Powell
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Joined: 27 Nov 2004
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 Posted: Sat 24 Jan 2009 22:01 Post subject: "One Drop" Lies on Bill Moyers program |
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http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01232009/transcript1.html
| Quote: | PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Well, I think that he is, on the one hand, our first African American president. And some people call him our first bi-racial president.
BILL MOYERS: Right.
PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Some people say that he is, or really consider him still much more acceptable because he has a white parent. I think that part of that internecine warfare within the black community based on skin color. But the people they are claiming often do not consider themselves part of the "black community." Nevertheless, the "black community" (especially the former mulatto elites and their descendants) want to claim them anyway.
I think one of the freighted problems within the black community with hearing words like "bi-racial" is that, you know, African Americans have always been multi-racial. We are, I mean, you know, since slavery, at least bi-racial. And so that some of that vocabulary within the black community I think evokes images of half-breed, quadroon, mulatto, the kind of color coded, tragic mulatto conversation that induces a kind of hierarchy. And I think that that's going to be part of a new American vocabulary in dealing with that unconscious level of distinction.
This "blacks are multiracial, biracial, etc." is bull, because it really means that "whites" are "pure" and Latinos aren't "mixed" but a "race" unto themselves. It protects Latinos from the fact of their sub-Saharan African ancestry (which Anglo blacks politely avoid mentioning). "Half-Breeds" often ruled Indian tribes such as the Cherokee, Creek, etc., but no Indian claims that everyone with a drop of Indian blood is an Indian.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think about that?
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, so for me I suppose the notion of Barack Obama as our first bi-racial president is troubling. And it's troubling in part because, as you point out, African Americans have always been a multi-racial people, or at least for all of contemporary American history they have been a multi-racial people. But the other thing is that race is not simply about biology.
Bull! If "blacks" were one-tenth as "multiracial" as mulattoes like Harris-Lacewell (white mother) claim, they would look like Latinos. The truth is that most Americans (white, black and otherwise) define blacks first by looks and only make exceptions if explicitly told to do so. Latinos aren't defined by phenotype because they are truly "multiracial." "Whites" are usually defined by phenotype (with some exceptions) but that doesn't mean they are "pure" (free of black, Indian, Asian, etc. ancestry).
Race is, of course, socially and legally constructed. And at every point in American history Barack Obama would have been in the category of black. He would have been enslaveable under the slave codes. He would have been Jim Crowed in the context of the Jim Crow South.
Harris-Lacewell is a political scientist who doesn't know history but thinks that she does. Obama would not have been "black" at every point in American history. He would have been "mulatto." He would have been "free colored" (since he would have been born of a free, white mother). Indeed, the term "free colored" was a generic term for non-white that included Indians and part-Indians as well. Early in American history, Obama could even have been a plantation owner, married a white woman, and produced white descendants.
Homer Plessy, who is the litigate in the Plessy v. Ferguson, which establishes separate but equal, the legal code that we think of the civil rights movement as finally breaking open, was so visibly or physiologically white that he had to go to the conductor on the train and tell him, "I'm passing the color line here. I'm breaking the color line. You need to arrest me."
So all of the moments of American racial political history hinge right around a space where multi-racial, sometimes much more sort of in appearance white-black people, have been a part of the story. So it's very hard for me to imagine that now, at the culmination of one part of the black political story, we would start to break that off and assign it to a group that simply does not exist as a matter of law, the bi-racial group.
Harris-Lacewell and the black-identified elites have worked hard to deprive others of the freedom to be free of a forced "black" identity. Look at how they demonized the late New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard (who was born of two Creole parents, not "black" ones). The issue is not Obama "choice" (which he sometimes falsely claims was no choice), but the freedom of other Anglos and Creoles with the dreaded "black blood" to make DIFFERENT choices.
I suppose what I find exciting about the upfrontness about Barack Obama's patchwork, racial identity is that it allows him to be empowering to many different kinds of people. But at the same time, to take away that this is a particular moment of ordinary black folks on the ground who came to D.C. in numbers like nothing I've ever seen, who stood there in the cold.
That's a contradictory statement. She claims that she likes for Obama to be all things to all people but to belong exclusively to the blacks.
That is the accomplishment and the achievement of ordinary black folks on the ground as voters, as those who survived the Jim Crow South. So I just can't take Barack away from us. We need him. |
Why do black Americans always seem to need mulattoes to perform great things in the name of the Negro? Those "ordinary black folk" owe a great deal to the white mother and white grandparents who nurtured, loved and educated the mulatto Obama at great sacrifice. Are they grateful? Hell, no! Why? Because the very idea of "blackness" demands that white relatives be reduced to suppliers of desirable white genes. The ideology of "blackness" demands that the mulatto have a greater loyalty to any Negro on the stree than even the closest white relatives. Obama himself acknowledged that when he criticized his white grandmother for being (rightfully) afraid of an agressive black panhandler (who could have been his "brother"). Harris-Lacewell, who presents herself ALL OVER the media as spokeswoman for "blacks," takes pains to avoid mentioning her white mother. |
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