Over at Alternet.org, Philip Barron has a piece criticizing a piece in Slate.com by Mickey Kaus and a piece written by Stanley Crouch in The Daily News (which latter piece you can read here) in which the issue of race and the prospective run for the Presidency by Sen. Barack Obama is addressed. The interesting thing about Barron's piece - especially after reading Crouch's column which apparently stirred up a hornet's nest from people who either didn't read it or didn't understand it - is he falls on the very sword he attempts to wield against Kaus and Crouch, viz., they don't understand race all that well. The gist of Barron's criticism of both Kaus and Crouch is that, by complicating race matters (speaking of them in terms much broader than skin color, but the social, political, and historical dimensions in which "race" has come to be understood in the United States) they fail to understand that , quite simply, Barack Obama is a black man.
Memo to Barron - having dark pigmentation is not necessarily what race is about. In the Kaus piece, we are reminded that Hillary Clinton has a record on race matters that Obama does not. Crouch takes the whole issue a step further and discusses Obama's ethnicity (and potential appeal) in terms of "race" as a socio-cultural category. Barron wants us to see race quite literally in black-and-white, and it is not not nor has it ever been that simple. It isn't about "blood" or skin tone. It isn't about who "represents" whom. As Crouch rightly notes in his column, even Obama himself says that he has not experienced racism in the same way other Africa-Americans have. In citing this, Crouch is defending a position that has the merit of resting on American history. Race matters run so deep, and their currents are so strong - so many have drowned in their horrible waters - that to reduce "race" to skin tone is a lowering of IQ (to steal Barron's headline).
Obama is, in many ways, the Democratic version of Colin Powell, an African-American liberals can like. More radical, and well-liked among blacks, leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (both of whom have a longer list of accomplishments than Obama) are unappealing because - well, let's face it, blacks like them so they are unacceptable. As in the case of Powell, who has broader appeal than other black Republicans such as Alan Keyes, Obama is someone white liberals can accept precisely because he has such a short public resume and hasn't made the mistakes of Jackson (fathering a child out of wedlock) or Sharpton (Tawanna Brawley will haunt him until the day he dies) and hasn't engaged in the kind of confrontational politics that both men have done. Obama sounds nice, he talks about appealing across political and racial lines and aboundaries, and he makes white liberals feel good about supporting a black man for President.
None of this is to say that Obama is not, potentially, an excellent Presidential candidate, or that his racial bona fides aren't as acceptable as those of other potantial African-American candidates. What I am saying is that Obama's candidacy, and his appeal to white liberal voters, has much to do with racial politics in America, their history, their complexity, and their hiddenness and unspeakability. To dismiss out of hand criticisms of Obama's potential appeal based upon race isn't racist so much as it is simple-minded. Race isn't about skin color or ethnicity. It is about the whole history of experiences and interactions between Europeans and Africans since the landing of the first slave-ships in Virginia almost four hundred years ago. Obama is a participant in that history, to be sure; all Americans are. It is Obama's place in that story that is being discussed, and how he fits into the larger narrative about race (and implicitly, about America) that is at issue. For Barron to dismiss such discussions because "race makes us stupid" misses an opportunity to really grapple with the issue.
Virtual Tin Cup
