Mixed Race Studies

Why Obama is Black: Language, Law and Structures of Power

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3
pages 468-481

SpearIt, Assistant Professor of Law
Saint Louis University

[W]ords are our tools, and, as a minimum we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. –J. L. Austin

When he filled out the race section of the 2010 U.S. Census survey, President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box despite the fact that Obama is of both European-American and African ancestry. This simple fact raises a number of complicated questions and challenges the idea that race, or more properly, racism, is a thing of the past or “post” as used in “post-racial.” “Post-racial” is rhetoric for an ideology that promotes “a larger national and legal consensus that ignores the bulk of racial disparities, inequities, and imbalances in society, and pursues race-neutral remedies as a fundamental, a priori value.” Ironically, the ideology garners support from Obama’s presidential election in 2008, which launched widespread reports that the country elected its first “black” president. For many, the election provided concrete proof of improved race relations. Such believers epitomized Obama’s election as fulfilling the American promise; for others, however, he symbolized a formidable challenge to the “post-racial” posture. Hence, although the term “post” intends to point to the past, it is really about the future, a destination that has yet to be achieved. It is a way of wishing away the present and supplanting it with an idealized future. Under such pretentions, “post-racial” reflects a desire to identify with something more sublime than the status quo.

Framing Obama as a poster for “post-racial” suffers from various defects. The most fundamental is the assumption that he is “black” in the first place. Although the decision that the president indeed is “black” is practically unanimous, such a conclusion neglects his “white” heritage. President Obama could have checked black and white on the census survey, but he passed on the option. This decision raises unsettling questions for post-racial ideologues. Rather than signal arrival into the post-racial age, however, his choice on the survey could be read as a denial of whiteness or an unfair response given the survey’s purposes, which imply an obligation to represent oneself based on parental lineage as opposed to racial ideology. But what if Obama’s logic led him to identify as “white”? For many this proposition would not ring true. Yet Obama’s self-identification as “black” raises no protest. Why the double standard? Of course the question itself is rhetorical—because a rigorous baseline logic is already at play.

Although Obama’s story is not the only forceful challenge to the “post racial” concept, it affords a solid frame to consider the merits and myths. A sober read of Tea Party rhetoric and the Henry Louis Gates episode indicate that talk of “post-racial” is premature, a point further exclaimed by the resignation of Shirley Sherrod. Far from relegating racism to the back burner, events since Obama’s election have stoked racial flames and revealed that race still matters. His presidential victory might have ignited widespread faith in a “post-racial” era, but a more pessimistic read would render it a backlash from the country’s collective guilt over the Bush regime that moved voters to “reject the party of an unpopular president.” The election may have helped herald in an era of wishful thinking called “post-racial,” yet its logic, paradoxically enough, was governed by the rule of hypodescent, which can drown an oceanic man in the tide of one drop.

What follows is a critique of the “post-racial” ideology. It begins with “Language and Law,” which provides a theoretical backdrop to map how law influences common language, and more importantly, how concepts rooted in racism maintain in the American lexicon through the force of law. The next section, “White by Law,” analyzes the legal and social constructions of whiteness, a historical survey that arrives at constructions in the American context. Building from the previous parts, “Structures of Racism,” outlines how racial language and ideals of white superiority work in tandem to produce structural racism, that is, racism beyond individual bigotry. Today’s racism is not simply the aggregate of individual interactions; rather, the discrimination resides in the institutions and polity of American society, particularly in the language of law. The last section, “Beyond Binaries and Reinscribed Racism,” is a normative venture that offers ideas for stemming the force of these linguistic and conceptual burdens. Centuries of racial sedimentation have made some aspects of racism invisible to the eye, yet an analysis of the post-racial concept shows that debates on race and color are fundamentally flawed. This Essay exposes the concept as a type of wishful thinking, and more critically, how the law prevents this wish from being fulfilled.

Read the entire article here.