AVINASH PANDEY
Britain, in a major victory for the movement against caste based discrimination and atrocities, can soon declare caste prejudice unlawful under laws against racial discrimination becoming the first country of the world to do so. The development was imminent in the wake of the fact that the House of Lords had already passed the Equality Bill empowering the government to treat caste as 'an aspect of race' in March this year leaving just one more step of getting it passed by the House of Commons to be enacted as law.
The victory has come as a result of the valiant struggle of the Dalit groups along with members of the broader civil society against the exploitative and oppressive system of caste, amidst tremendous opposition of the Indian government and the right wing Hindu groups based in Britain.
The significance of the development lies in the fact that it has taken almost a decade to come since 2001 when the Government of India had succeeded in botching up the attempt of the Dalit Rights Group together with the broader civil society to make caste based discrimination an aspect of racial discrimination at the Durban World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The Government of India claimed the caste issues as ‘internal matter of India’ and asserted that they were making all attempts to put an end to caste based discrimination.
What it forgot in doing that was its own, and glorious, role in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If caste issues are an internal matter of India, would not apartheid be an internal issue of the governments of apartheid-era South Africa? So why did India play a crucial role in mobilising the world opinion against apartheid?
The government of India tried to further substantiate its claim by asserting the caste issues as intra-racial and intra-cultural even while conceding the existence of discrimination. Soli Sorabjee, the then Attorney General of India, maintained that the only reason behind India’s attempt to keep caste discrimination off the agenda of Durban Conference was that “it will distract participants from the main topic: racism”. Even while conceding that caste discrimination in India is 'undeniable' he stressed that 'caste and race are entirely different'.
It could very well be. After all, no two systems of social stratification in this world are absolutely similar to each other. A lot of factors, from culture to economy, intercede with the systems of stratification to produce the division of power and hierarchy in the society and make the systems, in the process, absolutely distinct from one another in internal structure. The crucial question, however, is not about their distinctiveness but their efficacy in maintaining and safeguarding social hierarchies.
Sadly, Indian caste system has proved itself to be one of the worst, if not the worst, system of social stratification for maintaining and perpetuating social hierarchies. Most probably, humankind has never devised a more comprehensive system of keeping a section of society under perpetual subjugation amidst inhuman conditions. It has never devised a worse way of dehumanising fellow human beings and reducing them to being mere labour force devoid of any dignity leave aside rights. Everything said and done, when it comes to committing atrocities on people, the caste system has proved itself to be far more clinical in brutalising its victims than race and not less.
The argument of the Indian government that caste based discrimination should not be included under the category of racial discrimination because it is making serious progress in the issue by having protective laws and positive discrimination fails miserable in the wake of data produced by its own agencies.
For example, the number of crimes against people belonging to the Scheduled Castes as per records of the National Crime Records Bureau of India, a body of ministry of Home Affairs, went up to 33615, an increase of more than 2 percent from the preceding year. Or the fact that the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act does not get applied even in such ghoulish cases of caste based atrocities as in the killing of a Dalit family in Khairlanji while committing brutal rapes on the women speaks volumes about the seriousness of the efforts of the government.
The second argument of Indian government, unfortunately backed by a few leading sociologists, was that since 'race' is a not a meaningful biological category in India and all attempts of profiling different castes along racial lines have fallen flat. Their claim is that even if caste is based on descent it is entirely different from race.
Even if the discrimination against the Dalits is intra-racial, the consequences for them are no less brutal than that in racism. On a more fundamental level, the lack of 'scientific' evidence may prove the absence of 'race' in India but not the absence of 'racism', an ideological structure based on the belief of superiority of some people because of birth and inferiority of others because of the same! And there is no doubt that this ideology is becoming stronger day by day despite all the attempts of Indian government to put an end to this ‘evil’ practice.
The seriousness of the government on the issue speaks for itself in its acts. After all, the government's dogged opposition to the inclusion of caste based discrimination does not come out of some failure to understand the ground realities out of sheer ignorance. It reflects the mindset and the psyche of the government and the people manning it. The stand of the government emanates from that pre-modern, barbaric and regressive social structure of caste that rules the country under its democratic façade. A facade that gets exposed more often than not by the deeds of all organs of the state, including its judiciary.
It is hard to believe that even judiciary can do that but even a cursory glance on its track records bear out the fact. Be it the highly misogynist and casteist verdict in Mathura rape case ((Tukaram V. State of Maharshtra, AIR 1979 SC 185) when the Supreme Court overruled the decision of the Bombay High Court convicting two policemen for raping Mathura, a 16-year-old girl because of the fact that the girl was an ‘illiterate and orphaned tribal girl’ and was of loose character by implication to the recent verdict of Maharashtra High Court in Khairlanji massacre, the judiciary has proved itself complicit in letting the government off its responsibility of abolishing caste based discrimination.
At times, ubfortunately, it has went all the distance to be part of the perpetuators ad not only accomplices of caste discrimination. Like in the infamous and stinking observation of the trial judge in the Bhanwari Devi rape case in 1995 that because Hindu scriptures do not allow upper caste men to touch a low caste woman, the accused could not have raped the Dalit victim. This case and many others have put our constitution to shame.
And that is why, compartmentalising the issue of caste into the 'scientific' and 'cultural' aspects and then prioritising the scientific ones to assert that caste is not race is not only incorrect but in fact a deceitful attempt to violate the spirit of the constitution of India if not the letters itself, and should be fought against from within and outside.
As a matter of fact, the meaning of the term 'descent' has been expanded to include 'discrimination based on caste' ,by the general recommendation number 29, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) 1969. Indian government will do well to remember that it is a signatory to that convention along with more than 170 other countries.
It will also do well to take note of the fact that the lives of more than 165 million citizens is not a question of intellectual theorising over whether race is caste or not before putting its act together and cracking down on all forms of caste atrocities decisively. By then, it can begin with accepting that caste is a form of racial discrimination, at least of racism if not of the 'pure' (in the Brahiminical sense) biological category of race!
Meanwhile, lets us all support the British Dalits in safeguarding their hard won victory against the demon of caste, threatened by the right wing Hindu organisation in Britain as well as Indian government which is, reportedly, trying to arm-twist the British government into not intervening in its 'internal' matter. Making that absurd claim amounts to appropriating anything relating to Hindu religion as ‘internal’ and caste serious aspersions on the secular credentials of Indian state. Does Indian government want to claim that all issues concerning Hindus are its ‘internal’ issues, throwing all its secular pretensions away?
After all, caste based atrocities have long ceased to confine themselves in Indian subcontinent. If the gory facts about honour killings taking place in Britain and Canada among other places were not proof enough, the recent killing of a Sikh religious leader belong to the Ravidasi sect (a Dalit sect) in Vienna leaves no scope for doubts about the same.
We can begin by standing by the policy and reminding the Indian government not to meddle in the internal issues of Britain, as it is dealing with an issue concerning its citizens and has nothing to do with a ‘secular’ India. Further, no government can sit idle when caste issues lead to illegal confinements, abductions, forced marriages, and even killings. It is the Indian state which has failed to contain the demon of caste, leave aside killing it, and it has no right to demand the same indifference and disdain for human life from a sovereign state for such a pressing issue.
Avinash Pandey, alias Samar, a research scholar based in New Delhi, is currently in Hong Kong on assignment with the Asian Human Rights Commission, which has distributed this article. He can be contacted at samaranarya@gmail.com
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
08 September, 2010
17 December, 2008
'Obama Effect' highlights racism in Cuba
LOUIS E. V. NEVAER
News Analysis
New America Media
Editor's Note: Barack Obama's victory has made Cubans more willing to speak out against the institutional racism that exists half a century after Fidel Castro established a "color blind" egalitarian society.
MERIDA, Mexico – As Cuba prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, US President–elect Barack Obama’s victory is raising disturbing questions about the institutional racism in the so-called egalitarian society, where racism is said to have disappeared along with capitalism.
“Cuba, I am inclined to believe, is nervous about the impact that a black president in the White House could have upon its own black population,” writes Carlos Moore, a black Cuban of Jamaican ancestry and author of “Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba,” in the Miami Herald.
Since the first days of the revolution, Fidel has been aware of the racism that permeated Cuban society. “In the daily life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood, and shrewdness,” Fidel wrote in January 1959, “there has always been a Negro standing beside every white man.”
Castro envisioned a “color-blind” society, an aspiration that dated back to the 19th century liberator Jose Martí who fought to end the vestiges of slavery as part of severing ties with Spain. But there was paradox in Castro’s declarations: Castro, the son of European immigrants from Galicia, Spain, was a white man who had overthrown the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto born to parents who were both of mixed race.
In the decades that followed, Castro’s vision of giving Cuban blacks equal opportunities was thwarted by the realities of race outside the island nation: Soviet and East European allies preferred white Cubans, and these were granted scholarships to study for advanced degrees throughout behind the Iron Curtain. The growing disparities between white Cubans and black Cubans remained a lingering problem throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
It was the official policy of the government to deny the existence of racism, arguing that Communist “egalitarianism” made discrimination based on race “an impossibility,” simply because it was incompatible with a socialist state. This was a polite fiction. As Alejandro De La Fuente wrote in his authoritative book, “A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba,” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) the color of one’s skin determines the life one leads in Communist Cuba.
“(A) strong correlation between race, the regional distribution of the population, and the quality of the housing stock persisted through the 1980s,” De La Fuente wrote. “A traditional geography of race and poverty had not been dismantled, largely because of the government’s failure to provide adequate housing to the entire population. No neighborhood was racially exclusive—this was true, for the most part, in pre-Revolutionary Cuba also—but in the most dilapidated areas of the big cities, the proportion of blacks and mulattos was greater than that of whites.”
This was considered slander against socialism. Castro shot back, and Cuban authorities offered statistical analysis to bolster their view, which revealed the lengths to which Havana was prepared to deceive others even as it deceived itself. Of Cuba’s population of 11.2 million people in 2002, officials declared, 65 percent were white, 10 percent were black, and 25 percent were mulatto. This racial breakdown matched exactly the breakdown of members of Cuba’s parliament: 65 percent white and 35 percent people of color.
The implication was as obvious as it was ridiculous: Cuba had achieved “perfect” racial representation between the people and their representatives. Europeans scoffed at such claims. In fact, most independent census reports of the Cuban nation puts the number of “whites” at anywhere from 20 to 35 percent; everyone else is black or mulatto.
The European Union recently dispatched anthropologists to study racism in Cuba. Their findings were shocking: Not only was racism alive and well in the workers’ paradise, but it was systemic and institutional. Blacks were systematically excluded from positions that involved coming in contact with foreign tourists (where they could earn tips in hard currencies), they were relegated to poor housing, complained of the longest waits for healthcare, were excluded from managerial positions, received the lowest remittances from relatives abroad, and were five times more likely to be imprisoned.
The report, “Race and Inequality in Cuba Today,” by Rodrigo Espina and Pablo Rodriguez Ruiz, published in the anthropological journal TEMAS in 2006, infuriated Cuban officials.
But the findings were irrefutable, and they reflected an acceleration of racism in the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union only exacerbated the problem, particularly as Cuba now competed with Cancun and San Juan for European vacationers. As Democracy Now! reported in 2000, Cuban officials continued to exclude blacks from tourist-related industries.
When Maria Carrion of Democracy Now! interviewed a black Cuban identified only as Victor, he told her that the only jobs black Cubans have access to are in construction and cleaning. Blacks are randomly stopped on the street by police, he said, and are unable to denounce racism in Cuba for fear of going to prison for being anti-Communist.
This is why Cubans are dizzy with excitement at Obama’s victory. “I still feel my heart skip a beat,” Victor Fowler, a black Cuban, told Spain’s El Pais newspaper last month. “I listen to Barack Obama … I look at my skin, I look at my children’s skin, I cry and I smile.”
Obama’s ascendancy has emboldened Cuban blacks in their criticism of the racism in Cuba. “The bottom line is that racism is Cuba's most intractable problem,” Carlos Moore wrote in the Miami Herald. “Only an arrangement implying effective power sharing between the island's two dominant groups can prepare the ground for a reversal of Cuba's socio-racial conundrum. This would call for an entirely new institutional framework that includes the reinvigoration of civil society, the implementation of robust racial affirmative action policies in all spheres, the revival of independent cultural and social institutions, an independent media and free press and the existence of autonomous political movements, associations and parties.”
In other words, when it comes to racial progress, blacks in Cuba complain that their nation resembles the United States circa 1963, the year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.
This was precisely the point that Esteban Morales Dominguez, an economist, political scientist and essayist made last year in his book, “The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba” (Fundación Fernando Ortiz, 2007), which was promptly banned by authorities.
Yet there is rising anger among Cuban blacks who view Obama’s victory as a sharp reminder of the racism that still exists in Cuba. In a country where few dare to post messages in public view that are not in support of the government, signs in windows have begun to appear that are startling: “Si se puede, coño” or “Yes we can,” with a Cuban twist – “Damn it.”
News Analysis
New America Media
Editor's Note: Barack Obama's victory has made Cubans more willing to speak out against the institutional racism that exists half a century after Fidel Castro established a "color blind" egalitarian society.
MERIDA, Mexico – As Cuba prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, US President–elect Barack Obama’s victory is raising disturbing questions about the institutional racism in the so-called egalitarian society, where racism is said to have disappeared along with capitalism.
“Cuba, I am inclined to believe, is nervous about the impact that a black president in the White House could have upon its own black population,” writes Carlos Moore, a black Cuban of Jamaican ancestry and author of “Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba,” in the Miami Herald.
Since the first days of the revolution, Fidel has been aware of the racism that permeated Cuban society. “In the daily life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood, and shrewdness,” Fidel wrote in January 1959, “there has always been a Negro standing beside every white man.”
Castro envisioned a “color-blind” society, an aspiration that dated back to the 19th century liberator Jose Martí who fought to end the vestiges of slavery as part of severing ties with Spain. But there was paradox in Castro’s declarations: Castro, the son of European immigrants from Galicia, Spain, was a white man who had overthrown the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto born to parents who were both of mixed race.
In the decades that followed, Castro’s vision of giving Cuban blacks equal opportunities was thwarted by the realities of race outside the island nation: Soviet and East European allies preferred white Cubans, and these were granted scholarships to study for advanced degrees throughout behind the Iron Curtain. The growing disparities between white Cubans and black Cubans remained a lingering problem throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
It was the official policy of the government to deny the existence of racism, arguing that Communist “egalitarianism” made discrimination based on race “an impossibility,” simply because it was incompatible with a socialist state. This was a polite fiction. As Alejandro De La Fuente wrote in his authoritative book, “A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba,” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) the color of one’s skin determines the life one leads in Communist Cuba.
“(A) strong correlation between race, the regional distribution of the population, and the quality of the housing stock persisted through the 1980s,” De La Fuente wrote. “A traditional geography of race and poverty had not been dismantled, largely because of the government’s failure to provide adequate housing to the entire population. No neighborhood was racially exclusive—this was true, for the most part, in pre-Revolutionary Cuba also—but in the most dilapidated areas of the big cities, the proportion of blacks and mulattos was greater than that of whites.”
This was considered slander against socialism. Castro shot back, and Cuban authorities offered statistical analysis to bolster their view, which revealed the lengths to which Havana was prepared to deceive others even as it deceived itself. Of Cuba’s population of 11.2 million people in 2002, officials declared, 65 percent were white, 10 percent were black, and 25 percent were mulatto. This racial breakdown matched exactly the breakdown of members of Cuba’s parliament: 65 percent white and 35 percent people of color.
The implication was as obvious as it was ridiculous: Cuba had achieved “perfect” racial representation between the people and their representatives. Europeans scoffed at such claims. In fact, most independent census reports of the Cuban nation puts the number of “whites” at anywhere from 20 to 35 percent; everyone else is black or mulatto.
The European Union recently dispatched anthropologists to study racism in Cuba. Their findings were shocking: Not only was racism alive and well in the workers’ paradise, but it was systemic and institutional. Blacks were systematically excluded from positions that involved coming in contact with foreign tourists (where they could earn tips in hard currencies), they were relegated to poor housing, complained of the longest waits for healthcare, were excluded from managerial positions, received the lowest remittances from relatives abroad, and were five times more likely to be imprisoned.
The report, “Race and Inequality in Cuba Today,” by Rodrigo Espina and Pablo Rodriguez Ruiz, published in the anthropological journal TEMAS in 2006, infuriated Cuban officials.
But the findings were irrefutable, and they reflected an acceleration of racism in the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union only exacerbated the problem, particularly as Cuba now competed with Cancun and San Juan for European vacationers. As Democracy Now! reported in 2000, Cuban officials continued to exclude blacks from tourist-related industries.
When Maria Carrion of Democracy Now! interviewed a black Cuban identified only as Victor, he told her that the only jobs black Cubans have access to are in construction and cleaning. Blacks are randomly stopped on the street by police, he said, and are unable to denounce racism in Cuba for fear of going to prison for being anti-Communist.
This is why Cubans are dizzy with excitement at Obama’s victory. “I still feel my heart skip a beat,” Victor Fowler, a black Cuban, told Spain’s El Pais newspaper last month. “I listen to Barack Obama … I look at my skin, I look at my children’s skin, I cry and I smile.”
Obama’s ascendancy has emboldened Cuban blacks in their criticism of the racism in Cuba. “The bottom line is that racism is Cuba's most intractable problem,” Carlos Moore wrote in the Miami Herald. “Only an arrangement implying effective power sharing between the island's two dominant groups can prepare the ground for a reversal of Cuba's socio-racial conundrum. This would call for an entirely new institutional framework that includes the reinvigoration of civil society, the implementation of robust racial affirmative action policies in all spheres, the revival of independent cultural and social institutions, an independent media and free press and the existence of autonomous political movements, associations and parties.”
In other words, when it comes to racial progress, blacks in Cuba complain that their nation resembles the United States circa 1963, the year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.
This was precisely the point that Esteban Morales Dominguez, an economist, political scientist and essayist made last year in his book, “The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba” (Fundación Fernando Ortiz, 2007), which was promptly banned by authorities.
Yet there is rising anger among Cuban blacks who view Obama’s victory as a sharp reminder of the racism that still exists in Cuba. In a country where few dare to post messages in public view that are not in support of the government, signs in windows have begun to appear that are startling: “Si se puede, coño” or “Yes we can,” with a Cuban twist – “Damn it.”
16 December, 2008
Obama's win didn't end racial stereotyping
EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: A new study shows that even with Barack Obama's White House win, racial stereotyping hasn't ended, and much of the public still perceives those likely to commit crimes as being poor and black. NAM associate editor Earl Ofari Hutchinson analyzes this situation.
There is still much talk about how Barack Obama’s White House win demolished negative stereotypes about blacks. That’s wishful thinking. A new study by a team of researchers from several top universities shows that stereotypes about poverty and crime remain just as frozen in time. The study found that much of the public still perceives that those most likely to commit crimes are poor, jobless and black. The surprise was that the negative racial stereotypes also applied to anyone, no matter their color, who was poor and jobless. If for instance a white commits a crime, the odds are that the respondents will reclassify that person as black.
The jumbled mental contortions that many go through to dub a white person black solely on the basis of their income and whether they have been jailed didn’t end there. If a person who was perceived as white was jailed, that person was still perceived to be black even after their release. The study did more than affirm that race and poverty and crime are firmly rammed together in the public mind. It also showed that once the stereotype is planted, it’s virtually impossible to root out. That’s hardly new either.
In 2003 Penn State University researchers conducted a landmark study on the tie between crime and public perceptions of who is most likely to commit crime. The study found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crime. This was no surprise given the relentless media depictions of young blacks as dysfunctional, dope peddling, gang bangers and drive by shooters.
The bulging numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons seem to reinforce the perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young, black male face. And it doesn’t much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated a black is. The overkill frenzy feeding on the criminal hijinks of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, O.J. Simpson, and the legions of black NFL, NBA stars, Hollywood personalities, and entertainers who run afoul of the law or are poorly behaved, further reinforces the negative image of blacks.
There was, however, a mild surprise in the Penn State study. It found that even when blacks didn’t commit a specific crime, whites still misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American.
University researchers were plainly fascinated by this result. Five years later they wanted to see if that stereotype still held sway. By then Obama’s political ascent was in full trajectory upward. Polls showed that a crushing majority of whites not only said that they would vote for an African-American for president, but that color was not a consideration in how they viewed and voted for a candidate.
This appeared to signal a benign sea change in public attitudes on race.
It didn’t. Researchers found that public attitudes on crime and race were unchanged. The majority of whites still overwhelmingly fingered blacks as the most likely to commit crimes, even when they didn’t commit them.
There are two troubling implications in these studies. One is that Obama’s victory was more a personal triumph for him. It did not radically remap racial perceptions, let alone put an end to racial stereotyping. A significant percent of whites voted for him and were passionate about him because they were fed up with Bush’s policies, and believed that he would reverse those policies. The vote for him was race neutral. His victory was a tribute to his personal political organization and savvy as well as public fear and frustration about Bush.
The second implication is even more troubling. If much of the public still view crime and poverty through narrow racial lens then that will continue to stir public clamor for lawmakers, police and prosecutors to clean the streets of violent criminals, who are almost always seen as African-Americans. This could mean even more gang sweeps, court injunctions, stiff adult prison terms, three strikes laws, and incarceration for teens, the holding of accused teens indefinitely in juvenile jail detention.
Ironically, Obama inadvertently fed the negative perceptions of blacks. In several much publicized talks on the black family, he blasted black men for being missing in action from the home and shirking their family responsibility. It was a well-meaning effort to call attention to the chronic problems of black males and families, but it also gave the impression that black males are dysfunctional. It was a short step from that to conclude that these same men are more likely to be involved in crime than whites.
Obama’s win was a two-edged sword. It was as billed a profound historic win, but it also fanned the illusion that racial stereotypes are dead. Now we know better.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: A new study shows that even with Barack Obama's White House win, racial stereotyping hasn't ended, and much of the public still perceives those likely to commit crimes as being poor and black. NAM associate editor Earl Ofari Hutchinson analyzes this situation.
There is still much talk about how Barack Obama’s White House win demolished negative stereotypes about blacks. That’s wishful thinking. A new study by a team of researchers from several top universities shows that stereotypes about poverty and crime remain just as frozen in time. The study found that much of the public still perceives that those most likely to commit crimes are poor, jobless and black. The surprise was that the negative racial stereotypes also applied to anyone, no matter their color, who was poor and jobless. If for instance a white commits a crime, the odds are that the respondents will reclassify that person as black.
The jumbled mental contortions that many go through to dub a white person black solely on the basis of their income and whether they have been jailed didn’t end there. If a person who was perceived as white was jailed, that person was still perceived to be black even after their release. The study did more than affirm that race and poverty and crime are firmly rammed together in the public mind. It also showed that once the stereotype is planted, it’s virtually impossible to root out. That’s hardly new either.
In 2003 Penn State University researchers conducted a landmark study on the tie between crime and public perceptions of who is most likely to commit crime. The study found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crime. This was no surprise given the relentless media depictions of young blacks as dysfunctional, dope peddling, gang bangers and drive by shooters.
The bulging numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons seem to reinforce the perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young, black male face. And it doesn’t much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated a black is. The overkill frenzy feeding on the criminal hijinks of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, O.J. Simpson, and the legions of black NFL, NBA stars, Hollywood personalities, and entertainers who run afoul of the law or are poorly behaved, further reinforces the negative image of blacks.
There was, however, a mild surprise in the Penn State study. It found that even when blacks didn’t commit a specific crime, whites still misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American.
University researchers were plainly fascinated by this result. Five years later they wanted to see if that stereotype still held sway. By then Obama’s political ascent was in full trajectory upward. Polls showed that a crushing majority of whites not only said that they would vote for an African-American for president, but that color was not a consideration in how they viewed and voted for a candidate.
This appeared to signal a benign sea change in public attitudes on race.
It didn’t. Researchers found that public attitudes on crime and race were unchanged. The majority of whites still overwhelmingly fingered blacks as the most likely to commit crimes, even when they didn’t commit them.
There are two troubling implications in these studies. One is that Obama’s victory was more a personal triumph for him. It did not radically remap racial perceptions, let alone put an end to racial stereotyping. A significant percent of whites voted for him and were passionate about him because they were fed up with Bush’s policies, and believed that he would reverse those policies. The vote for him was race neutral. His victory was a tribute to his personal political organization and savvy as well as public fear and frustration about Bush.
The second implication is even more troubling. If much of the public still view crime and poverty through narrow racial lens then that will continue to stir public clamor for lawmakers, police and prosecutors to clean the streets of violent criminals, who are almost always seen as African-Americans. This could mean even more gang sweeps, court injunctions, stiff adult prison terms, three strikes laws, and incarceration for teens, the holding of accused teens indefinitely in juvenile jail detention.
Ironically, Obama inadvertently fed the negative perceptions of blacks. In several much publicized talks on the black family, he blasted black men for being missing in action from the home and shirking their family responsibility. It was a well-meaning effort to call attention to the chronic problems of black males and families, but it also gave the impression that black males are dysfunctional. It was a short step from that to conclude that these same men are more likely to be involved in crime than whites.
Obama’s win was a two-edged sword. It was as billed a profound historic win, but it also fanned the illusion that racial stereotypes are dead. Now we know better.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).
08 November, 2008
Not Black President Obama, just President Obama
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: President-elect Barack Obama never made race an issue in his presidential bid. Perhaps that's why he earned the endorsements of the likes of Colin Powell and Hollywood celebrities, and won over the media, writes NAM contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
The instant Barack Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring nearly two years ago, the twin mantra was that he could be the first black president, and if that happened, America would finally have kicked its race syndrome.
The twin mantra has been repeated ad infinitum, and it’s dead wrong. The early hint that race was overblown and over-obsessed came from Obama himself: He didn’t talk about it, and for good reason -- he was not running as a black presidential candidate. He was running as a presidential candidate.
He had to make that crucial distinction for personal and political purposes.
The ritual preface of the word “black” in front of any achievement or breakthrough that an African American makes is insulting, condescending and minimizes their achievement. It maintains and reinforces the very racial separation that much of America claims it is trying to get past. Dumping the historic burden of race on blacks measures an individual’s success or failure by a group standard. That’s a burden whites don’t have. They succeed or fail solely as individuals.
Obama’s personal history –- his biracial parents, his upbringing, his education and his relative youth –- defies racial pigeonholing. He was influenced by, but not shaped by, the rigid race-grounded civil rights struggles of the 1960s as older whites and blacks were.
The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped anyway. Obama would have had no hope of bagging the presidency if there had been the slightest hint that he embraced the race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism.
He could not have raised record amounts of campaign cash. He would not have been fawned over by legions of Hollywood celebrities, corporate and union leaders. He would not have netted the endorsements of Colin Powell and packs of former Reagan and Bush Sr. administration stalwarts, and prepped by W. Bush political guru Karl Rove on how to beat Hillary Clinton. The media would never have given him the top-heavy favorable coverage, endorsements, nor relentlessly hammered Republican rival John McCain.
If the media had so chosen, it could have torpedoed Obama’s campaign by playing up the connection to his race-focused former pastor Jeremiah Wright. But the media bought his protest of racial bewilderment at the Wright race revelations, and dropped the matter.
Obama had to cling closely to the centrist blueprint Bill Clinton had laid out for Democrats to win elections, and to govern after he won.
It meant that during the campaign, and at least in the early days of his presidency, he would focus on strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, mild tax reform for the middle class, a cautious plan for affordable health care and for dealing with the sub-prime lending crisis, and a genteel reproach of Wall Street.
The old axiom that you can tell a president-elect by his staff and cabinet picks will very much apply to Obama. A cast of governors, senators and ex-senators, former Clinton and Democratic party operatives, and even a few Republicans have been floated for Obama’s staff and cabinet picks such as Al Gore, Tom Daschle, Tim Kaine, John Kerry, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Chuck Hagel, Tom Vilsack, and, as improbable as it seems, even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of Energy. The list reads like a who’s who of the Beltway and Heartland America establishment.
Obama’s cautious, center-governing, non-racial, likely staff and cabinet are plainly designed to blunt the standard Republican rap that Democrats, especially those branded liberal Democrats, inherently pander to special interests, i.e. minorities, are pro-expansive government, and anti-business. They will be watching for any sign of that from Obama.
As president, Obama will be pulled and tugged at by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, environmental watchdog groups, conservative family values groups, moderate and conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders. They all have their priorities and agendas and all will vie to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests.
An Obama White House will, of course, be a historic and symbolic first. However, it will be a White House that keeps a firm, cautious and conciliatory eye on Middle America public opinion, and corporate and defense industry interests in making policy decisions and determining priorities. All other occupants of the White House have done that.
Obama would not and could not have attained the White House if he didn’t do the same. This has nothing to do with race, or the nonsense of being tagged a black president. It has everything to do with the requirement of White House governance.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: President-elect Barack Obama never made race an issue in his presidential bid. Perhaps that's why he earned the endorsements of the likes of Colin Powell and Hollywood celebrities, and won over the media, writes NAM contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
The instant Barack Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring nearly two years ago, the twin mantra was that he could be the first black president, and if that happened, America would finally have kicked its race syndrome.
The twin mantra has been repeated ad infinitum, and it’s dead wrong. The early hint that race was overblown and over-obsessed came from Obama himself: He didn’t talk about it, and for good reason -- he was not running as a black presidential candidate. He was running as a presidential candidate.
He had to make that crucial distinction for personal and political purposes.
The ritual preface of the word “black” in front of any achievement or breakthrough that an African American makes is insulting, condescending and minimizes their achievement. It maintains and reinforces the very racial separation that much of America claims it is trying to get past. Dumping the historic burden of race on blacks measures an individual’s success or failure by a group standard. That’s a burden whites don’t have. They succeed or fail solely as individuals.
Obama’s personal history –- his biracial parents, his upbringing, his education and his relative youth –- defies racial pigeonholing. He was influenced by, but not shaped by, the rigid race-grounded civil rights struggles of the 1960s as older whites and blacks were.
The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped anyway. Obama would have had no hope of bagging the presidency if there had been the slightest hint that he embraced the race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism.
He could not have raised record amounts of campaign cash. He would not have been fawned over by legions of Hollywood celebrities, corporate and union leaders. He would not have netted the endorsements of Colin Powell and packs of former Reagan and Bush Sr. administration stalwarts, and prepped by W. Bush political guru Karl Rove on how to beat Hillary Clinton. The media would never have given him the top-heavy favorable coverage, endorsements, nor relentlessly hammered Republican rival John McCain.
If the media had so chosen, it could have torpedoed Obama’s campaign by playing up the connection to his race-focused former pastor Jeremiah Wright. But the media bought his protest of racial bewilderment at the Wright race revelations, and dropped the matter.
Obama had to cling closely to the centrist blueprint Bill Clinton had laid out for Democrats to win elections, and to govern after he won.
It meant that during the campaign, and at least in the early days of his presidency, he would focus on strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, mild tax reform for the middle class, a cautious plan for affordable health care and for dealing with the sub-prime lending crisis, and a genteel reproach of Wall Street.
The old axiom that you can tell a president-elect by his staff and cabinet picks will very much apply to Obama. A cast of governors, senators and ex-senators, former Clinton and Democratic party operatives, and even a few Republicans have been floated for Obama’s staff and cabinet picks such as Al Gore, Tom Daschle, Tim Kaine, John Kerry, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Chuck Hagel, Tom Vilsack, and, as improbable as it seems, even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of Energy. The list reads like a who’s who of the Beltway and Heartland America establishment.
Obama’s cautious, center-governing, non-racial, likely staff and cabinet are plainly designed to blunt the standard Republican rap that Democrats, especially those branded liberal Democrats, inherently pander to special interests, i.e. minorities, are pro-expansive government, and anti-business. They will be watching for any sign of that from Obama.
As president, Obama will be pulled and tugged at by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, environmental watchdog groups, conservative family values groups, moderate and conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders. They all have their priorities and agendas and all will vie to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests.
An Obama White House will, of course, be a historic and symbolic first. However, it will be a White House that keeps a firm, cautious and conciliatory eye on Middle America public opinion, and corporate and defense industry interests in making policy decisions and determining priorities. All other occupants of the White House have done that.
Obama would not and could not have attained the White House if he didn’t do the same. This has nothing to do with race, or the nonsense of being tagged a black president. It has everything to do with the requirement of White House governance.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).
05 November, 2008
Will the Real American Please Stand Up?
Andrés Tapia
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: The 2008 election provided two competing visions of America, with each side questioning the humanness of the other. NAM contributing writer Andrés Tapia is a specialist in diversity issues based in Chicago.
CHICAGO -- Underneath the 2008 presidential election’s made-for-YouTube drama of gaffes, accusations of deceit, and guilt by association –- and even deeper underneath the ideological differences on health care, taxes, and the Iraq War –- lay competing visions of what it means to be an American.
The Democratic and Republican tickets offered up very different mythologies about American identity in the face of an upside-down world. More so than with the WWII generation of John McCain and Joe Biden, this drama played out with the tail-end Boomers Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. The archetypes that faced off were the urban, multiracial, community activist with a global mindset and the rural, white, working hockey-mom with a parochial world view.
The battle lines for defining the new American identity were drawn not in the spinmeisters' and pundits’ bluster, but rather showed up in the throbbing, hopeful, and alarmist blog threads of the red media of The Drudge Report, RedState, and Fox News and the blue media of The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and MSNBC.
As a diversity expert, in order to find a way through to inclusion I seek to understand what drives the conflicting perspectives of different sides. The cyber shouting during the election that questioned the very humanness of the Other revealed a fear that one vision of America would prevail over the other. In a New York Times poll a week before the election, three-fourths of respondents on both sides felt it was very or extremely important for their candidate to win. Partisan crowds in both camps shouted “USA! USA!” in their rallies, seeking the mantle that their way was the “real America.”
I’ve had intimate knowledge and experience with these competing visions of America. Even though I grew up in Lima, Peru, my biographical trajectories have had me crisscross the United States. My American mom gave me family roots in a tiny white rural town called Harrington, 50 miles west of Spokane in the western frontier state of Washington. My German-American wife hails from the evangelical heart of the Republic of Kansas. And I now live in multicultural, urbane Chicago.
Visiting my American grandparents Freida and Brownie Graham as a kid entailed traveling through a cultural worm hole that took me from the chaotic streets of Third World Lima to the tranquil wheat fields of Harrington. As I stepped into this Norman Rockwell America with my darker skin and the heavy accent of my youth, I experienced the America of the rugged individual, master of one’s own domain. Paradoxically, it was also a tightly-knit community of 500 that jointly experienced the yearly rituals of the town’s Turkey Gobble Pancake Breakfast, the Lilac Parade, and wheat harvest.
I marveled at 14-year-olds getting to drive trucks along massive John Deere harvesters and then careen into the town’s wheat grain exchange, with harvested grain brimming over the truck bed. Then after harvest, hanging out on hot lazy afternoons at Mini Falls chewing on tall sun-baked prairie grass.
But something terrible has happened. My nostalgic memories of Main Street in Harrington and stocking up on a week’s supply of candy at the local drugstore, grabbing spare parts for my grandpa’s weed control pick-up truck at the hardware store, and going to the Challenger Cafe with him for chili can’t be confirmed by a visit anymore. Today the drug and hardware store as well as the Challenger Cafe are gone. Agribusiness has bought out several of the family-owned farms and people have moved to the cities. Towns 30 miles away need to combine their school sports programs in order to field enough kids for a basketball squad. Even the friends I made during those childhood visits, Linda and Ron Mielke who are third-generation farmers, have a brooding sense that family farming is coming to an end and are encouraging their two college-aged daughters to seek livelihoods elsewhere.
As attractive as this lifestyle is for millions of Americans, the American mythology as represented by Palin is facing the rising waters of change that are turning land mass into islands. It is no coincidence that the Palin mythology has come forth from America’s final frontier, Alaska.
But American cities are facing their own days of reckoning. The glitz and rapid pace of New York and Los Angeles, their mythologies of America glorified by Hollywood blockbusters and embraced by “I Love New York” bumper stickers, have taken devastating blows. New York’s mystique and invulnerability took its first hit with the crumbling of the Twin Towers and suffered another crippling blow with the humiliation of Wall Street. American financial hegemony is over. In the same way that family farms ceded economic ownership to big business, economic ownership has shifted en masse to Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese hands. Hollywood is losing ground to Bollywood. Residents in New Orleans and Galveston are still picking up the pieces of their lives obliterated by storms that have names but no mercy.
Both American mythologies –- Rugged Frontier and Vibrant City -- have been tarnished. Yet this election breathed new life into both of them. The battles lines were such that one got the sense that only one could survive. In the blogosphere, “arugula-eating” and “moose-hunting” became the shorthands for mutual disdain.
So who then are the real Americans?
As I think of this nation I have crisscrossed from sea to shining sea, here’s what I believe. It’s my 92-year-old grandmother in a nursing home in Washington. It’s the Wall Street whiz kid who lost her job at Lehman. It’s the Alaska boy who loves ice fishing. It’s the hip-hop breakdancer on Chicago’s South Side. The tiara-decked girl at her quinceañera. The Torah-reciting boy at his bar mitzvah. It’s the AmeriCorps teacher in El Paso. It’s moms and dads making peanut butter sandwiches, my Peruvian high-school mate Luis who on 9/11 said, “Today I became an American.” It’s my wife Lori’s Oklahoma cattle ranching relatives who emailed us their deepest fears about the man with a Muslim name. It's me. It’s Palin and it’s Obama. And the people they represent.
What does it mean to be an American?
Essayist Richard Rodriguez has written that the idea of America is that it is a place where one can re-invent him or herself. Where our destiny is not fixed. Right now I believe the task is not an individual reinvention but a collective one. So much of the rest of the world’s anger over the last decade toward the United States has been fueled by disappointment about America losing its idealistic and democratic identity by which others have wanted to model themselves. When America does good, it gives hope to countries like the one where I grew up.
Tumultuously, adolescent America is coming into adulthood. As we often remind our 17-year-old, let’s make good choices.
Commentary
New America Media
Editor's Note: The 2008 election provided two competing visions of America, with each side questioning the humanness of the other. NAM contributing writer Andrés Tapia is a specialist in diversity issues based in Chicago.
CHICAGO -- Underneath the 2008 presidential election’s made-for-YouTube drama of gaffes, accusations of deceit, and guilt by association –- and even deeper underneath the ideological differences on health care, taxes, and the Iraq War –- lay competing visions of what it means to be an American.
The Democratic and Republican tickets offered up very different mythologies about American identity in the face of an upside-down world. More so than with the WWII generation of John McCain and Joe Biden, this drama played out with the tail-end Boomers Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. The archetypes that faced off were the urban, multiracial, community activist with a global mindset and the rural, white, working hockey-mom with a parochial world view.
The battle lines for defining the new American identity were drawn not in the spinmeisters' and pundits’ bluster, but rather showed up in the throbbing, hopeful, and alarmist blog threads of the red media of The Drudge Report, RedState, and Fox News and the blue media of The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and MSNBC.
As a diversity expert, in order to find a way through to inclusion I seek to understand what drives the conflicting perspectives of different sides. The cyber shouting during the election that questioned the very humanness of the Other revealed a fear that one vision of America would prevail over the other. In a New York Times poll a week before the election, three-fourths of respondents on both sides felt it was very or extremely important for their candidate to win. Partisan crowds in both camps shouted “USA! USA!” in their rallies, seeking the mantle that their way was the “real America.”
I’ve had intimate knowledge and experience with these competing visions of America. Even though I grew up in Lima, Peru, my biographical trajectories have had me crisscross the United States. My American mom gave me family roots in a tiny white rural town called Harrington, 50 miles west of Spokane in the western frontier state of Washington. My German-American wife hails from the evangelical heart of the Republic of Kansas. And I now live in multicultural, urbane Chicago.
Visiting my American grandparents Freida and Brownie Graham as a kid entailed traveling through a cultural worm hole that took me from the chaotic streets of Third World Lima to the tranquil wheat fields of Harrington. As I stepped into this Norman Rockwell America with my darker skin and the heavy accent of my youth, I experienced the America of the rugged individual, master of one’s own domain. Paradoxically, it was also a tightly-knit community of 500 that jointly experienced the yearly rituals of the town’s Turkey Gobble Pancake Breakfast, the Lilac Parade, and wheat harvest.
I marveled at 14-year-olds getting to drive trucks along massive John Deere harvesters and then careen into the town’s wheat grain exchange, with harvested grain brimming over the truck bed. Then after harvest, hanging out on hot lazy afternoons at Mini Falls chewing on tall sun-baked prairie grass.
But something terrible has happened. My nostalgic memories of Main Street in Harrington and stocking up on a week’s supply of candy at the local drugstore, grabbing spare parts for my grandpa’s weed control pick-up truck at the hardware store, and going to the Challenger Cafe with him for chili can’t be confirmed by a visit anymore. Today the drug and hardware store as well as the Challenger Cafe are gone. Agribusiness has bought out several of the family-owned farms and people have moved to the cities. Towns 30 miles away need to combine their school sports programs in order to field enough kids for a basketball squad. Even the friends I made during those childhood visits, Linda and Ron Mielke who are third-generation farmers, have a brooding sense that family farming is coming to an end and are encouraging their two college-aged daughters to seek livelihoods elsewhere.
As attractive as this lifestyle is for millions of Americans, the American mythology as represented by Palin is facing the rising waters of change that are turning land mass into islands. It is no coincidence that the Palin mythology has come forth from America’s final frontier, Alaska.
But American cities are facing their own days of reckoning. The glitz and rapid pace of New York and Los Angeles, their mythologies of America glorified by Hollywood blockbusters and embraced by “I Love New York” bumper stickers, have taken devastating blows. New York’s mystique and invulnerability took its first hit with the crumbling of the Twin Towers and suffered another crippling blow with the humiliation of Wall Street. American financial hegemony is over. In the same way that family farms ceded economic ownership to big business, economic ownership has shifted en masse to Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese hands. Hollywood is losing ground to Bollywood. Residents in New Orleans and Galveston are still picking up the pieces of their lives obliterated by storms that have names but no mercy.
Both American mythologies –- Rugged Frontier and Vibrant City -- have been tarnished. Yet this election breathed new life into both of them. The battles lines were such that one got the sense that only one could survive. In the blogosphere, “arugula-eating” and “moose-hunting” became the shorthands for mutual disdain.
So who then are the real Americans?
As I think of this nation I have crisscrossed from sea to shining sea, here’s what I believe. It’s my 92-year-old grandmother in a nursing home in Washington. It’s the Wall Street whiz kid who lost her job at Lehman. It’s the Alaska boy who loves ice fishing. It’s the hip-hop breakdancer on Chicago’s South Side. The tiara-decked girl at her quinceañera. The Torah-reciting boy at his bar mitzvah. It’s the AmeriCorps teacher in El Paso. It’s moms and dads making peanut butter sandwiches, my Peruvian high-school mate Luis who on 9/11 said, “Today I became an American.” It’s my wife Lori’s Oklahoma cattle ranching relatives who emailed us their deepest fears about the man with a Muslim name. It's me. It’s Palin and it’s Obama. And the people they represent.
What does it mean to be an American?
Essayist Richard Rodriguez has written that the idea of America is that it is a place where one can re-invent him or herself. Where our destiny is not fixed. Right now I believe the task is not an individual reinvention but a collective one. So much of the rest of the world’s anger over the last decade toward the United States has been fueled by disappointment about America losing its idealistic and democratic identity by which others have wanted to model themselves. When America does good, it gives hope to countries like the one where I grew up.
Tumultuously, adolescent America is coming into adulthood. As we often remind our 17-year-old, let’s make good choices.
16 April, 2008
Hillary’s Achilles' heel is her gender
Far more Americans have a bigger problem voting for a woman for president than voting for an African American, says New America Media contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
See NAM despatch
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