The Myth of Colorblindness Revisited

Wouldn't it be great if race weren't the first characteristic we checked off upon meeting a new person! But it still is, no matter who we are. It's about clan, it's about tribe, and the negative aspects of this way we identify ourselves gets exacerbated when there are hierarchies: when one race predominates over another.

In America there is no meritocracy, not yet, not even close, so let's not pretend that race doesn't play an enormous role in decisionmaking, both public and private.

And as the Judiciary hearings begin today into the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, think about all of the code words that will be used, both brazen and more subtle, to distinguish her being Puerto Rican as either a plus or a minus.

Listen. Listen carefully.

And then read the New York Times this morning. In a front page story, a reporter disingenuously wonders why unemployment has hit African Americans so much worse in New York than people without color.

By the end of March, there were about 80,000 more unemployed blacks than whites, according to the report, even though there are roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here.

It was that question from an African American reporter at a news conference last month, asking what the President was doing for men and women of color, when President Obama, who likes to ignore the issues of race, stumbled for the first time, claiming that the stimulus package was helping everyone. Well, it isn't. It doesn't seem to be helping anyone except for the bankers, frankly. And it isn't helping people of color because African Americans have the least job seniority, security, and are often employed in marginal industries that are heavily dependent upon a soaring economy.

If we all listen, we might learn about the hidden advantages that skin color offers or withholds, and find some room to grow inside ourselves.

More on Identity

While waiting to see how Sarah Palin presents herself on Saturday Night Live, I want to return to Amin Maalouf's "On Identity." He wrote this essay because identity appears to be the cause of the great genocides of the twentieth century; Germany and the Holocaust, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur, Iraq among the Shiites and Sunis, India and Pakistan. His examination of identity illuminates how dangerous each of us becomes when we get stuck in a primary identity.

After each ethnic massacre we ask ourselves, quite rightly, how human beings can perpetrate such atrocities. ...When an otherwise normal man is transformed overnight into a killer, that is
indeed insanity. But when there are thousands, millions of killers; when this phenomenon occurs in one country after another, in different cultures, among the faithful of all religions and among unbelievers alike, it's no longer enough to talk of madness.

Add threat to the situation, add threat to the tribe, and what happens:

...if the men of all countries, of all conditions and faiths can so easily be transformed into butchers, if fanatics of all kinds manage so easily to pass themselves off as defenders of identity, it's because the "tribal" concept of identity still prevalent all over the world facilitates such a distortion.

We can slice our identities, or we can view ourselves, like the vast number of people who have moved from their origins, as a combination of identities, molded and changed by experience.

[Tribal]... is a concept inherited from the conflicts of the past, and many of us would reject it if we examined it more closely. But we cling to it through habit, from lack of imagination or resignation, thus inadvertently contributing to the tragedies by which, tomorrow, we shall be genuinely shocked.

By the way: While flying back from Chicago, I watched Barack Obama's speech at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner on Thursday night. He looked adorable in his white tie and tails, but more importantly, he was so cool and endearing in his delivery. Contrast that to how uncomfortable McCain was in trying to respond to Obama's jokes without exploding from his anger.

On Identity

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born writer who moved to France when he was 27 years old. He writes in French although he speaks fluent Arabic. He is a Christian, not a Muslim. With the incisiveness of a philosopher, Maalouf discusses the inquiry into and the dangers of identity. I am reading his short, but intense book “On Identity,” because in this wildly coded presidential election, we are experiencing America’s brand of identity politics.

“The identity a person lays claim to is often based, in reverse, on that of his enemy.”

Every time John McCain or Sarah Palin asks the question: Just who is Barack Obama? in essence they are questioning his identity. They are eliciting caution, fear, and racial hostility from their white audiences. (There were only 36 African American delegates at the Republican National Convention.) As the son of a white woman and an African father, a man who left the family when Barack was only two, does Obama consider himself white, having been raised by a white mother and her white parents, or black, as he is seen by the world? In his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father,” Obama explains how he journeyed to his sense of self, to his identity as an African American man in the true sense of the word.

“…each individual identity: it is complex, unique and irreplaceable.”

Yet he has carefully avoided the issue of race throughout the campaign. With the one exception during the primary when he responded to the revelations about his then pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright whose fiery sermons appeared on YouTube and then repeatedly on every major news network. That speech, as eloquent and touching as it was, appears to be his only major statement on race.

According to Maalouf, one of the dangers of identity, especially since most of us have complex and specific sources of identity, is that no matter what we say, we are questioned as to what is our one true self.

“It presupposes that ‘deep down inside’ everyone there is just one affiliation that really matters, a kind of ‘fundamental truth’ about each individual, an ‘essence’ determined once and for all at birth, never to change thereafter.”

By asking repeatedly who is Barack Obama, McCain and Palin are piercing into the depths of white distrust of African Americans, unleashing a rabid violence that is associated with the foreign, the unknown, the stranger, especially the dark skinned stranger.

For us to move forward, we must examine our attitudes towards race. We must understand how much we limit our potential, and the potential of others through our labeling.

"For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free."