Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s “Double Consciousness” On Race

The New Yorker
2013-07-26

Jonathan Alter, Author, Reporter, Columnist, TV Analyst, Lecturer

More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of the black man: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” President Barack Obama’s extemporaneous remarks in the press room last week about the Trayvon Martin case and the plight of young black men were pitch-perfect in part because they let no one off the hook, not even well-intentioned people who want him to lead what he predicted would be a “stilted” national conversation on race.

But the surprise appearance will have lasting importance if it keeps the President on the hook, too—if it helps reconcile a double consciousness that had left the Obama White House facing some of the most important issues of the day as if under a veil (another of Du Bois’s concepts).

Those who know the President well attest that, for the most part, there aren’t “two Obamas” the way that there were famously “two Clintons” (the policy wonk and the man of appetites). The gap between the public and the private Obama is much smaller than it is for most politicians—except when the subject is race.

In public, he has, until now, tread gingerly; in private, after hours and especially with friends and family, race is often an overt part of the conversation—or else it inhabits a place close to its surface.

The President’s Trayvon talk, and its generally positive response, represents the narrowing of the gap between the public and private Obama. The caution that grew out of his status as the first black President, which one close aide described to me as “the President’s inability to swing at certain pitches” before being reelected, made it harder to confront social issues that have engaged him deeply since he was a young man…

Read the entire article here.

White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-07-25

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

A strange meme circulates, apparently fueled by Geraldo Rivera’s White Hispanic, Yellow Journalism. It goes like this: George Zimmerman is not really white, he’s Hispanic, and so the [liberal, race-baiting] Main Stream Media [MSM] invented “White Hispanic.” And if Zimmerman’s White Hispanic, does that make President Obama a White Black? Hahaha. #LiberalLogic Gotcha!

Rivera’s account is not completely inaccurate, it’s just a bit twisted and incorrect. First, the claim that “White Hispanic” is a completely made-up term for the Zimmerman trial should be news to the more than 26 million people who in 2010 marked in as White Hispanic on the US Census form–the categories for Hispanic yes/no and race are both separate and both mandatory, as they have been since at least the 1980 Census. Second, as of 2000, people like Obama could indeed check in as White Black on the US Census–however, understanding this issue means knowing about the traditional US framework of hypodescent. Finally, Rivera’s claim that the Hispanic immigrant experience is different from the Irish and Italian one–that Latinos will transform the US racial landscape–is intriguing but unsupported. If anything, the move seems to be toward a Hispanic White/Black bifurcation…

Read the entire article here.

Obama bares his ‘blackness’ in Trayvon speech

The Buffalo News
2013-07-20

Sonya Ross
The Associated Press

In a move unparalleled among presidents, Barack Obama reflects on being black in America.

WASHINGTON – Something in President Obama’s voice caught Gregory C. Ellison’s ear. It was fleeting, subtle, and easy to miss — unless you’re a black man, too.

“In between his personal reflections on what it feels like to be an African-American man, and the history of pain and his strategic plan, there was what I call a very pregnant pause,” says Ellison, a theology professor in Atlanta.

“If I ever have an opportunity to talk to President Obama, I would ask him what was he searching in his soul during that pregnant pause?”

Obama was wrapped in presidential authority Friday as he talked to a nation rubbed emotionally raw in the week since the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was acquitted in a Florida courtroom.

Then, in a move hardly anyone saw coming, Obama unwrapped himself, and put his own young, black face on Trayvon’s dead, young, black body.

This first black president, the guy accused by some of running from his blackness, of trying to address black folks’ needs on the down low, suddenly lifted the veil off his black male identity and showed it to the world. It was something no American president before him could have done.

He had to do it, Obama said, because “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.”…

…Greg Carr, chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Howard University in Washington, said the president “has an authenticity, because he does signal to the black community that he too has experienced what we experienced.”…

Read the entire article here.

Discussing Trayvon Martin, Obama Embraces his Blackness

The American Prospect
2013-07-19

Jamelle Bouie, Staff Writer

On Obama’s remarks this afternoon.

When President Obama issued a pro forma statement following last week’s verdict in the Zimmerman trial, there was some disappointment—“Why didn’t he say more?” It only takes a small step back to see the answer; not only would it have been inappropriate for the president to question the decision of the jury, but given wide outrage at the ruling, it could have inflamed passions on both sides.

But it isn’t out of bounds for Obama to speak on the meaning of Trayvon Martin, which he did this afternoon, during a White House press briefing. And unlike his earlier statement, this was a frank and heartfelt take on the racial issues surrounding the shooting and the trial.

Which, to be honest, came as a surprise. Barack Obama’s entire political career has been about de-racializing his personal identity. Yes, he was a black senator from Illinois, but for white audiences at least, he wasn’t a black one. It’s why the Jeremiah Wright controversy was so dangerous for his candidacy—it emphasized his blackness at a time when he was trying most to build a universal appeal…

…Obama gains nothing by identifying with his blackness, but in talking about Martin, he did exactly that. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” said the president, “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” He continued, “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama on Trayvon Martin: The first black president speaks out first as a black American

The Washington Post
2013-07-20

David Maraniss

Trayvon Martin, the president said, could have been him 35 years ago. That would have been Barack Obama at age 17, then known as Barry and living in Honolulu. He had a bushy Afro. Hoodies were not in style then, or often needed in balmy Hawaii. His customary hangout outfit was flip-flops, called “slippers” on the island, shell bracelet, OP shorts and a tee.

Imagine if Barry Obama had been shot and killed, unarmed, during a confrontation with a self-deputized neighborhood watch enforcer, perhaps in some exclusive development on the far side of Diamond Head after leaving home to get shave ice. The news reports would have painted a complicated picture of the young victim, a variation on how Martin was portrayed decades later in Florida:

Lives with his grandparents; father not around, mother somewhere overseas. Pretty good student, sometimes distracted. Likes to play pickup hoops and smoke pot. Hangs out with buddies who call themselves the Choom Gang. Depending on who is providing the physical description, he could seem unprepossessing or intimidating, easygoing or brooding. And black.

On the inside, the young Obama had already begun a long search for identity — and by extension a study of the meaning and context of race. His mother and maternal grandparents were white. He was not. He lived in one culture, and the skin color passed along to him by his absent father placed him inalterably in another, in the eyes of others. How and why did race define him, limit him, grace him, frustrate him, alienate him, propel him and connect him to the world?

His effort to reconcile those questions and figure himself out was his quest. It took him off the island to Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where he finally found a sense of belonging and comfort in the black community. It took him into writing, and then politics. He wrote a book about it. “Dreams From My Father” is not so much an autobiography as a coming-of-age memoir filtered through the lens of race. As a state senator in Illinois, where he worked on legislation to overcome racial profiling, some African American colleagues dismissed him as not being black enough. As a candidate for president, when he was linked to a fiery black preacher, some white detractors said he hated white people. He eventually reached the presidency on a theme meant to answer both extremes. His idealistic message was that people yearned to transcend the differences that kept them apart, race prime among them…

Read the entire article here.

Obama, from Rev. Wright to Trayvon Martin

The Washington Post
2013-07-20

Dan Balz, Chief Correspondent

President Obama’s comments on Friday about the killing of Trayvon Martin were remarkable in many respects, but not least because of the distance he has traveled since the equally notable speech he delivered in 2008 during the controversy about his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When Obama — then an aspirant to the presidency — spoke in 2008, he sought to translate and explain the grievances, fears and resentments of both whites and blacks concerning the volatile topic of race in America. He spoke as a bridge builder who was trying to give something close to equal weight to the views of each side.

On Friday, he again sought to calm a roiling controversy, but he spoke as an African American who happened to be president, and he spoke to explain why the not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman has been so difficult for so many African Americans to accept…

…He barely mentioned George Zimmerman. He said he would let legal analysts and talking heads deal with the particulars of the case. Instead, his comments were all about Trayvon Martin and the black experience in America. “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” he said.

This is, after all, a president who wrote a book — “Dreams From My Father,” about his search for racial identity as the child of a white mother and an absent black African father. He has thought long and hard about the complexities of race in America, and it was clear from what he said Friday that this is something he and his wife talk about privately.

He spoke not just as an African American but also as an African American male — “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” — in a country where young African American males regularly die from gunshots or are, as he noted had happened to him, subject to being followed while shopping in a department store, no matter how innocently, or who can hear the locks on car doors click when they walk along a street…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Barack and Trayvon

The New York Times
2013-07-19

Charles M. Blow, Visual Op-Ed Columnist

On Friday President Obama picked at America’s racial wound, and it bled a bit.

Despite persistent attempts by some to divest the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy of its racial resonance, the president refused to allow it.

During a press briefing, Mr. Obama spoke of the case, soberly and deliberately, in an achingly personal tone, saying: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

With that statement, an exalted black man found kinship with a buried black boy, the two inextricably linked by inescapable biases, one expressing the pains and peril of living behind the veil of his brown skin while the other no longer could…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

This is the speech we’ve been waiting for

Politico
2013-07-19

Anthea Butler, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Pennsylvania

President Obama’s surprise remarks Friday about Trayvon Martin, race in America and the Zimmerman trial will be remembered far longer than his “race” speech in March 2008 in Philadelphia.

That speech, entitled “A More Perfect Union,” was then-candidate Obama’s way of giving a broader perspective to the uproar surrounding his former pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and his infamous “God Damn America” sermon. That address was designed to tamp down anger, and bring his constituencies together, and — most important of all — keep his lead in the Democratic primary. This speech was different: far more personal, far more raw, and ultimately, far more resonant.

Until today, the president had said remarkably little about race – his commentary on the matter had mainly come in the form of off-the-cuff comments or the “Beer Summit” with Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates. But the latter was a political bust, and since then, the president has been extremely risk-averse in addressing the issue — so much so that he has arguably mentioned race the least of any Democratic president in memory.

…The president also placed the conversation about the trial into its larger context: the specific historical and structural present-day circumstances that underly persistent racial disparities in the United States. Explaining to Americans that the “African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away” was very, very powerful. It placed him squarely within the community, but also acknowledged a history that the entire nation must confront.

But perhaps the most moving parts of the president’s unscripted comments were those that came from a deeper place: within himself. To admit that he, too – a man who is now the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world — had been racially profiled in department stores was to link himself directly to a slain black teenager. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said. And the president’s tone and manner suggested that, in the week since the Zimmerman verdict, he had felt the pain resonating throughout America.

Obama has often seemed ambivalent about his racial background. Connecting his experience of profiling to the experiences of millions of black men all over this country was an important moment. It linked the president firmly to the African-American experience. For many African-Americans, it said: He is one of us. And for a community that has had to watch the countless racially charged indignities Obama has been made to endure while in office, it was a gratifying moment…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me—at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often…

President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., July 19, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin.

Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
2013-07-19, 17:33Z (13:33 EDT)

Barack H. Obama, President of the United States

I wanted to come out here, first of all, to tell you that Jay is prepared for all your questions and is very much looking forward to the session.  The second thing is I want to let you know that over the next couple of weeks, there’s going to obviously be a whole range of issues—immigration, economics, et cetera−we’ll try to arrange a fuller press conference to address your questions.

The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week—the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling.  I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday.  But watching the debate over the course of the last week, I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.

First of all, I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation.  I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it…

..You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.  Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.  And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.  There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me—at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often…

…And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws…

Read the entire transcript here.