy under the Civil Rights Act because they are irrational, refer to
intractable traits and cannot be justified by facts or logic.

Perhaps; but he sometimes misses the mark. Thus, he writes that framing
antifat discrimination as a civil rights issue is "an uncomfortable
stretch." The rejection of a fat but fit and qualified woman for a job as
a Jazzercise instructor in San Francisco was defensible, he claims, on
the grounds that the company advertises itself as a weight-loss
organization: "Asking Jazzercise to hire fat instructors is not like
asking a lunch counter to hire blacks; it's more like asking a cosmetics
company to hire models with severe acne." Furthermore, he says, fat
people can change themselves in ways blacks cannot, there is general
agreement that being overweight is undesirable and unhealthy, and no
significant fat identity movement exists. Whoops! Overweight Americans,
far more numerous than blacks, can point to medical evidence that fatness
is partly genetic, to sociological findings that they suffer job
discrimination and to a growing fat-acceptance movement led by feisty
bloggers in the "fatosphere."

And consider this: The great choreographer George Balanchine held that a
ballerina's skin should be the color of a peeled apple, a view shared by
many in ballet circles. I can see no difference between Ford's defense of
Jazzercise's action and an artistic director's refusal to hire a talented
black ballerina because ballerinas are expected to be white, thin and
flat everywhere. Justice sometimes requires the rehabilitation of
standards unfairly naturalized by convention.

Another reason for the upsurge in the use of the race card is the
difficulty of defining discrimination. In this, the most rewarding part
of the book, Ford nimbly translates arcane legal doctrine and academic
work on prejudice into tart, slyly engaging prose. Contrary to the common
view, we learn that the courts are skeptical of attempts to define racial
injury in intentional terms, racial animus being almost impossible to
prove unless openly admitted. Instead, the prevailing doctrine is that of
discriminatory effect or "disparate impact," the view that prejudice may
be inferred from acts that ride on earlier disadvantage or modes of
evaluation that assume a world in which only white males matter. Far from
a tidy solution, it is inevitably "a source of legitimate and sincere
disagreement," providing more fodder for playing the race card.

Take racial profiling. Everyone, even George W. Bush, now condemns it,
but the consensus, Ford argues, is a sham, based on a disingenuously
narrow view that it is characterized by the sole use of race in random
stops and searches. In practice, most security forces use a more
"rational" combination of race and other appropriate criteria, based on
reliable statistics. Nearly all of us have a civil liberties threshold:
imagine Pakistani madrassa graduates lining up at airport security; race
matters in such cases, and need involve no animus. Inevitably, Ford
concedes, such practices are going to ensnare some law-abiding members of
the profiled group. It is what the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy
calls a "racial tax," one that Ford is willing to pay for the common
good.

Without missing a beat, Ford makes this argument the centerpiece of a
spirited defense of affirmative action, emblematic of the "clash of ends"
that is the fourth source of race-card play. Race matters, indeed, and is
also legitimately used by institutions deploying affirmative action to
promote the common good of righting centuries of racial wrongs and
generating a vitally needed black middle class. To call such inclusive
action "reverse racism" is guff hypocrisy, the essence of racism being
exclusion and pervasive animus toward a particular group. The claim is,
in fact, a case of whites playing the race card. True, a few whites and
Asians will pay a small racial tax, but this, too, is trumped by the
common good of racial justice and harmony. Think of the riots in
Clichy-sous-Bois, France.

To left-leaning readers and victims of genuine racism, Ford's relentless
evenhandedness and cost-benefit balancing act may seem at times to skirt
the edges of conservative reaction. But a patient reading of this astute
and closely reasoned work reveals an exquisitely subversive mind. Ford is
adept at stealing the best-defended intellectual bases of the right on
behalf of a pragmatic, antiracist liberalism unflaggingly committed to
the increasingly scorned goal of integration - and to relief for the
truly disadvantaged, who suffer the persisting injuries of past racism in
the absence of those who engendered their plight and, perplexingly, in
the presence of growing racial tolerance.

Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author
of "The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's
'Racial' Crisis."

=============================================

February 10, 2008First Chapter

'Sellout'
=========

By RANDALL KENNEDY

Who Is "Black"?

"How difficult it sometimes is to know where the black begins and the
white ends." -Booker T. Washington, "Up from Slavery" (1901)

Soon after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United
States, Senator Barack Obama was asked on the television program 60
Minutes when he had "decided" that he was black. One of the reasons the
interviewer posed this question is that Obama's mother was a white
American and his father a black Kenyan. Obama, moreover, had had little
contact with his father; he was raised mainly in Hawaii by his mother and
her relatives, in settings far afield from conventional black American
communities. Against this backdrop, some observers have questioned
Obama's racial standing. "Obama isn't black," the journalist Debra J.
Dickerson asserts, because "in our political and social reality [black]
means those descended from West African slaves." Rather, Dickerson
continues, "by virtue of his white American mom and his Kenyan dad ...
[Obama] is an American of African immigrant extraction." Obama responded
to the question on 60 Minutes by distancing himself from the idea that he
had "decided" to be black. He focused on three other considerations: his
appearance, the response of onlookers to his appearance, and his shared
experience of those responses with others also perceived to be "black."
"[I]f you look African American in this society," he remarked, "you're
treated as an African American." In 1940, W. E. B. DuBois quipped that
"the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." Obama
updated that view, noting that when he tried to catch taxis, drivers were
not confused about his race; they all too often refused to pick him up
for racially discriminatory reasons, just as they all too often sped by
other "black" men.

Discussion of Obama's racial identity is a highly publicized instance of
a feature of American race relations that is often ignored or
misunderstood though it has deep historical roots. Many people believe
that determining who is "black" is rather easy, a task simplified by the
administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any
discernible African ancestry stamps a person as "black." A principal
purpose of this doctrine was to address "the problem" of children born of
interracial sex who would bear a mixture of physical markers inherited
from ancestors situated on different sides of the race line. White
supremacists hoped that by definitively categorizing as "African,"
"black," "Negro," or "colored" anyone whose appearance signaled the
presence of an African ancestor, the one-drop rule would protect white
bloodlines. It mirrored and stoked Negrophobia by proclaiming that even
the tiniest dab of Negro ancestry was sufficiently contaminating to make
a person a "nigger." Many white racists have believed what a character
exclaims in Thomas Dixon's novel The Leopard's Spots - that "a single
drop" of Negro blood "kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the
lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal
passions." Many champions of black advancement, however, have also become
devotees of the one-drop rule (bereft, of course, of its white
supermacist intentions). In her richly detailed defense of the doctrine,
Professor Christine B. Hickman writes:

The Devil fashioned [the one-drop rule] out of racism, malice, greed,
lust and ignorance, but in so doing he also accomplished good: His rule
created the African-American race as we know it today, and while this
race had its origins in the peoples of three continents and its members
can look very different from one another, over the centuries the Devil's
one-drop rule united this race as a people in the fight against slavery,
segregation and racial injustice. The one-drop rule helped to funnel into
one racial camp people who might otherwise have been splintered. It is
because of the one-drop rule that some of the most significant leaders
among African Americans are considered "black" or "Negro" despite their
"white" ancestry; here I think immediately of Frederick Douglass and W.
E. B. DuBois. Long denounced as a method for protecting whites against
the taint of Negro blood, the one-drop rule is now embraced by some
devotees of black unity as a way of reinforcing solidarity and
discouraging exit by "blacks" who might otherwise prefer to reinvent
themselves racially.

Despite its evident significance, however, the one-drop rule has never
been an unchallenged guide to racial definition. For a long period,
several states formally defined as "white" individuals with known "black"
ancestors. Until early in the twentieth century, several states,
including Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, statutorily decreed that
an individual was considered white so long as he or she did not have more
than one-eighth Negro "blood." In Virginia, until 1910, a person could be
deemed white as long as he or she did not have more than twenty-four
percent Negro blood. Not until 1924 did the Old Dominion adopt the
one-drop rule. True, in many places, the mere appearance of being a Negro
was sufficient to trigger mistreatment, regardless of one's genealogy or
the words of some arcane statute purporting to define racial status.
Still, the assigning of racial identity by white authorities has
occasioned far more controversy than is generally realized.

Just as some "whites" have adopted rules of racial identification at
variance with the one-drop rule, so, too, have some "blacks."
Light-skinned descendants of interracial unions have at various times
attempted to set themselves apart from those with darker hues. They have
labeled themselves differently, for example, eschewing "black" or "Negro"
in favor of "FMC"-"free men of color" - or similar formulations. They
have created social organizations that resolutely excluded those deemed
to be "too dark" - those darker than a light-brown paper bag or those in
whose wrists one cannot discern blue veins. They have insisted upon
marrying people who were as light as, or preferably lighter than,
themselves. The one-drop rule lumps all "colored" people together
regardless of the extent to which they are partially white in appearance
or ancestry. But some light-skinned people of color have rejected that
formula and insisted upon distinguishing themselves from "real" Negroes.
Consider the case of William Ellison, who was born into slavery in 1790
in South Carolina. Allowed to purchase his freedom (by a white man who
may well have been his biological father), Ellison amassed a sizable
fortune, bought and sold slaves, contributed funds to pro-slavery
vigilantes, aided the Confederacy, and then, after the Civil War,
supported the opponents of Reconstruction. Today many people would
describe Ellison as "black" despite his obvious multiraciality. Yet
Ellison "did not consider himself a black man but a man of color, a
mulatto, a man neither black nor white, a brown man."

Between 1850 and 1920, the United States Census demarcated a category for
the "mulatto." Enumerators were initially given virtually no guidance;
they used their own judgment, mainly based on appearance, to determine
who was "black" as opposed to "mulatto." In 1870, census officials noted
that the "mulatto" category included "quadroons, octoroons and all
persons having any perceptible trace of African blood." In 1890,
officials supplemented the "white," "black," and "mulatto" categories
with two new classifications that had previously been subsumed within the
definition for mulatto. They admonished enumerators to:

"[b]e particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes,
quadroons, and octoroons. The word "black" should be used to describe
those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; "mulatto,"
those persons who have three-eighths to five-eighths black blood;
"quadroon," those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and
"octoroon," those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black
blood."

At no point were enumerators provided with a methodology for extracting
this information or discerning these differences.

The idea of the mulatto has been a gathering point for a wide variety of
racial prejudices, fears, myths, and speculations. For one thing,
throughout American history there has been a tendency on the part of
whites and blacks to favor mulattoes and other mixed-race colored people
over plain "blacks." This tendency has been fueled, in large part, by the
logic of white supremacy: since whiteness has been perceived to be
superior to blackness, lighter complexions have been accorded more
prestige than darker ones. Hence the saying: "If you're black, go back;
if you're brown, stick around; if you're white, you're alright." The
baleful efflorescence of racist sentiments in the post-World War I era
prompted the Census Bureau to simplify its stratification of the American
pigmentocracy. After 1920, the Bureau ceased enumerating mulattoes. It
adopted the one-drop rule, declaring that persons of "mixed blood" would
be "classified according to the nonwhite racial strain ... [A person] of
mixed white ... and Negro ... is classified as ... a Negro ... regardless
of the amount of white blood [he carries]." Under the new regime, writes
Professor Joel Williamson, "all Negroes did look alike. On the one side,
there were simply Negroes, and on the other the melting pot was busy
making everyone [else, except Asians] simply white. Obviously the Bureau
was quite willing to add its strength to the effort to create a simply
biracial America." Although skin color is undoubtedly the most salient
signal of racial identity in America, other actual or imagined bodily
features have also been seen as distinctive markers of Negritude. These
include the shapes of heads, feet, lips, and noses as well as the texture
of hair. Adjudicating the race of plaintiffs suing for their freedom, a
Virginia judge asserted in 1806 that:

"Nature has stamped upon the African and his descendants two
characteristic marks, besides the difference of complexion, which often
remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of color either
disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and a wooly head of hair. The
latter of these characteristics disappears the last of all; and so strong
an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that
it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended
from parents of different complexions."

Yet, the very words used as labels for races - "white," "black," "red,"
"yellow," and "brown" - highlight the centrality of complexion in
American racial consciousness. Skin color has long been the main
physiological feature of the uniform that is widely seen as racially
identifying the wearer.

So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance
and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to
added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals
whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their
ancestors. When conflict arises between looks and lineage, it is the
former that usually emerges as the more influential of the two. As
Professor Robert Westley observes, "no one who is visually apprehended as
Black ... turns out to be white.... The judgment of Blackness is fixed,
immediate, irreversible." In notable instances whites have been willing
to grant what Professor Daniel Sharfstein terms "racial amnesty" to
individuals who appeared to be white. The key to such amnesty, however,
has been the appearance of the individuals in question; if they looked
obviously "colored" there has been no controversy. They are labeled
"colored" or "black" or "Negro" and that is the end of it. Only if they
possessed physical traits that might lead them to be seen as white (or
something else nonblack) would space be opened allowing for wiggle room
in determining their racial placement.

Consider the early nineteenth-century North Carolina case Gobu v. Gobu,
in which a white girl found an abandoned baby whom she claimed as her
slave. When this enslaved boy grew to maturity he sued for his freedom.
No one knew the identity of his biological parents. In appearance,
according to the court, he was "of an olive colour, between black and
yellow, had long hair and a prominent nose." Judge John Louis Taylor
expressly states that if he had recognized the plaintiff as "black," the
plaintiff would have borne the burden of proving that he was not a slave.
In Judge Taylor's words: "I acquiesce in the ... presumption of every
black person being a slave." But the plaintiff was not "black"; he was of
"mixed blood," meaning that his mother might have been white or an
Indian. Given these possibilities, and the absence of any other pertinent
evidence, the judge required the slaveholder to bear the burden of
proving that the plaintiff was properly enslaved. The judge decided, in
short, to give the plaintiff the benefit of the doubt - a benefit
withheld from anyone deemed by appearance to be "black."

Neither appearance nor lineage nor the concatenation of the two exhaust
the menu of ingredients that have figured into determinations of race.
Consider the lawsuit in South Carolina in 1940 in which Virginia Bennett
challenged the will of her deceased father, Franklin Capers Bennett.
While leaving Virginia unmentioned, the will bequeathed Franklin's entire
estate to his second wife, Louetta Chassereau Bennett. Virginia attacked
the validity of Louetta's marriage to Franklin, asserting among other
things that the union had violated the state's antimiscegenation law.
According to Virginia, Louetta was colored, inasmuch as she was more than
one-eighth Negro, and was thus prohibited from marrying Franklin, a white
man. Virginia's motivation was clear. She wanted to obtain portions of
Franklin's estate that would be lost to her if her father's marriage to
Louetta was upheld.

The Supreme Court of South Carolina rejected Virginia's challenge. It
ruled that Louetta was not a Negro, despite the presence of "some Negro
blood in her veins," because she possessed a reputation as a white person
- in the court's words, she had been "generally accepted as white" - and
because she had long "acted white," by doing such things as marrying a
white man, attending a white church, sending her children to white
schools, and voting in political primaries open only to whites.

The ruling in favor of Louetta Bennett, despite her "negro blood," was
firmly rooted in precedent. As far back as 1835, the South Carolina
judiciary had weighed considerations other than complexion and lineage in
determining racial identification. "We cannot say what admixture of negro
blood will make a colored person," Judge William Harper declared. "The
condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by a distinct
and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception
into society, and [by] his having commonly experienced the privileges of
a white man."

In the process by which individuals are racialized, they have little or
no control over certain factors - the color of their skin, the identity
of their ancestors, the judgments of others, the ascendant protocols of
racial categorization. Barack Obama, for instance, has no control over
one of the most significant aspects of his case: the fact that some
American-born Negroes decline to acknowledge as "African American" or
"black" African-born Negroes or their progeny. Professor Valerie Smith
notes that "Obama's 'black credentials' have been questioned as much
because of his Kenyan father as his white mother." Those who have raised
questions on this score emphasize the centrality of slavery in America to
their definition of "blackness": to them, a "black" must have an
ancestral tie to enslavement in America - clearly a circumstance over
which an individual today has no control.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sellout by Randall Kennedy Copyright © 2008 by Randall
Kennedy. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpts are
provided by Dial-A-Book Inc.

------------------------------------------

February 10, 2008First Chapter

'A Bound Man'
=============

By SHELBY STEELE

The High Possibility

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white
mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of
this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossip's wicked
delight. Yet this piece of information was presented as vital, as one of
those all-important facts about a person that, like the first cause of a
complex truth, plays a role in everything that follows. Apparently, it is
Barack Obama's fate to have notice of his racial pedigree precede even
the mention of his politics - as if the pedigree inevitably explains the
politics. And I suspect that some people would feel a bit defrauded were
they to hear his political ideas and only later learn that he was
racially mixed.

Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to
a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this
fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was
old enough to notice the world's fascination - if not obsession - with
it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and
think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore,
as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race - dumb
because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside
actual human experience. So I never know what people really want to know
when they ask me what it is like to be - and here come the math words -
"biracial" or "multiracial" or "multicultural." The self as the answer to
an addition problem.

But, as best as I can surmise, what people really want to know is what it
is like to have no race to go home to at night. We commonly think of race
as a kind of home, a place where they have to take you in; and it seems
the very stuff of alienation to live without solid footing in such a
home. If this alienation is not nearly as dramatic as the old "tragic
mulatto" stories would suggest, it nevertheless does exist. How could it
not in a society like America where race once meant the difference
between slavery and freedom? Racist societies enforce the idea of race as
home by making race an inescapable fate. So, still today, this
fundamentally odd - even primitive - idea remains embedded in our
democratic national culture, the legacy of our past. People who are the
progeny of two races have a more ambiguous racial fate and, therefore, at
least some feeling of homelessness. They stand just outside the reach of
that automatic racial solidarity that those born of one race can take for
granted.

So, people like Barack Obama and me are always under a degree of
suspicion. The "one drop" rule formulated in the days of slavery - one
drop of black blood makes you black - consigns us to the black race
(happily so for me and, I would imagine, for Obama as well), but the fact
of an immediate white parent differentiates us and interrupts solidarity
with blacks. And all this is worsened by the fact that whites are
historically the "oppressor" race. Thus, by the dumb logic of racial
thinking, our very mother's milk comes through a collaboration with the
enemy. More literally, this "collaboration" may mean that we enjoy more
exposure to the dominant culture, more advantages in a color-conscious
society. Mistrust and even resentment from other blacks often ensues. And
from whites come the sneers one commonly hears in reference to Obama -
"he's not even really black."

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible
racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed
background to challenge our authority to speak. And both races can
squeeze us in a blueslike double bind where the absurdity is as comic as
it is tragic: we dismiss you for not being authentically black, yet we
will never accept you as authentically black. Ha ha. When people can call
you inauthentic and undermine your moral authority, they have a degree of
power in relation to you. And where they have power, you have
vulnerability.

This would have to be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama's
life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a
public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was
meant in part to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not
merely "own up" to his interracial background as if to a past
indiscretion; he candidly explores it. He practices that brave and
aggressive self-disclosure that disarms by taking away the gossip's
ability to surprise. It is harder to deploy a man's vulnerability against
him when he publishes it in a book.

Still, I glimpsed some of the weariness he must feel at having this
vulnerability regularly probed in a 60 Minutes interview that aired near
the launching of his presidential campaign. It was the usual 60 Minutes
setup, the camera in close enough for a dermatological exam. And there
sat Obama, perfectly composed and seemingly ready for anything, the now
famous ears framing his good looks in eternal boyishness. The
correspondent, Steve Kroft, asked a series of predictable political
questions and then, hunching forward a bit, entered the territory of
identity. There was an allusion to the mixed-race background, and a
question about how Obama saw himself. And here - probably because I knew
so well what to look for - I saw the very faintest exasperation come into
his eyes and then instantly vanish. Barack Obama has no doubt had a
lifetime of rehearsals for this moment, and he must have had a hundred
answers immediately at hand, all rehearsed to the point of glibness. Yet
the answer he finally gave had real pathos precisely because it was so
glib.

He was "rooted," he said, in the African-American community, but he was
also "more than that." To be sure, this is the formulation of a man with
a very complex identity trying, understandably, to make himself simpler
and more recognizable to a society not used to pondering his like. Yet,
this is also a formulation that reduces Obama's identity to a banality.
What could "rooted" or "more than that" mean? How would the two be
simultaneously possible? And, for that matter, what could
"African-American community" really mean? A culture? A politics? To
become recognizable, he processes himself through the same dumb racial
math - he is one thing plus something else - that has been the very
source of his vulnerability. He collaborates with the same tired racial
conventions that made him an odd man out to begin with.

And yet a great part of Obama's appeal in broader America - especially
his political appeal - can be chalked up to his complex identity. He is
interesting for not fitting into old racial conventions. Not only does he
stand in stark contrast to a black leadership with which Americans of all
races have grown exhausted - the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and
Julian Bond - he embodies something that no other presidential candidate
possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human
difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, that
automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America's corrosive
racial politics. After all, this is the radicalism by which Martin Luther
King put Americans in touch - if only briefly - with their human
universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. And, as such,
he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation
and identity politics - to any form of collective chauvinism. For all his
misfittedness, he also embodies a great and noble human aspiration: to
smother racial power in a democracy of individuals. To stand in the glow
of so high an aspiration is to seem a bit enchanted or, at the very
least, charismatic.

It doesn't matter that he sometimes goes along with race-based policies,
or that he made his own Faustian bargain with affirmative action (no
college-bound black of his generation could avoid this self-compromise).
No one is excited because Obama nods to identity politics; people are
excited because he represents an idealism that opposes such politics. Any
black who takes on the near-absolute visibility that goes with seeking
such high office will function as both a man and a symbol, and sometimes
the two will be at odds. So it is not surprising that Obama the man may
vary a bit from Obama the symbol.

And, as a symbol, he raises several remarkable possibilities. Is America
now the kind of society that can allow a black - of whatever pedigree -
to become the most powerful human being on earth, the commander of the
greatest military in history? Have our democratic principles at last
moved us beyond even the tribalism of race? And will the black American
identity, still so reflexively focused on victimization, be nullified if
a black wins the presidency of this largely white nation?

The cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are clearly
greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors
in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy
positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself
asks the American democracy to virtually complete itself, to achieve that
almost perfect transparency where color is indeed no veil over character
- where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual
he truly is. This is the aspirational significance of Obama's campaign,
the high possibility that it points to quite apart from its policy goals.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Bound Man by Shelby Steele Copyright 2008 by Shelby
Steele.

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