Back to Barack

I hardly expected to be doing a second post on Barack Obama, but the blowback on how to characterize him is just too beguiling to stay away from.

First, as to Joe Biden's sin of calling him 'clean,' and in particular to all those who are scandalized at Biden for, e.g., "bizarre, race-related crap" (link): oh, stop it. Biden is a prattler, but you know perfectly well what he meant, and that it is benign.

Second--the Yglesias thread (linked above) has a fascinating discussion on Obama and the "embarassing relative" problem--apparently Obama doesn't have one (unless you count his late father). It's an interesting issue, but it is hardly a black problem: think Billy Carter, or Roger Clinton (or, I guess, Neil Bush, except perhaps he is too insignificant to notice). And on the whole, properly managed, I suspect the "embarassing relative" is more of a help than a hindrance: which of us does not have an embarrasing relative, and thus find himself touched with a bit of compassion when we see it in others?

The really fascinating issue, though, is the rising discussion of whether Obama is "really black" (link here and many other places). Here's a hobbyhouse of mine: one of the great paradoxes of ethnic politics the social Heisenberg effect: look at any identity too closely and it isn't there any longer. Remember the old joke about the Jew who built a shul in his back yard, and then he built a second one. His friends asked him why and he said "that's the shul whose doorstep I won't talk, so help me God!" David Hackett Fisher wrote a marvellous book demonstrating that the category of WASP vanishes under scrutiny--Fisher identified four subgroups, but read it carefully and you can begin to discern a dozen more. Part of the attitude is, of course, the child of ignorance: my father was a Type #1.5 WASP; my mother was a Scandinavian, pardon a Swede, pardon a Gothenberger--but plenty of my students think of me as just The Man. A breakthrough movie about Chinese in California starred a Japanese actor; evidently the producers decided (rightly?) that the audience would never notice.

I listened to prominent academic deliver an arresting (and sometimes hilarious) paper showing how tangled up the U.S. Census categorization can be--how dare you put us in the same box as that guy? The speaker, as I remember, was pretty well committed to the idea that all categories were artificial with one exception--black (or perhaps "African American"). This one, she argued, was indissoluble.

I wondered then--what would she say about Hutus and Tutsis? Or all the West Africans who kidnapped all the slaves who wound up in America? Or--but that is exactly what we see surfacing in the new Obama-talk. The point must be that Obama cannot speak for blacks because he can't say "I am one of you." Well--narrowly, quite a few black politicians, historically, have come from the Carribean and so have a "one of you" problem from the get-go.

There is a fundamental irony here: if we are at the point where we are noticing that not all blacks lot alike (nor WASPS, nor all Swedes, nor all Chinese Asians), you might think we are making a kind of progress--isn't that what mixing it up, socializing, diversity education, are supposed to be all about? I wouldn't count on it, though: politics is the organization of hatreds (link) and it is far easier to manufacture distrust and division than it is to promote general understanding. Makes me long for the day when we wondered if the first black president was this guy.