Mixed Race Studies

“Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History”: Race and the National Narrative in Commemorative Journalism About Barack Obama

Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 35, Number 2 (April 2011)
pages 115-133
DOI: 10.1177/0196859911404604

Siobahn Stiles
Temple University

Carolyn Kitch, Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia

This article considers how race was discussed in commemorative journalism produced after Barack Obama’s election and inauguration by major American newspapers, magazines, and television news. A discourse analysis of these commemorative media texts reveals competing—though often overlapping—narratives. Some celebrated Obama’s victory as a racial milestone, claiming it for African Americans past and present, yet another hurdle crossed in the continuing struggle for equality. Other commemorative texts either elided or marginalized racial issues, instead emphasizing diversity and democracy in a narrative of generalized American “freedom” and unity. The narrative in each text, however, was ultimately a tale imbued with nationalist ideology, emphasizing unity and progress at the expense of discussing issues related to contemporary racial inequality in America. Overall, although the coverage of this election demonstrated some change in racial representation, the overall discourse on race in America—and journalists’ thematic avoidance of racial issues—did not.

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Obama Deception?: Empire, ‘Postracism’ and Hegemonic White Supremacy in the Campaign and Election of Barack Obama

Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (May 2011)
ISSN: 1925-3850

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

The essay provides a socio-historical account of the role that hegemonic white supremacy played in the Presidential ascendancy of Barack Obama. I suggest that Obama crafted his political ontology to articulate a discourse of post-racism. Deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society for a more just society. By trading on the racial ambiguity of his biography in a country that demands certainty of racial lineage, his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action. The result was a presidential campaign that traded on the hopes of African Americans and assuaged the anxieties of European Americans and others while propagating the interests of the ruling class and the military industrial complex.

Introduction

Written a month and a half into Barack Obama’s first term, the core elements of this paper were delivered as a lecture for African Heritage Month to a third year class on racism and anti-racism. My giving the lecture itself was unintended. It was a replacement for an invited colleague who had to cancel his appearance. In the months leading up to the election my colleague and I discussed, quite frequently, the policy implications of an Obama Presidency on US foreign policy and domestic relations. I expressed my concern and fascination during these conversations about the cult-like charisma driven preoccupation with Obama as the “new Black”. I was fascinated by many of my family and friends who seemed to bestow mystical significance to Obama’s biography/blackness as signs for/of change. Relatives, especially those in the US were caught up in the post-civil rights-ism euphoria. But I did not share this cheery view of Obama as a political actor. Not because I didn’t like him as a person, but rather because politics from the citizen’s perspective is not an appropriate forum for sentiments such as “like” and “dislike”.

Indeed, for the months leading up to the election I had numerous conversations with my colleague about the near unanimous suspension of critical judgment about Obama’s locus in the machinery of the US’s political and economic elite. With rare exception, I noticed Left blogs and news sites consistently took a wait and see attitude about whether Obama would rule differently than his predecessors. Whatever the case, race was explicit in ways it was not in previous presidential elections. African Heritage Month, too often given to romanticism, struck me as the most opportune moment to disrupt this uncritical celebration of how Obama’s blackness was being articulated.

My colleague and I agreed that what was needed was a critical but not cynical analysis of Obama’s platform and ways he deployed race and just equally how race was invested in the meanings imputed to his ostensibly progressive politics. After all, an aspirant for the most powerful political office of the most powerful country should not be regarded through a sentimental lens. Rather, the question of how sentiment played into the aspirations of those who favoured and disfavoured his candidacy and the extent to which Obama himself articulated a platform to suit these opposing forces were crucial for lucid and complex analysis that steered away from the facile. For us then, blackness and the discourse of “hope” were not grounds to grant Obama the benefit of doubt as to the possibility of economic and political reform and racial healing in the US. Maybe as Canadian men of African descent of a radical Left persuasion we felt little compunction that we were conceding to racism by virtue of a relentless critique of the first serious Black presidential contender. Indeed, based on the historical record, we knew both intuitively and concretely that Black people do not rise to positions of power and influence in the White world without conceding the necessity of sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. If Obama became president of an imperially dominant USA, he too would be bound by the inertia of this historical fact. This fact, in the lead-up to the election seemed lost on many commentators and those in civil society who favoured his candidacy. Interestingly, those on the right saw clearly the issue of empire and presumed the essentialism that blackness equaled radicality feared the worst because of an Obama Presidency. Events since his inauguration have shown the fears of the latter unfounded…

…I will argue in this essay that, as in Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about a blind Black man who is a white supremacist, the possibility of a Black American sustaining hegemonic white supremacy is a canard that overturns standard definitions of who can support hegemonic white supremacy. Chappelle’s character gives us choices. We can “re-fence” the apparent anomaly, holding it in abeyance because it does not accord with established patterns of thought and practice (Allport, 1954, p. 23). We can reject the apparent anomaly, since it may be presumed blackness disqualifies a person from sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. Or we can develop a critique equal to the conditions it attempts to explain (see Smith citing Lenin, 2003, p. 314); which is to say that given systemic White racism, the “order of things” makes racism an equal opportunity employer, with or without intent.  This critique suggests that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign depended on deploying colour blindness through blind faith in formal (but not substantive) equality. It suggests further that Barack Obama deployed the ambivalent blackness of his body and his personal biography to reorganize the terrain on which race-talk would occur during his campaign. Indeed, a central observation here is that Obama selectively and strategically appropriated the radical enterprise of anti-racism by deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness that undermined the need for anti-racism. On one hand he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society. On the other hand, he propagated the belief that where Whites voted for him, this confirmed the triumphal defeat of hegemonic white supremacy.

In either case, by trading on his blackness his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action (both of which, ironically, are belied by everyday white supremacist invective leveled against him). Through select and strategic claims of Black fraternity, Obama surreptitiously deployed anti-African American tropes that were passed off as pastoral concern for “his” people. In some ways, he extended a similar paternalistic narrative to the reproach of African leaders in his speech given in West African when he became President (Obama, 2009). The arguments are to be taken as a whole, aimed at unpacking Mr. Obama’s white supremacist presidential campaign and to suggest its effects are more than symbolic. Mr. Obama’s discourse on race, and his persistent “colour blindness” even into his presidency, negates the oppression of African Americans while deepening their exploitation. To a significant extent, Obama deceived no one even if he intended. The deceit that blackness equals progressive change is built into the normative structure of how race is understood in the US.

…Mongrel in the White House: The Post-Racial President

In so highly race conscious a society as the US, who would not find it disarming that its first recognized Black President should share publicly, in a jocular manner, that he prefers to adopt a dog for his daughters who, like himself, is a mongrel or a mutt (Gardner, 2008). Of course, for those whose social history is one in which the “one drop” rule prevailed to determine social caste and reflected abject sexual domination of Black women by White men and the lynching of Black men who married or cavorted with White women, the humour may be lost on them. Indeed, to make light of his “mongrelization” and to ignore its differential historical facticity, is, in view of white supremacy in the US, to attribute transcendence and maturity on the part of the White public and, of course, forbearance on the part of African Americans.

It is consequentially important, that there is little outcry today about the perpetuation of this eugenics impulse in the contemporary US relative to poor African American, and to a lesser extent Latina, Native American, and even poor White women (Roberts, 1992, p. 1961). So, far from a passing moment of humour, Obama used his own biography, not in a revolutionary way but as an ideological sociology of the self to demonstrate the choice of narrative of the nation he would align himself with. This narrative, a hegemonic narration of the (White) nation, is one in which radical stories are structurally excluded from consciousness and false ethical stances on racism are interpolated. I suggest that in crafting himself as the quintessential post-modern US subject, Barack Obama is able to deflect White criticisms that would otherwise doom an African American politician committed to revolutionary politics. I will now critically elaborate the false ethical complementarity Barack Obama drew between racism and anti-racism with an examination of his Philadelphia speech on race (and class) in the US…

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In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

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Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 54, Number 2 (Summer 2011)
pages. 139-162
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2011.54.2.139

Jennifer A. Jones, SBS Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow
Ohio State University, Columbus

Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building though ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that overtime, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.

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The Mixing of Races and Social Decay

Eugenics Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (April 1949)
pages 11–16

The Right Rev. E. W. Barnes, Sc.D., F.R.S. (1874-1953)
Biship of Birmingham, England

I have chosen to address you on a subject of great importance. With regard to it strong differences of opinion exist. As we consider various aspects of the subject we grope our way uncertainly.

Let us begin with statements that all will accept.

Some Facts of Inheritance

First, the various races of mankind interbreed freely with one another. International enmity, racial prejudice, cultural differences all seem, speaking generally, impotent to prevent interbreeding.

Secondly, the extension of world trade and of transport facilities is steadily increasing the mixture of races and in consequence the likelihood of interbreeding.

I add a further statement that is steadily winning acceptance; physical and psychical qualities are inherited by the same laws of inheritance. As an illustration of this statement we may say that from a tuberculosis parent a tendency to tuberculosis can be inherited; likewise from a drunken parent a tendency to drunkenness can be inherited. In either case, in mating, the dangerous gene or genes may be rejected, or they may be handed on as recessives; but, if rejection or subordination does not take place, the evil tendency will show itself when the environment gives it a chance.

What we have to insist upon in addition to the above fundamental facts is that the complex of desirable qualities, or modes of behaviour and of appreciation, which we call civilization, is a recent acquisition of humanity: it may easily be destroyed or, at least, injured. Our civilization is a fragile thing, which can only be preserved by the education of each successive generation.

And the most careful education, painstaking and thorough though it be, at times fails. Such failure is, it seems, especially likely to occur when the type of civilization which the education aims at producing differs markedly from that which may be called ancestral.

Unsatisfactory “Pockets” in our Society

It is much to be regretted that we lack authoritative knowledge which will enable us to forecast such failure. There is general agreement that in our industrial areas, and in some of our villages, “pockets” of feeblemindedness exist: the children from families in these pockets are expected by elementary teachers to be-and in fact often are backward at school. It seems certain that mental dullness is inherited more often than not. But though “pockets” are formed by half-breeds, if we may for convenience so describe children who are the offspring of different racial stocks, and though children from these “pockets” fairly often prove unsatisfactory to their teachers, it is difficult to know how far their defects are due in innate limitations rather than to harmful home influences. As we put the inquiry we sometimes receive over-confident opinions: colour prejudice, which in Britain is instinctive and strong, tends to distort judgment.

There is no doubt that grave social decay often appears in places like seaports where races mix. But we must remember that, when there is no race mixture, if war leads to conditions under which children run wild, or defective housing creates circumstances leading to immorality, even good stocks will tend to decay. The best we can say is that, when conditions improve, recovery can be rapid. But, I repeat, civilization is fragile: it is a pattern of lving more easily broken than repaired…

…Mixture of Races in South Africa and West Indies

I have left until the end of my survey the most important and difficult of all aspects of the mixing of races, the problem of the Negro in South Africa and in the U.S.A. In each country the ” colour problem ” is a domestic political issue of the first magnitude. Dislike of intermarriage and fear of Negro domination show themselves in white attempts at restrictive legislation. Anxiety is greater in South Africa because there the white man is an intruder; and developments in the West Indian islands suggest that ultimately a partially coloured population will be universal. Descendants of Dutch settlers naturally wish to retain a racial heritage of which they are rightly proud. Their civilization is far higher than that of the Negroes among whom they live and distinctly higher than that of the Indians who seek admission as traders. Without Negro labour in the gold mines the industry could not be carried on as at present; and, in fact, climatic conditions make it natural that manual labour should be supplied by the Negro. We have, in fact, a situation which has recurred throughout history. Two races live side by side: the one of higher culture is dominant but increases slowly in numbers: the other becomes increasingly necessary because it supplies manual labour; it has also the higher birthrate. Inter-breeding takes place and in the end a mixed race with a lower civilization is evolved.

The Negro Problem in the U.S.A.

In the U.S.A., as is well known, the outcome of the Civil War was freedom for the slaves coupled, theoretically, with full civil rights. The actual denial of the franchise in the Southern States has been notorious. Of recent years Negroes have been migrating to the north, where their political influence is being felt. Such migration is leading to further racial admixture. In thirty American States legislation to prevent marriage between whites and Negroes exists—in one instance a Negro has been defined as one in whom there is more than three sixteenths of Negro blood. The California Supreme Court has recently declared such legislation unconstitutional. Americans, whether they like the prospect or not, must accept the fact that a Negro strain in the population is spreading. How should this outcome be regarded?

The earlier stages of disreputable intercourse between white and black belong to the past. Coloured people in all but remote areas of the United States of America have acquired a mixture of white blood. Whenever a so-called Negro makes his mark in public life, inquiry almost always shows a mixed ancestry. In fact, the American “Negro” is already of a different race from the African from whom he is partially descended. This fact is probably the cause of the wide divergence of American opinion as to the right attitude towards “black” citizens. Those who live in Southern States where the Negro strain in the coloured population is strong are prejudiced against any form of political or social equality. Those who know the qualities and potentialities of what we may call the “new” Negro have no such prejudice. The “new” Negro is already developing a characteristic culture. His religion is a form of Christianity which, though intellectually primitive, is emotionally strong. For “Negro spirituals” a musician of the quality of Walford Davies had great admiration. Some plays and stories due to “new” Negroes show the beginning of new forms of art…

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