Race & Repetition

Barack Obama has said that his tours across this country as a presidential nominee have made it clear to him that Americans are ready to move beyond the old divisions of race. I think he has a point; that my mother voted for Obama in our state's primary is a small testament to this observation. But the media is not ready to give up on what is the most sensationalist, divisive material they can grasp onto: that of the confusions and misunderstandings between people based on race, gender, and class.

As a teacher, I'm not sure I can make the same observation Obama has made. My mostly white, affluent students continually complain about "reverse racism" proven through anecdotal stories of "my friend who didn't get in to his college of choice." In other words, my white students feel entitled to a college admissions process that does not force them to compete with people of a different color, ethnicity, or class than themselves.

They repeat the phrase "reverse racism" as if through their repetition this fallacious notion might become true. And eventually it does. But reverse racism is illogical: oppression is the yoke of the marginalized. For example, my students are often furious that in the desire to be "politically correct" their school has replaced the "Redskin" mascot and team name with "Redhawk." They assume the Native Americans after whom the school is in fact named should not be offended; after all, they insist, "we wouldn't be offended if a school had a 'Honkey' as mascot."

Well, no you wouldn't be offended would you? Because Honkey has never been used to dehumanize in order to enslave, lynch, or disenfranchise an entire group of people based on their racial classification. "Honkey" is humorous, in fact, because the power whites have in society is only emphasized by their ability to offer up their own skin color as the basis for a school mascot.

All of this is simply to say, the consistent definition and naming of race, and its necessarily subsequent product, racism, is not less common "now" than "back then." We simply have different effects of that racism: the political disenfranchisement of black Americans for instance. As I watch the CNN team ("the best political team on TV") go on and on and on about women voters, white women voters, old white women voters, black voters, educated voters, young voters, white male voters, etc etc etc, I see the divisions of race, gender, and class, not observed, but engendered -- these divisions must be repeated, over and over, to be maintained. And the media is so good at saying the same thing over and over again.

I hate to disagree with Barack. It seems we are working harder than ever to maintain these divisions. We may be ready to move beyond them, but first we have to recognize how they work: through daily maintenance of difference as a fixed, insurmountable category.

Let's begin to recognize the way these boundaries that "The Best Political Team on TV" name are in fact blurry, unclean, unkempt, messy and, well, fucked up. Obama himself represents this blurring: the son of a "white" woman from Kansas and a man from Africa, the child who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, and came to religion later, not as a blind follower, but a thoughtful devotee. Yet even Obama has to pick one: Black. Could he even run if he defined himself as multi-racial? Would the media be able to comprehend him? What would they do with him?

Categories make for clean, easy, and sensational news and they aren't going away anytime soon.