Mixed Race Studies

Fear of a ‘Black’ President: Obama, Racial Panic and the Presidential Sign

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Cynthia D. Bond, Clinical Professor of Lawyering Skill
The John Marshall Law School, Chicago

I’ve been wonderin’ why
People livin’ in fear
Of my shade
(Or my hi top fade)
I’m not the one that’s runnin’
But they got me on the run
Treat me like I have a gun
All I got is genes and chromosomes.

—Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy

I. Introduction

Of all the imaginable racialized backlash, real or representational, to Barack Obama’s candidacy for and inauguration as President of the United States, probably no one would have predicted the relatively widespread depiction of him as Adolf Hitler. Even a cursory knowledge of Hitler’s ‘policies’ as leader of the Third Reich and his eugenicist crimes against humanity would seem to make analogies between he and Obama intellectually incoherent, at a minimum, and otherwise patently outrageous. Nevertheless, this narrative cropped up during the 2008 campaign, where Hitler-Obama comparisons were found on the Internet, even on pro-Hillary Clinton websites (though apparently not sponsored or supported by Clinton herself). After the inauguration, Hitler-Obama comparisons were rife in town hall meetings on the health insurance bill. And they were common in the discourse of Rush Limbaugh, on numerous apparently homegrown websites, and even on relatively benign, apolitical blogs and chat boards like Yahoo! Answers. In 2010, a large billboard posted by the North Iowa Tea Party equating Obama with Hitler (and conflating socialism with both) drew national attention and ire. And in 2011, even the talking heads on Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, recoiled when Hank Williams, Jr., compared Obama playing golf with Representative John Boehner to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu playing with Hitler.

Most thinking people would be inclined to simply dismiss these images and comparisons between Hitler and Obama as absurd fringe lunacy or Photoshop ephemera. And indeed, many of these images are graphically contradictory, evoking inconsistencies even within their own world of signification. Some may find these images offensive to the memory of those who suffered under Hitler, but nonsensical in their relationship to Obama himself. And at first glance, the motives behind these messages may seem to be no more profound than simplistic, politically partisan attempts to malign Obama. Or perhaps they simply represent the playing out of the seemingly inexhaustible Hitler meme.

However, the sheer ubiquity of these types of images and references, indeed the viral nature of them on the Internet and elsewhere, makes them more than a representational blip on the pop cultural radar. In addition, these references extend beyond a few marginal Internet sites to high-profile voices of the Right such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and others, making them even more disturbing. Finally, these images merit examination because, as Elizabeth Abel suggests, the historic nature of Obama’s election may divert attention from ‘the ways that racial panic and taboo are mediated by the verbal and visual technologies that have always intersected in the construction of race.’

I argue that this phenomenon of the conflation of Obama and Hitler channels racial anxieties, and even outright panic, about a ‘non-white’ president taking office. I situate this panic within ‘whiteness,’ and argue that it encompasses not just the fear of a ‘black’ president, but also the fear of unsettling the purportedly settled categories of race itself. This panic may be muted by the discourse of colorblindness and post-racialism, but finds voice in these ‘hybrid’ significations of Obama.

On a formal level, the internal contradiction and cognitive dissonance of these images is not merely coincidental to the images themselves, but rather reflects the paradoxes and contradictions of an Obama presidency viewed from the position of white racial panic. These contradictions may be read as representational pathologies generated by the perceived plurality or hybridity of racial referents Obama embodies as a bi-racial person. W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that, in the context of Obama as a signifier of bi-racialism, ‘the key to Obama’s iconicity resides not in determinacy but ambiguity, not in identity but differential hybridity.’ And as I will discuss more fully later on, Obama’s position as an apparently ‘black’ man in a historically ‘White House’ also evokes notions of hybridity. Ultimately, these significations attempt to ‘re-other’ Obama now that he has entered the office that most visibly represents the United States as a nation.

In addition, these contradictions in signification may in part result from the difficulties the Right encounters in maintaining its preferred discourse of colorblindness, while simultaneously seeking to stir white racial anxieties to fuel anti-Obama sentiment. Thus, in the Right’s signification of Obama, ‘both the stabilizing project of racial classification and the destabilizing strategies that call that project into question’ are essential to activating, and indeed constituting, white racial panic…

…The suppression of racial signification in the images correlates with the suppression of the central role that virulent racism and xenophobia played in Hitler’s agenda and in the actions of the Third Reich. Thus, there is a kind of ideological ‘whiteface’ in this image; an elision of the way that Hitler’s policies would not even allow for the existence of Obama, much less for a shared political approach.

Yet to say that racial signification is suppressed here is not to say that it is non-existent. In addition to the overdetermined sign of President, Obama’s presidency brings with it the overdetermined meanings of blackness and black maleness. Significantly, Obama’s bi-racialism, in the residual ideology of the ‘one drop’ rule, is read as ‘black’ by most ‘whites.’ As Shawn Michelle Smith suggests, this positionality may have particular resonance in our current historical moment:

Obama is a key transitional figure between the racially divided generation of the Baby Boomers and the future generations that will see the decline of a white majority in the United States through immigration. Perhaps this is why his whiteness seems to matter so much. If, as the son of an immigrant Kenyan man, Obama represents a new kind of blackness, perhaps he also represents a new kind of whiteness—a mixed whiteness to be sure, but for now a whiteness that is tentatively maintaining its hold on an anxious American imagination (or at least its ‘white half’).

Interestingly, Smith’s own analysis here wavers between the narratives of the white/black binary (Obama’s ‘white half’ and ‘black half’), and more fluid notions of hybridity, in which ‘whiteness’ (and ‘blackness’) are remade.

As noted above, Obama’s racial hybridity potentially embodies age-old anxieties about racial ‘mixing’–essentially anxieties about the actual indeterminacy of race as a biological matter. Such anxieties fuel the signification of the imagined boundary that is ‘white/non-white,” which, paradoxically, the Hitler images embody. (Note also the clear binary composition of the image, with its diptych presentation). Under this formula, a white viewer would see the image of Obama, regardless of the colors used in it, as the image of a ‘black’ man, with whiteface techniques only serving to reinforce some viewers’ perceptions of his ‘blackness.’…

Read the entire article here.

History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1738-1745

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Categories of race (ethnicity, color, or both) have appeared and continue to appear in the demographic censuses of numerous countries, including the United States and Brazil. Until recently, such categorization had largely escaped critical scrutiny, being viewed and treated as a technical procedure requiring little conceptual clarity or historical explanation. Recent political developments and methodological changes, in US censuses especially, have engendered a critical reexamination of both the comparative and the historical dimensions of categorization. The author presents a comparative analysis of the histories of racial/color categorization in American and Brazilian censuses and shows that racial (and color) categories have appeared in these censuses because of shifting ideas about race and the enduring power of these ideas as organizers of political, economic, and social life in both countries. These categories have not appeared simply as demographic markers. The author demonstrates that censuses are instruments at a state’s disposal and are not simply detached registers of population and performance.

…1850–1920 Censuses

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Racial theorist, medical doctor, scientist, and slaveholder Josiah Nott lobbied certain senators for the inclusion in the census of several inquiries designed to prove his theory of mulatto hybridity and separate origins. In the end, the senators voted to include only the category “mulatto,” although they hotly debated the inclusion of another inquiry—“[d]egree of removal from pure white and black races”—as well. Instructions to enumerators for the slave population read, “Under heading 5 entitled ‘Color,’ insert in all cases, when the slave is black, the letter B; when he or she is a mulatto, insert M. The color of all slaves should be noted.” For the free population, enumerators were instructed as follows: “in all cases where the person is black, insert the letter B; if mulatto, insert M. It is very desirable that these particulars be carefully regarded.”

The 1850 census introduced a pattern, especially in regard to the mulatto category, that lasted until 1930: the census was deliberately used to advance race science. Such science was fundamental to, though not the only basis of, racial discourse—that is, the discourse that explained what race was. Far from merely counting race, the census was helping to create race by assisting scientists in their endeavors. Although scientific ideas about race changed over those 80 years, the role of the census in advancing such thought did not.

The abolition of slavery and the reconstitution of White racial domination in the South were accompanied by an enduring interest in race. Predictably, the ideas that race scientists and proslaveryadvocates had marshaled to defend slavery were used to oppose the recognition of Black political rights. Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites, whether as slaves or as free people, and should therefore be disqualified from full participation in American economic, political, and social life. Although scientists, along with nearly all Whites, were convinced of the inequality of races, they continued in their basic task of investigating racial origins. Darwinism presented a challenge to the still dominant polygenism, but the mulatto category retained its significance within polygenist theories. Data were needed to prove that mulattoes lived shorter lives, thus proving that Blacks and Whites were different racial species…

…The mulatto category remained on the 1910 and 1920 censuses for the same reason that it had been introduced in 1850: to build racial theories. (Census officials removed the category from the 1900 census because they were dissatisfied with the quality of 1890 mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon data.) The basic idea that distinct races existed and were enduringly unequal remained firmly in place. What happens when superior and inferior races mate? Social and natural scientists still wanted to know. But the advisory committee to the Census Bureau decided in 1928 to terminate use of the mulatto category on censuses.

The stated reasons for removal rested on accuracy. Had the advisory committee possessed confidence in the data’s accuracy or the Census Bureau’s ability to secure accuracy, “mulatto” might well have remained on the census. The committee did not refer to the evident inability of the mulatto category to settle the central, if shifting, questions of race science: first,whether “mulatto-ness” proved that Whites and Blacks were different species of humans, and then, whether mulattoes were weaker than members of the so-called pure races. The exit of the mulatto category from the census was markedly understated, especially whencompared with its entrance in 1850 and its enduring significance on 19th-century censuses.

Beginning with the 1890 census, all Native Americans,whether taxed or not,were counted on general population schedules. Much as racial theorists believed that enumerating mulattoes would prove their frailty, they thought that Native Americans were a defeated and vanishing race. Given the weight of these expectations in the late 19th century, it is not surprising that census methods and data reflected them. As the historian Brian Dippieobserved, “the expansion and shrinkage of Indian population estimates correlate with changing attitudes about the Native American’s rights and prospects.” The idea of the vanishing Indian was so pervasive that the censuses of 1910 and 1930 applied a broad definition of “Indian” because officials believed that each of these censuses would be the last chance for an accurate count.

Read the entire article here.

Measures of “Race” and the Analysis of Racial Inequality in Brazil

Social Science Research
Available online 2012-07-05
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.06.006

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Quantitative analyses of racial disparities typically rely on a single categorical measure to operationalize race. We demonstrate the value of an approach that compares results obtained using various measures of race. Using a national probability sample of the Brazilian population that captured race in six formats, we first show how the racial composition of Brazil can shift from majority white to majority black depending on the classification scheme. In addition, using quantile regression, we find that racial disparities are most severe at the upper end of the income distribution; that racial disparities in earnings are larger when race is defined by interviewers rather than self-identified; and that those classified as “black” suffer a greater wage penalty than those classified as “brown.” Our findings extend prior conclusions about racial inequality in Brazil. More generally, our analysis demonstrates that comparison of results across measures represents a neglected source of analytic leverage for advancing empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of how race, as a multidimensional social construct, contributes to the production of social inequality.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Presumption of Indigeneity: Colonial Administration, the ‘Community of Race’ and the Category of Indigène in New Caledonia, 1887–1946

The Journal of Pacific History
Published online: 2012-06-29
pages 1-20
DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2012.688183

Adrian Muckle, Lecturer in History
Victoria University of Wellington

From 1887 to 1946, the administrative apparatus known as the indigénat provided French administrators in New Caledonia with a set of exceptional measures to streamline the governing and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (‘natives’). This paper examines the place of the indigénat, the role of colonial administrators in defining one or more communities of race and the variable status of the category of indigène in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration is given to the influence (or absence thereof) of the science of race on administrative thinking about native policy in New Caledonia, the distinctions drawn between different categories of indigène, the extent to which cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were imagined or constructed in racial terms and the situation of métis (‘half-castes’). The paper argues that an incipient definition of the indigène as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian, mixed or Oceanian race must be understood in the context of the development of the indentured labour and immigration regimes (the importation of workers from Asia and other parts of Oceania) as well as the ways in which the indigénat was differently applied and experienced between New Caledonia’s mainland and its dependencies (notably the Loyalty Islands), as well as by métis.

Read or purchase the article here.

Critical ‘Mixed Race’?

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 1, Issue 2, 1995
pages 381-395
DOI: 1080/13504630.1995.9959443

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

An African-American couple found themselves taking their child, a baby of a few month’s age, to a physician for an ear infection. Since their regular physician was out, an attending physician took their care. Opening the baby girl’s files, he was caught by some vital information. The charts revealed a diagnosis of ‘H level’ alpha thalassemia, a genetic disease that is known to be among two per cent of Northeast Asian populations. He looked at the couple.

The father of the child, noticing the reticence and awkwardness of the physician, instantly spotted a behaviour that he had experienced on many occasions.

‘It’s from me’, he said, ‘She’s got the disease from me’.
‘Now, how could she get the disease from you?’, the physician let out.
‘My grandmother is Chinese’, the father explained.

The physician’s face suddenly shifted to an air of both surprise and relief. Then he made another remark, ‘Whew! I was about to say, ‘But — you’re black’.

Silence.

Realizing his error, the physician continued. ‘I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I know Hispanics who are also Asians, so why not African Americans?’

Yeah. Why not?

The expression mixed-race has achieved some vogue in contemporary discussions of racial significations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It is significant that these three countries are marked by the dominance of an Anglo cultural standpoint. In other countries, particularly those marked by Spanish, Portuguese, and French influences, the question of racial mixture has enjoyed a great deal of specificity and simultaneous plurality. For the Anglos, however, the general matrix has been in terms of ‘whites’ and ‘all others’, the consequence of which has been the rigid binary of white and non-whites. It can easily be shown, however, that the specific designations in Latin and Latin-American countries are, for the most part, a dodge and that,…

Read or puchase the article here.

Morgan Freeman: No Black President For U.S. Yet

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-07-06

Michel Martin, Host

Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman joined Tell Me More host Michel Martin to discuss his new movie, The Magic of Belle Isle. But the prolific actor, famous for his roles in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Million Dollar Baby and The Dark Knight, also had a lot to say about politics. He was especially interested in talking about President Obama, and why Freeman thinks he should not be called America’s first black president.

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America,” Freeman said. “There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Many of Freeman’s films explore important chapters of African-American history: Amistad was about the trans-Atlantic slave trade; Driving Miss Daisy was set in the civil rights era; and Glory centered on an all-black regiment in the Civil War.

Freeman says he has been disappointed by what he considers unfair treatment of Obama by his political opponents.

“He is being purposely, purposely thwarted by the Republican Party, who started out at the beginning of his tenure by saying, ‘We are going to do whatever is necessary to make sure that he’s only going to serve one term,’ ” he said. “That means they will not cooperate with him on anything. So to say he’s ineffective is a misappropriation of the facts.”…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India 1858-1930

Oxford University Press
January 2012
288 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199697700; ISBN10: 0199697701

Satoshi Mizutani

From 1858 to 1930 the concept of whiteness in British India was complex and contradictory. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was pervasive, but whiteness was never taken as self-evident. It was constantly called into question and its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices.

Only those whites with social status, cultural refinement, and the right level of education were able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness were the ‘domiciled community’, made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of whom lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly rendered the meaning of whiteness ambiguous in fundamental ways.

The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The Meaning of White reveals the precise ways in which the existence of this community was identified as a problem (the ‘Eurasian Question’) and examines the deeper historical meanings of this categorization. Dr Mizutani demystifies the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. British prestige and fears of colonial degeneration
• 2. The origins and emergence of the ‘domiciled community’
• 3. The ‘Eurasian Question’: the domiciled poor and urban social control
• 4. ‘European schools’: illiteracy, unemployment, and educational uplifting
• 5. Towards a solution to the Eurasian Question: child removal and juvenile emigration
• 6. Disputing the domiciliary divide: civil-service employment and the claim for equivalence
• 7. Conclusion: Race, class, and the contours of whiteness in late British India

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

Rhizomes Postgraduate Conference
Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference
The School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2006-02-24 through 2006-02-25

Alzena D’Costa
Curtin University of Technology

This paper argues that the ‘nostalgia’ that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely.

In his book Long-distance Nationalism, Zlatko Skrbiŝ defines nostalgia as ‘a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means ‘to return home’ and algia, ‘a painful condition’ (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past – a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is ‘perhaps the most dangerous … of all the ways of using history’ because it glosses ‘over the past’s iniquities and indignities’. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also ‘fix’ the past and recover it in ‘narrative terms’ (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home.

Read the entire paper here.

Frantz Fanon’s reception in Brazil

Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon (Symposium on Frantz Fanon)
Université Paris 7
February 2008

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothers. However, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil, Fanon became known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when revolutionary violence was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary fighters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Kwame N’Krumah. However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places, his thinking did not become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part of Brazilian universities and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other revolutionary thinkers.

In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his lukewarm reception was due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial conflicts, highly instilled within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race, yet racially colourless. That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black professors and researchers at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity or the affirmation of racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.

Fanon’s thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas – in European books – and at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight of the Brazilian cultural and political scene.

Read the entire paper here.