Mixed Race Studies

The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
pages 328-348
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

Mario L. Barnes, Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008, prompted many declarations from journalists and commentators about the arrival of a post-racial society, a society in which race is no longer meaningful. For many, the fact that a self-identified black man had obtained the most prominent, powerful, and prestigious job in the United States symbolized the end of an era in which Blacks and other racial minorities could make legitimate claims about the harmful effects of racism. In fact, on the night of the election, conservative talk show host Bill Bennett proclaimed that Blacks would have no more excuses for any failures or unattained successes. Black actor Will Smith essentially agreed with Bennett, proclaiming the following: “I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down.”

Along the same lines, many conservatives pointed to Obama’s election as a symbol of a racism-free society when they initiated constitutional challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the fact that Obama had earned only one in four votes from Whites in areas covered by section 5 of the Act while earning nearly half of all votes from Whites nationally, Texas lawyer Gregory Coleman argued that the Voting Rights Act was basically irrelevant in today’s society; to him and other conservatives, Obama’s election as president demonstrated as much. Coleman declared, “The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African American president is far different than when [the Voting Rights Act] was first enacted in 1965.”

Overall, many pondered whether Obama’s election signaled a new day for Blacks. The fact that Obama was biracial only made the symbolism stronger. The son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, Obama represented a break from our nation’s troubled past with race and racism, not just because of his ability to become president but also because of his individual racial background.

In this Article, we explore the proclamations that have been made about an emerging “post-racial” society within the context of workplace anti-discrimination law. Specifically, as the title of our panel for this symposium asks, we inquire: What is the significance of having a biracial, black-white president (or more specifically, the first self-identified black president) to the enforcement of anti-discrimination law? What impact, if any, has President Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and election as president had on discrimination in the workplace?

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism…

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The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

Joel Wm. Friedman, Jack M. Gordon Professor of Law
Tulane University Law School

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

On Friday, August 4, 1961, police officers in Shreveport, Louisiana, arrested four African American freedom riders after the two men and two women refused to accede to the officers’ orders to exit the whites-only waiting room at the Continental Trailways bus terminal. Four thousand miles away, in the delivery room at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas-born American anthropologist whose family had moved to the island state twenty years earlier, gave birth to the only child that she would have with her first husband, Barack Obama Sr., an ethnic Luo who had come to Hawaii from the Nyanza Province in southwest Kenya to pursue his education at the University of Hawaii. Just over forty-seven years later, on November 4, 2008, their son, Barak Obama II, a mixed-race man who identifies as black, was elected the 44th president of the United States.

The election of the nation’s first African American president was hailed as an event of historic importance. Many heralded Obama’s victory as signaling the dismantling of “the last racial barrier in American politics.” Analogies were quickly and frequently drawn to the historic moment when Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball. This superficially obvious comparison, however, diminished the causal significance of Obama’s election. When Jackie Robinson left the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues on October 23, 1945, to sign a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then made his debut on a major league diamond at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he breached the unofficial, but rigidly enforced exclusionary “color line” in professional baseball. But this momentous event was the product of a courageous and visionary decision by one man—Branch Rick[e]y, the part-owner, president, and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Obama’s election triumph, on the other hand, was the result of millions of individual determinations to vote for an African American candidate for the nation’s highest office.

Beyond the unique historical aspect of Obama’s election triumph, the results of the 2008 presidential election were interpreted by many as marking the onset of a new era of American “postracialism.” For example, much was made of the fact  that in Virginia, home of the Confederacy’s capital city, Obama amassed more votes than his Caucasian opponent. Many analysts concluded that the voters’ comparative assessments of each candidate’s ability to deal with the nation’s economic woes, and not his racial classification, were a crucial determinant in their decisions in the voting booth. They pointed to the fact that Obama’s 8.5 million vote margin of victory was, in part, the result of his receipt of 40% of the votes cast by white men, a higher share than had been garnered by any of the five previous (white) Democratic presidential nominees…

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“White Latino” Leaders: A Foregone Conclusion or Mischaracterization of Latino Society

The Modern American
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Summer-Fall, 2007)
Article 11
pages 62-65

Eric M. Gutierrez

Am I white? My personal inquiry into race begins with a school picture of a six-year-old boy. My dark brown hair, parted to one side, falls impishly over half-cocked eyebrows. My eyes, more almond-shaped than oval, are a murky blue with green speckles. My nose, a thicker version of the traditional aquiline Roman contour, fades into a tiny bulbous tip. My smile, close-mouthed and askance. My skin, white, even with a faded summer tan.

If I am white, whether I have claimed it or not, has it afforded me the privileges of a racial hierarchy skewed towards the dominant white culture? Moreover, has my apparent skin color placed me in a leadership role in the Latino community based merely on society’s perception of what that race is? Will that perception imply that I will turn my back on the Latino community that raised me, opting instead for the spoils of an influential white power structure?

In this article I consider the arguments presented by Ian Haney López in his essay entitled “White Latinos” and analyze the validity of his statements on white Latino community leaders. I examine and challenge López’s assertions regarding the characterization of Latino leaders, generally; and his description of an emerging Latino culture identified as “Mexican Americans,” the “Brown Race,” and the “New Whites,” specifically.

The most crucial assertion by López is that white Latino leaders are the most prevalent and influential in Latino society and that by emphasizing their whiteness as a key component of their identity, they facilitate the mistreatment of Latinos and buttress social inequality. Although I agree with many of López’s assertions about white Latino leaders, I believe the aforementioned assertion is a mischaracterization of Latino leadership and neglects to consider the cultural values from which these leaders arise…

Read the entire article here.

White Latinos

Harvard Latino Law Review
Volume 6, Number 1 (Spring 2003)
8 pages

Ian Haney Lopez, John H. Boalt Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

Who are the leaders in Latino communities? This question does not admit simple answers, for who counts as a leader and what Latino identity entails are both contentious issues. Having said that, I contend that often Latino leaders are white. I employ this hyperbole to emphasize my point that most of those who see themselves as leaders of Latino communities accept or assert whiteness as a key component of their identity. This assertion of whiteness, I argue here, facilitates the mistreatment of Latinos and buttresses social inequality. In this Essay I use the experience of Mexican Americans and the Chicano movement to illustrate this dynamic, and also comment on the aspiration to be white in the context of contemporary racial politics.

I. WHITE LATINO LEADERS

The majority of those who consider themselves leaders in Latino communities are white. I do not contend by this that race is fixed or easily ascertained. Nor do I mean that the Latino community is led by Anglos—that is, by persons from the group hstorically understood as white in this country. Rather, Latino leaders are often white in terms of how they see themselves and how they are regarded by others within and outside of their community. Race’s socially constructed nature ensures that racial identity is formed on multiple, sometimes contradictory levels. Self-identification, group perception, and external classification all constitute axes of racial construction. In turn, these axes encompass myriad criteria for determining racial identity. In this context, many Latino leaders believe they are—and are understood to be—white by virtue of class privilege, education, physical features, accent, acculturation, self-conception, and social consensus. True, these Latinos are rarely white in the sense that they are accorded the full range of racial privileges and presumptions Anglos reserve for themselves. But then, as with all racial categories, there are various shades of white, and many Latino leaders are arrayed along this continuum…

Read the entire essay here.

For A Century, The First Underground Railroad Ran Slaves South To Florida (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post
2012-03-18

Bruce Smith, Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. — While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century in the opposite direction.

Stories of that lesser-known “railroad” will be shared June 20-24 at the National Underground Railroad Conference in St. Augustine, Fla. The network of sympathizers gave refuge to those fleeing their masters, including many American Indians who helped slaves escape to what was then the Spanish territory of Florida. That lasted from shortly after the founding of Carolina Colony in 1670 to after the American Revolution.

They escaped not only to the South but to Mexico, the Caribbean and the American West.

And the “railroad” helps to explain at least in part why the lasting culture of slave descendants – known as Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Florida and Georgia – exists along the northeastern Florida coast.

“It’s a fascinating story and most people in America are stuck – they are either stuck on 1964 and the Civil Rights Act or they are stuck on the Civil War,” said Derek Hankerson, who is a Gullah descendant and a small business owner in St. Augustine, Fla. “We have been hankering to share these stories.”…

…Slaves likely started fleeing toward Florida when South Carolina was established in 1670, said Jane Landers, a Vanderbilt University historian who has researched the subject extensively. The first mention of escaped slaves in Spanish records was in 1687 when eight slaves, including a nursing baby, showed up in St. Augustine.

Spain refused to return them and instead gave them religious sanctuary, and that policy was formalized in 1693. The only condition is that those seeking sanctuary convert to Catholicism.

“It was a total shift in the geopolitics of the Caribbean and after that anyone who leaves a Protestant area to request sanctuary gets it,” Landers said.

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Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission

The Modern American
Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
Article 8
pages 22-23

Lydia Edwards

It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told Jon Velie her story about how her 13 year old son was denied clothing benefits because he is black. “It hit me as obviously wrong. So I naively took the case on a contingency basis not knowing there would be no real payment. I naively thought I could inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tribe they missed this.” What Jon really stepped into was something like the uphill civil rights battles of the 1960s. “It was straight up racism in conversations with the involved parties including the tribe and BIA; the ‘N word’ was thrown all around.” For his entire legal career, Jon Velie has sought to bring justice to Ms. Davis and other black Seminoles as well as black Cherokees.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jon Velie graduated from University of Oklahoma Law School in 1993. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley he was a Native American studies major. During law school he was a research assistant for Rennard Stickland, a renown Indian Law scholar who is now Dean of Oregon Law School. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Jon had already developed an affinity for Native American issues. As a child he grew up in the Absentee Shawnee tribal community. Many of his friends were from the tribe and he was exposed to sacred activities otherwise unseen by outsiders. His father, Alan Velie, taught the first course in contemporary Indian studies.

Alan Velie was a Shakespearean professor at the Oklahoma University in the 1970s in the midst of the American Indian rights movement when he was approached by Native American students and agreed to teach a course on American Indian literature. At the time, all the courses taught about Native Americans were concentrated on the past and more in the anthropological sense. He now travels the world talking about Native American literature and has written seven books on the subject.

WHO ARE THE BLACK INDIANS?

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek) have had long traditions of African membership and enslavement. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had a form of African slavery that closely mirrored that of Southern white plantation owners. The Seminole tribe, however, has had a unique relationship with its African members. The Seminole tribe and its African members (commonly referred to as Freedmen Freedmen) have coexisted together since the 16th Century. Many slaves of white plantation owners ran away to live with the Seminole tribe. Both Seminole Wars were fought over the number of runaway slaves who lived with the tribe. African members could intermarry and take on positions of leadership. Many served as translators between the Spanish, the tribe, and southern white plantation owners.

During the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought with the Confederacy against the Union. After the war, all of the tribes signed treaties with the United States government in order to maintain their sovereignty and reinstitute an autonomous government. In all of their treaties, there were clauses ordering the tribes to free their slaves and treat them and their descendants equally. Over the years, Congress and the courts have enforced the treaties to assure equal rights for the black Indians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress set up the Dawes Commission to record all the members of respective Indian Tribes. Their records are called the Dawes Rolls. The commission recorded black Indians on separate rolls for all of the tribes. Cherokees and Seminoles that were ¾ white were recorded on a “full blood” list while their black members were enrolled on the Freedmen list. The quantity of Indian blood of each black Indian was not recorded by the Dawes Commission…

Read the entire article here.