Trading Places

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It's entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (the author of the quote above) acknowledges the manner in which Obama-watchers oscillated between judgments of 'not black enough' to 'too black' during the 2008 campaign, but offers this little thought experiment as a way of illustrating her main claim: that Obama not only disrupted standard definitions of blackness, but put whiteness itself in crisis.

Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama's whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

Who are these threatened upholders of America's racial order, and what evidence is there of their efforts to contain this disruption? Harris-Lacewell doesn't say--nevertheless, an interesting read.

Merit

Er, I'm back. A marathon of grading, then packing, then moving, then unpacking, then other kinds of my-two-cents distractions (Facebook, Twitter), etc., etc. Long story. Anyway...

One of the more common--and more despicable--assumptions on the Right concerning persons of color in high places is that any achievement or station in life is the result, not of merit, but of misplaced liberal guilt. One could cite as a recent example Fred Barnes' on-air musings about the legitimacy of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's summa cum laude honors at Princeton; or one could simply read this wretched commentary by City Journal's Harry Stein on l'Affaire Gates. 'We're ... learning that race hustlers come in all kinds of packages', he fumes, and while his basic claim is that 'the racial-grievance industry won't learn anything' from the whole dust-up, his main ambition seems to be to drag Gates, a Cambridge-educated Harvard don, through the mud of calumny and innuendo. 'As a scholar in the trendy[!] field of black studies [sic]', Stein declares (without supporting evidence of any kind), 'Gates has built a career on being deferred to by cowed liberal colleagues, and he's obviously unaccustomed to anyone's calling him out on anything'. (Actually, according to one former colleague, he's quite accustomed to being called out all the time, simply on account of the color of his skin.) Stein then cites an instance where Gates apparently misattributed a line by the poet Robbie Burns to William Shakespeare, and approvingly quotes an anonymous online commenter in explaining the failure of the press to highlight this error: 'Why shouldn't Gates expect preferential treatment? He's been getting it his whole life'.

It's an interesting 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' moment when great achievement is taken as proof of a lack of merit: Stein might have looked to Gates' scholarship, or his command of the language, or his intelligence, for such proof. But these seem to me to be, even given my limited familiarity with his work, fairly unimpeachable, pace what seems to have been a rather egregious slip in erudition. No matter: Gates has been handsomely rewarded, he is black; ergo we have some quota to thank. '"Teachable moments" never teach these people anything', Stein concludes. Indeed.

H.N.I.C.

!!!
Who would have ever thought that a tall, dark, and handsome graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law might one day be elected President? Is this a great country or what?