Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  Advertising met politics when the Old Spice Guy took to YouTube to answer a question from the television host and former Democratic advisor George Stephanopoulos. How, Stephanopoulos wondered, could President Obama stop losing women voters? The Old Spice Guy advised Obama to “henceforth only be seen in a towel” and to begin his State of the Union addresses with “Hello ladies!” If the going got tough, just remind them of “his presidential ab-boards.”

  Not so long before, an image of a shirtless Black man might have caused race riots. One of the most indelible images of the American Century had been the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a Black boy brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 by two white men in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white girl. Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral—”I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said—and the shocking photographs of Till sparked the nascent civil rights movement.

  Could we now canter away from that history, with its fecund, corrosive brew of desire and debasement, love and theft? The comedian Stephen Colbert explored this question in a riotous ongoing gag. One night he told Samuel L. Jackson, “I don’t see race. I’m not a racist.”

  Caught by surprise, Jackson blurted, “Yes, you do!”

  “No, I don’t see race. Are you a Black man?” Colbert asked. “Are you an African American? Because as I said, I took King’s lesson to heart. I don’t see the color of anyone’s skin, I only see the content of their character.”

  “Really?!!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Awesome. Unfortunately I don’t have that luxury.”5

  On the night after Obama’s inauguration, Colbert delivered a monologue that perfectly captured white post-PC, post-racial confusion:

  You know, I noticed something interesting this afternoon. The inauguration of Barack Obama seemed to mean something special to African Americans. Even more interesting, it seemed to mean something to me, too.

  But I never empathize with people who are not like me. So the reaction I had to Barack Obama’s inauguration must logically mean that I am a Black man. I had no idea! Because I don’t see race. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because I dance with my thumbs out. But now I know I’m Black. Which is great, because there really ought to be more of us in late night.6

  Perhaps race comedy was one of the few places in which truths might be told, where an honest conversation might still be started. The late Black comic Patrice O’Neal had a bit where he said that being onstage was the one place where “I can say anything I goddamn want racially. And white people have to sit there and take it. ‘I am evil, yes.’”7

  Colbert’s “Don’t See Race” bits revealed a freshly nuanced sympathy for the devil: high-wire individualized absurdity to combat high-stakes social absurdity. They exploded two myths—that the mere act of seeing and acknowledging difference made one a racist, and that race was a problem for everyone else but whites to deal with. The jokes worked because of another strange idea prevalent in the era of post-multiculturalism—that whites as a group could never be culturally cool.

  Hua Hsu called this phenomenon the “flight from whiteness”—the eagerness, especially among young whites raised under multiculturalism, to “divest themselves from their whiteness entirely.”8 Hsu cited the success of Christian Lander’s blog Stuff White People Like, a relentlessly hip skewering of white hipsterism. But all of these myths still depended on the old idea that whiteness was the unspoken universal.

  And so there would be the confusion that drove McCain’s followers first to boo Obama then to cheer him in the chill of the Arizona desert night. There would be the mad pendulum swing between colorblindness and hyperawareness, between the silence and the crazy talk. There would be the new confusion of the moment, only perhaps it was just another version of the old.

  UNDONE

  Sometimes when people used the term “post-racial” they were speaking about the ways that identity and pop culture seemed more fluid and permeable and less “white” and therefore cooler than ever. But to many, the term “post-racial” signified less about how to face the future than about how to address the past.

  For some, it signaled a desire for an end to the politics of Black consciousness. Pundits like Juan Williams and Matt Bai hoped that a new generation of politicians of color—including men like Newark mayor Cory Booker and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—might douse the old fires of Black and Brown Power, give them relief from diversity fatigue, and replace “political correctness” with a deracinated rhetoric of class. In this narrative, “post-racial” signified not only an American sense of transcendence, a victory of will over history, but as Gary Younge put it, “a repudiation” of claims for equality.9 It signified a return to whiteness.

  Back in 2007 when Obama began his presidential run, Ward Connerly had praised him as a “post-racial candidate” and made a great show of sending in a campaign donation.10 But not long after, he and other Black neoconservatives like Shelby Steele were criticizing him for supporting policies like affirmative action.11 When Obama was “not Black enough,” he had been attractive. Now he was not post-racial enough.

  To others “post-racial” signified an end to white comfort. A post-racial America, the conservative activist Lawrence Auster wrote, meant “a post-white America, an America transformed by the symbolic removal of whiteness as the country’s explicit or implicit historic and majority identity.… Post-racial America is an America in which whites, as whites, go silent forever.”12 Pat Buchanan called white America “an endangered species,” as if it had entered the final spiral of Theodore Roosevelt’s “race suicide.”13 And because whites were in their “demographic winter,” the nation had entered—all clashing, cringe-worthy metaphors intended—”the Indian summer of our civilization.”14

  The implication was clear: defend your birthright, fight for your future. As Obama began his presidency, the right did not wait long to launch ferocious cultural attacks. Media crusaders Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck trained their sniper focus on newly appointed, culturally savvy Obama administration officials like NEA communications director Yosi Sergant and environmental advisor Van Jones and won their resignations. The sad episode of Department of Agriculture appointee Shirley Sherrod’s resignation seemed collateral damage.

  As image of the Obama Joker went viral, his face was no longer the screen on which to project desires, dreams, and hopes but the sum of all fears. Obama was no longer just the product of miscegenation, no longer just Black. He was now also a Muslim, a socialist, an illegal alien, a demon of disorder. He was all things Other.

  When an Internet video surfaced of a white student being beaten up by a group of Black students in a dispute over school-bus seats, Rush Limbaugh told his audience of millions, “It’s Obama’s America, is it not?… You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on.”15

  Had we all really just crossed the bridge together? For years good-willed people had believed in a conceit—perhaps it was multiculturalism’s core conceit—that if more people of color, women, and gays were represented, that if they could tell their stories and the stories were heard, then empathy would follow, and equity, too. A new kind of cultural politics that lifted everyone together could emerge.

  But by the summer of the Tea Party’s rise, at the midpoint of Obama’s first term, that kind of cultural politics seemed as distant as ever. All optimism was gone. When the Gallup Poll asked Americans how they felt Obama’s presidency had changed race relations, 64 percent said either nothing changed or things had gotten worse.16 Instead there was the fog of the renewed culture war. “Post-racial” did not point to a new consensus on race, but the seeming impossibility of one.

  THE SILENCE SPEAKS LOUDLY

  In each generation, race is rearticulated and reconstructed. A quarter-century since conservatives had remade national politics with the idea that col
orblindness and colormuteness were the only appropriate ways, individually and politically, to deal with race, the idea had become orthodox for many liberals, too. Being blind and silent had insinuated itself down to the personal level.

  In a broad 2007 study of almost 19,000 subjects, a team of scholars from Vanderbilt University found that 75 percent of white parents never or almost never discussed race or ethnicity with their children.17 Some of the parents didn’t think it was a big deal. Others genuinely did not know how to talk about race so they avoided talking about it altogether. Many of those parents—Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, the coauthors of NurtureShock, found—believed teaching their children not to see race was the proper way to teach them how not to be bigoted or racist.

  “[T]he habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture,” Toni Morrison said in 1990, when the culture wars were raging and conservative dogma was quietly hardening into new rules for civil conduct. “[E]very well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.”18

  The new common sense was: if bad people had used race to divide and debase, that is to say, if they had used race to be racist, then good people would be polite to never acknowledge race at all. It was better not to say anything than to risk being seen as a racist. Nothing was worse than being called a racist.

  In the post-racial moment there was a “watching you watching me” meta-absurdity. No theory better explained it than education psychologist Claude Steele’s idea of “stereotype threat.” Steele had stumbled onto the idea when he tried to explain why high-achieving Black students still underperformed in college, decades after programs designed to help them had been put in place. He found that when they were reminded that, as a race, society expected them to fail, they underachieved. The same happened with women in mathematics. In integrated environments, Steele argued, the threat of confirming a negative group stereotype could place extreme stress on individuals and cause them to fail.

  Steele then tried a different experiment. He asked whites to lead a topical discussion with a group of random people they did not know. He then asked them to situate the chairs for their guests. In actuality Steele and his researchers were not interested in the discussion but in where their discussion leaders placed the chairs. For most topics, they chose to move the chairs close to their own, suggesting that they wanted to encourage trust and intimacy with their subjects. But when they were told that the topic was racial profiling and their guests would be Black, they pushed the chairs much farther away than they normally would have. Steele theorized that the white subjects were afraid to be seen as racist. Stereotype threat had led them to distance themselves from their Black discussants.

  After multiculturalism, we knew what not to say to each other, but not what to say. Multiculturalism had given us protocols and scripts. When these were exhausted, we were lost. We did not know how to improvise a new way.

  If Steele had been interested in individual distancing, sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman were interested in social distance. They interviewed and surveyed white college students on their racial attitudes, then compared the answers. In their written surveys, white students showed support for affirmative action and interracial marriage. But in interviews, many of them contradicted their answers, using indirection, displacement, or claims of ignorance.19 Racialized issues were too uncomfortable to talk about candidly and directly.

  “Evasion,” Toni Morrison had also said, “has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate.”20

  Being colormute was safer. Po Bronson and his wife had chosen to send their child to a culturally diverse preschool in San Francisco. But one day he was mortified to find his young child happily pointing out Black people on the street. “That guy comes from Africa!” the boy said. He had just completed his preschool lesson on diversity and difference, and was pleased to have new words to talk about what he was seeing.

  Bronson listened in as his son and his white pals discussed their friends’ skin colors as “brown.” Not knowing what to call their own color, they spoke of friends who had “skin like ours.” Then he heard one of the boys tell his son, “Parents don’t like us to talk about our skin, so don’t let them hear you.”21

  Bronson realized that the children were simply trying to find language to discuss identity and diversity. But their good liberal parents—conditioned by stereotype threat—were instead trying to teach them to be colormute. “Avoidance,” Steele wrote, “becomes the simplest solution.”22 If difference itself could not be named, how could anyone begin a conversation about what really needed to change?

  Silence and evasion, distance and avoidance. Forman called it “racial apathy.” Bonilla-Silva called it “colorblind racism.” The writer and activist Tim Wise called it “post-racial liberalism.” Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford called it “post-racism,” arguing that it did not “signify ‘the end’ of racism, or even necessarily the beginning of the end.… It means the ‘next stage’ of racism.”23 If the word “post-racial” was intellectually inadequate, these scholars were devising oldish new names for a new-old problem.

  LOOK AT YOU FOOLIN’ YOU

  There was a paradox at the heart of the “post-racial” moment. While our images showed a mostly optimistic nation moving toward cultural desegregation and racial equality, our modes of living together reflected distancing and blindness, rancor and silence; our politics bespoke deep pessimism and a desire for disengagement; and our social indexes revealed increasing social resegregation and racial inequality.

  How did Americans value diversity and integration? Over the course of four decades, the Gallup Poll had asked whites, “Would you move if great numbers of Blacks moved into your neighborhood?” In 1958, 79% said they would. In 1997, 75% said they would not.24 A month after Obama’s victory, a report from the Pew Research Center showed that almost two in three Americans—including 52% of Republicans, 60% of whites, 83% of Blacks, and 76% of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds—said that they preferred to live in a community made up of people who were a mix of different races.25 The numbers were similar for religious, political, and socioeconomic diversity.

  Fully 68 percent of those making $100,000 or more a year—a much larger proportion than every other income bracket—said they preferred to live in a community with a mix of economic classes. But when Stanford professors Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff examined the data from 1970 to 2009, they found that not only had residential segregation by income soared, the wealthy had segregated themselves the fastest.26

  Large majorities told pollsters they wanted integrated schools and diversity in education. Pundits and politicians would often trot out such polls as cause for optimism. But in light of the actual social facts, the survey data looked less like a consensus for cultural equity than evidence that multiculturalism had made some better primed to answer the questions “correctly.”

  In this colorized generation, public schools were resegregating at a dramatic rate. By 2010, 80% of Latinos and 74% of Blacks attended majority nonwhite schools. Around 40% of Blacks and Latinos in public schools attended hypersegregated schools in which more than 90% of the students were nonwhite. Blacks and Latinos were also twice as likely to attend a school predominantly serving low-income students than white or Asian students. White students were the most racially isolated of all—the average white student attended a school that was 75% white.27

  Resegregation did not escape even the rapidly diversifying suburbs or the most liberal strongholds. From city to exurb, the San Francisco Bay Area—one of the nation’s most diverse regions, the birthplace of the multiculturalism movement, and the site of Berkeley’s national model public school desegregation program—also boasted California’s highest rates of white isolation. Although white students made up only 28 percent of the Bay Area’s student-age population, 65 percent of them attended majority white schools.28 Those schools were eight times les
s likely than predominantly nonwhite ones to be deemed “high-problem” schools.29

  After 1968, busing, court orders, and district plans had helped to integrate the schools from the Deep South to the Northwest. In turn, school desegregation climbed sharply and peaked in the late 1980s.30 But then anti-integrationists began to accumulate victories in the courts and the legislatures. During the 1990s, while multiculturalists were winning the battle to change school curriculum and staffing, they were losing the battle to desegregate the next generation of public school students. By the new millennium, the same Southern school systems that had made the most progress toward integration were the fastest to resegregate. Progress had always been fragile.

  ESCAPE FROM EVERYWHERE

  Public school resegregation was tied closely to housing resegregation. Housing was, the Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin wrote, “the realm in which we have experienced the fewest integration gains.” She added, “When it comes to integration, housing is also the realm in which Americans most seem to agree that separation is acceptable.”31 To be sure, times had changed since the period of white flight from the chocolate cities. The romance of the city was back. A Manhattan Institute study by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor titled “The End of the Segregated Century” found that “American cities are now more integrated than they’ve been since 1910.” Segregation in the metro areas they studied had dropped by almost half from its peak in 1970, with a notably accelerated drop during the 2000s. But had they simply taken a snapshot of the moment before displacement and gentrification sealed a new era of segregation?

  The weight of history was on segregation’s side. Expansive New Deal policies gave working-class and middle-class white homeowners a fresh start in home ownership and wealth building, leading toward the suburban boom of the mid-twentieth century. In essence, they had been granted mobility. But these same policies locked out people of color, who were often bound by racial covenants, zoning laws, and racial steering to urban neighborhoods “redlined” as too risky for lenders.32 Postwar highway building then tore through those neighborhoods and sped their decline.