I’m someone else. I’m white… white… WHITE!
— Imitation of Life (1959)
Some years ago I worked with a woman, of Jamaican descent, who could have been fairly described as a light-skinned black woman. She confided in me, one day, of the problem she was having with her family over her Haitian boyfriend. Her family was furious that she was dating a “black” man. This was my first acquaintance with the caste system of the West Indies. She explained to me that because her family had a good bit of “white” blood and was lighter skinned, they considered themselves of a higher social class.
“When I look in the mirror,” she told me, ” I see a black woman.” Thus did she dismiss her family pressure, and continue her relationship with her dark-skinned Haitian boyfriend. And good on her.
In the midst of this insane debate over whether Obama is black enough, or white enough, to pass as human enough, he seems to have reached a similar conclusion.
I’m not sure I decided it. Uh, I think, uh, you know, if you — if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American, uh, and, uh, when you’re a child in particular, uh, that is how you begin to identify yourself.
To which Rush Limbaugh brings the following inisight:
So are we to conclude here that he didn’t define himself as black, that the way he looks does? (Sigh.) Okay. We’ve got Obama’s wife in here. We’ve got John Howard from Australia coming up, but, “I’m not sure I decided it”? Well, if you didn’t decide it, then how did it happen?
Well, when you look like that, that’s what you are.
Well, renounce it, then! If it’s not something you want to be, if you didn’t decide it, renounce it, become white!
This of course follows Glenn Beck’s bizarre pronouncement that he’s “colorless.” The entire transcript from his radio show is worth reading and can found here, but here are the salient bits:
Yeah, I — you know, I was driving in today, and I was seeing — because I saw this piece with him on 60 Minutes — and I thought to myself, he is — he’s very white in many ways. . . .
And I thought to myself: Gee, can I even say that? Can I even say that without somebody else starting a campaign saying, “What does he mean, ‘He’s very white?’ ” He is. He’s very white. . . .
When he says — yes. When he said, you don’t notice his color, as a white guy — and I don’t know if African-Americans feel the same way — but for whites, I think he’s colorless. You don’t notice that he is black. So he might as well be white, you know what I mean? . . . .
OK, until he starts talking about race issues and he says things, like on this 60 Minutes piece last night, he said, “When I hail a cab.” And I thought, “What?” And then all of a sudden, I noticed his color. . . .
So when I say — I mean, he’s colorless — or, for whites, he might as well be white, he’s white. And yet, I guarantee you, there will be blogs today that will have me being a racist because I say that. . . .
Gee! Ya think?!
I suppose it’s possible that this isn’t just a preemptive shot, aimed at distracting us from his evident racism; that in fact Mr. Beck doesn’t see his ruminations on whiteness as racist at all.
What Limbaugh and Beck seem too obtuse to recognize is that the implicit message of these rants is that it is obviously preferable to be white. That Obama should take these opportunities to trade up; to pass.
I, for one, will be glad when the media moves on to more important issues, like his wardrobe.
Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.
Debra Dickerson, the author of The End of Blackness, appeared on The Colbert Report on February 8. Here is how she explains the title at the first link I gave:
When Colbert asks Dickerson if Obama is black, she replies, “No.” He can be called an “African African American” or “an American of African immigrant stock”. (She also suggests, as a joke, “as black as circumstances allow”.) She considers him a “brother, but an adopted brother”.
The reason this is an issue for Dickerson is that since, to a black, Obama is not really black, the corporate media’s infatuation with him is really all about “white self-congratulation” that white America has come so far that a “black man” can be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. (A similar point of view is expressed in Barack Obama: The Mania and the Mirage.)
All I wanted to do is point out that it’s not just for right-wing white Americans that Barack Obama’s blackness is problematic.
I know. I saw her on the Report. I am loathe to get into a discussion of how people of color should define themselves, as I am so WASPishly white. But when I read that lucid, intellectual argument, all I can think is, well that’s her opinion, and it’s a very debatable one. Is black a culture, a skin color, a specific lineage? Who knows. But when my friend explained to me that her family willingly identified themselves in a hierarchy, that made them less than white people, as long as there was still someone lower to look down on, I couldn’t believe it. It’s just insanity to me.
It’s not just Jamaicans that have this “skin tone” hierarchy: American blacks do as well. Also, white America apparently accepts that hierarchy, although it is not very aware of it, as far as I know.
Notice how mainstream black American pop stars, both male and female, are usually fairly light skinned? (I am not calling hip-hop mainstream for present purposes.) Also, I would wager that upper-middle class blacks tend to be light-skinned. (Come to think of it, there was a story in Raw Story recently about a study showing that there is a correlation between skin tone and income for recent immigrants. So this doesn’t hold just for blacks, but for Latinos as well.)
Then there is the exception, like Clarence Thomas, that product of affirmative action. I suspect that if weren’t so dark skinned, he wouldn’t have turned into such an extreme right-winger: his fascism and race betrayal is a form of over-compensation.
BTW, I think that the woman on the Report was a bit hard on Obama, since he married a black American. I think that entitles him to be more than just an adopted brother, but then who am I to tell the black community what they should think?
The American skin tone/caste system in America is very obvious to me. Blacks with lighter skin and finer features are more likely to be considered beautiful by white Americans. The thing about my friend’s situation that I found particularly troubling, was the self-loathing of it. The, I’m only as good as my “white” blood makes me thing. The willingness to be less than, as long they’re more than someone else. I don’t get it. But then a lot of cultural norms are irrational and make no sense when you’re on the outside looking in.
I think the woman on the Colbert Report was unfair to Obama because it’s not for her to say. She is not the arbiter of what constitutes black America. She has some theories, and she’s free to propound them, but it’s no more her right to dispense labels than Rush Limbaugh’s.
People really can get nuts on the subject of race especially it seems if someone has a white and black parent. I remember when Halle Berry won her Oscar and living here in central redneck Kalefornia lots of people were falling all over themselves to point out that she was really white you know. Of course before that she was just some black actress with a funny name.