Showing posts with label whites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whites. Show all posts

Apr 5, 2010

Rich Benjamin, Nell Irvin Painter, and white culture : The New Yorker

Cover of "Searching for Whitopia: An Impr...Cover via Amazon

Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”

Often, the most appropriate answer to that question is a joke, or a series of jokes. In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (This magazine made the list, too, at No. 114.) Lander’s tone is faux-anthropological but wide-eyed: “Bike shops are almost entirely staffed and patronized by white people!”; “After learning that a white person is pregnant, it is a good idea to provide a list of recipes for placenta.” His “white people” are wealthy, urban, youngish, and thoroughly blue—they “hate” Republicans, and although Obama hadn’t yet won the Democratic nomination, he placed eighth on the list. (Coffee was No. 1.)

Which means that Lander isn’t really talking about white people, or, at any rate, not most of them. In fact, he sometimes defines “white people” in opposition to “the wrong kind of white people,” because his true target is a small subset of white people, a white cultural élite. Most white people don’t “hate” Republicans—they have voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1968. A few months ago, a different and more demographically precise portrait of white culture arrived, bearing a fulsome blurb (“Revelatory!”) from Lander himself. The author is a black journalist named Rich Benjamin, and his book, “Searching for Whitopia” (Hyperion; $24.99), chronicles the years he spent in overwhelmingly white enclaves across America, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Forsyth County, Georgia. The people he meets tend to be politically conservative, and although they talk readily about the urban blight they left behind, they talk much less readily about race. Many in Idaho seem to agree with Helen Chenoweth-Hage, the late congresswoman, who responded to a question about the region’s lack of diversity by means of an ingenious euphemism. “The warm-climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that attractive,” she said. Benjamin hears many disavowals of racism, and he has to drive an hour north of Coeur d’Alene, to a tiny Christian Identity church, in a town called Sandpoint, just to find someone willing to say, “I’m glad I’m white.” Even that statement, delivered from the pulpit, is swiftly followed by a disclaimer: “The Indian, the Mexican, and the black can be proud of what they are, too.”

Benjamin did most of his research toward the end of the Bush era, and perhaps he now wishes he had waited a few years. Obama’s election was a transformative moment for blacks in America, but it has also proved to be a transformative moment for whites. As a whole, white people voted for Senator McCain, and, with the growth of the anti-Obama backlash, especially in the form of Tea Party protests, the whiteness of the Obama opposition has become a political issue. Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC, called the Tea Party movement “a white people’s party,” and asked, in reference to the various marches and rallies, “Where are the black faces?” (The most adroit response came in the form of a YouTube video highlighting the all-white lineup pictured on the MSNBC Web site.) When Jon Stewart introduced a “Daily Show” segment on the Conservative Political Action Conference, he got a laugh from his studio audience by calling it a “festival of whites.” (Stewart’s show ranked thirty-fifth on Lander’s list.)

The organizers of the Tea Party rallies have made a point of inviting African-American conservatives to address the crowds. But there’s no denying that the Tea Party protesters tend to be white. Should we pretend to be surprised? Judging from exit polls, black voters made up about 1.1 per cent of the McCain electorate, which is lower than the historical average, but not by much. (In 1984, when President Reagan was reëlected in a landslide, black voters accounted for only about 1.5 per cent of his total.) American politics has been segregated for decades; the election of a black President only made that segregation more obvious.

But what of it? Why is it that, from Christian Lander to Jon Stewart, a diagnosis of whiteness is often delivered, and received, as a kind of accusation? The answer is that the diagnosis is often accompanied by an implicit or explicit charge of racism. It’s become customary to suppose that a measure of discrimination is built into whiteness itself, a racial category that has often functioned as a purely negative designation: to be white in America is to be not nonwhite, which is why it was possible, in 1961, for a white woman from Kansas living in Hawaii to give birth to a black baby. In a marvellously splenetic essay, “On Being White . . . And Other Lies,” James Baldwin argued that America had, really, “no white community”—only a motley alliance of European immigrants and their descendants, who made a “moral choice” (even if they didn’t realize it) to join a synthetic racial élite. And, in the nineteen-nineties, a cohort of scholars took up Baldwin’s charge, popularizing a field of research that came to be known as whiteness studies. In 1994, the white labor historian David R. Roediger published an incendiary volume, “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.” Paying special attention to unions and strikes, he traced the unsteady growth of American whiteness, a category that eventually included many previous identities that had once been considered marginal: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish. “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false,” he wrote. “Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.” In his view, fighting racism wasn’t enough; white people who wanted to oppose oppression would have to do battle with whiteness itself. Nearly two decades later, amid a rancorous debate over our first black President, the idea of abolishing whiteness seems no less tantalizing—and no less remote.

In a wide-ranging new book titled “The History of White People” (Norton; $27.95), Nell Irvin Painter, a black historian of America, starts at the beginning, or near it. Her narrative opens in ancient Greece, with Hippocrates, who published his ethnography of the known world around 400 B.C. In assaying the tribes of Europe, he praised the “ferocity” of the mountain-dwellers, but he was less impressed by tribes who live where there is “a larger proportion of hot than of cold winds”—the warm-climate community, a few millennia ahead of schedule. “They are rather of a dark than of a light complexion,” he wrote, adding that “courage and laborious enterprise are not naturally in them.” In time, “ancients” like Hippocrates were seen as archetypes of racial purity and excellence. Painter quotes the eighteenth-century Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater, who delivered a plaintive verdict: “The Grecian race then was more beautiful than we are; they were better than us—and the present generation is vilely degraded!”

Like many of his contemporaries, Lavater was a devout craniologist, and it was through craniology that whiteness was given scientific validation. In 1793, a German anthropologist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach received a skull from a colleague which he considered particularly pleasing; it had belonged to a woman from Georgia, in the Caucasus region, and Blumenbach declared that it was typical of the “Caucasian” race, a super-category that came to include most of the peoples of Europe. As Painter explains, Blumenbach was making an argument from beauty, and his belief in Caucasian beauty had a notable pedigree: decades earlier, Kant had noted that “Circassian and Georgian maidens have always been considered extremely pretty by all Europeans who travel through their lands”; the fact that these “maidens” were enslaved by the Ottomans was part of the appeal. The Caucasian race begins with an evocation of bondage, and the skull of a young Georgian woman helped seal the connection between whiteness and weakness. It is a delicate race, always on the verge of being overrun or adulterated, dethroned or debunked. The supposed perfection of whiteness makes it vulnerable: every flaw and quirk, every tangled bloodline and degraded specimen, is seen as an existential threat, poised to undermine the whole project.

In eighteenth-century America, whiteness came to connote the opposite of slavery. Whiteness in America was primarily Anglo-Saxon—Thomas Jefferson argued for American independence by adducing the example of “our Saxon ancestors”—but not exclusively so, and the presence of immigrants from elsewhere in Europe eventually nudged American race theorists toward a more miscellaneous idea of whiteness. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson published “English Traits,” which includes a strange and suggestive chapter called “Race.” In it, he portrays the essence of whiteness as an elusive spirit. For a time, Norway had it, and Painter notes Emerson’s “affection” for the bloodthirsty old Norse sagas: “A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other’s body, as did Yngve and Alf.” But even these brutes were, in their own way, as delicate as Circassian waifs. Somehow, the glorious moment passed—a few too many “piratical expeditions,” he suspects—and “the power of the race migrated and left Norway permanently exhausted.” Around the same time, in his journal, Emerson was experimenting with a more ambitious theory. “The Atlantic is a sieve through which only or chiefly the liberal adventurous sensitive America-loving part of each city, clan, family, are brought,” he wrote. “It is the light complexion, the blue eyes of Europe that come: the black eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe is left.” This is a powerful notion: America as a magical siphon, extracting whiteness from Europe.

Emerson is a high point in “The History of White People.” As the theorists and theories pile up, Painter starts to seem, like nineteenth-century Norway, a bit exhausted. She isn’t helped by the format she has chosen, which divides a long and circuitous story into a textbook-like series of three-page biographical sketches, and she often sounds bored by the now obscure race men she profiles: William Z. Ripley’s 1899 magnum opus, “The Races of Europe,” is “nonsense” that “could not survive a careful reading”; early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonist theories are “blather.” One needn’t disagree with her judgments to wonder about her strategy: the tone and the format conspire to make these architects of whiteness hard to distinguish, and harder still to care about.

An odd thing about “The History of White People” is that there’s not more history in it: Painter underplays the social and political developments that were far more influential than the grand theories of whiteness. She mentions America’s one-drop rule only in passing. (The rule held—and, for the most part, still holds—that any person of mixed black and white ancestry is black, no matter the mixture.) And readers will have to search the footnotes to learn about the 1790 Naturalization Act, which made citizenship possible for any “free white person” of “good character” who had lived in America for at least two years. Long before it had any sort of coherent cultural or historical identity, whiteness in America was a broad, loosely defined political category, which is precisely why so many scholars knocked themselves out trying to fill in the details.

Painter aims for the conceptual heart of the race, but Roediger, the eminent abolitionist of whiteness, has always been more interested in its margins and boundaries. In 2008, just in time for the dawning Obama age, he compressed his decades of scholarship into a pithy little book, “How Race Survived U.S. History,” which has just been published in paperback (Verso; $19.95). He is alert to the shifting legal status of whiteness, and he underscores the 1691 Virginia law that banned “negroes, mulattos, and Indians” from “intermarrying with English, or other white women.” (Again, one of the defining qualities of whiteness is that it needs protection.) He also tells the story of Charles W. Janson, a British businessman who came to America in 1793 and, sometime during his thirteen-year visit, offended a white domestic worker by asking to speak with her master. “I have no master,” she said, adding, “I’d have you to know, man, that I am no sarvant; none but negers are sarvants.” Janson was shocked by “the arrogance of domestics in this land of republican liberty and equality”—shocked, that is, by a country where even the maids had something to be proud of, and someone to be prouder than.

The end of the Civil War was a perilous moment for whiteness. Roediger writes that, in America, “scientific racism”—the sort of grand theorizing that Painter chronicles—emerged “in the context of the pro-slavery argument and as a response to abolitionism.” Whiteness survived emancipation by becoming more muscular and more self-referential: where once whiteness offered a specific legal benefit—it meant that you were unenslavable, a non-“sarvant”—now whiteness had to be its own reward. Roediger writes that some poor white laborers in the South started wearing brimless wool hats, to distinguish themselves from ex-slaves, who customarily wore straw hats. (According to one contested etymology, the sunburn such laborers suffered gave rise to the term “redneck,” which conflates race and class.) And he tracks the insurgent whiteness of the Ku Klux Klan, founded after the end of the war and revived in 1915, the year of D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster “The Birth of a Nation,” which portrayed Klansmen as heroic defenders of white virtue. (The pivotal scene involves a white woman on a cliff, who tells her black pursuer, “Stay away or I’ll jump!” He doesn’t; she does.) “The Birth of a Nation” included intertitles with brief history lessons from President Woodrow Wilson, and Roediger quotes the most famous card, which marks the transition from war to Reconstruction: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

That astonishing sentence comes from Wilson’s “History of the American People,” but it’s not really a sentence at all: the ellipsis marks the removal of nearly seven hundred words. In Wilson’s original, the apologia for the Klan is meant to echo the eighteenth-century argument for American independence:



The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors.

The film depicts a clash between whites and blacks (one of the main villains is an ambitious mulatto politician), but, in this passage, “ignorant negroes” are a secondary concern, a mere symptom of a greater problem. In Wilson’s telling, Klan violence serves to defend white rights against “adventurers” from the North—that is, against other white people.

In the twentieth century, the struggle to define and defend whiteness was often presented this way, as an intra-racial struggle—white people against “the wrong kind of white people.” The race theorist Lothrop Stoddard warned against “racial impoverishment,” and enumerated the “alien stocks” that were taking over Rhode Island: “Poles, Polish and Russian Jews, South Italians, and French-Canadians.” Because of the legal tradition begun by the 1790 Naturalization Act, courts were often asked to judge the whiteness of immigrants from all over the world— Afghans and Armenians, Persians and Portuguese—and judges appealed to common sense, or to the anthropological entity known as the Caucasian race. But who counts as Caucasian? Madison Grant, in “The Passing of the Great Race,” a supremely pessimistic work of race theory first published in 1916, admitted defeat: “The term ‘Caucasian race’ has ceased to have any meaning, except where it is used, in the United States, to contrast white populations with Negroes or Indians or in the Old World with Mongols.” Grant was right that the putatively scientific term “Caucasian” was becoming interchangeable with its colloquial counterpart, “white”; both referred to a category that was growing simultaneously more inclusive (of Europeans) and more exclusive (of “Negroes” and “Mongols” and others).

But the borders of whiteness were never quite defined, let alone sealed. In an immigration report from 1911, a government commission declared that an “Arabian” was by definition Caucasian, a judgment that some of today’s politicians might want to appeal. The boundaries of whiteness have often reflected the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy. And there remains something particularly fraught about the whiteness of Italian-Americans, which has been contested for centuries. Roediger notes that “ ‘Guineas,’ an old marker for African Americans originally signaling their origins on the West African slaving coast, came to be applied widely and pejoratively to Italian Americans.” Now, of course, “guinea” has given way to “guido,” an anti-Italian-American slur that has been co-opted by its targets. The instructive MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” followed a group of self-described “guidos” and “guidettes” living in a beach house in New Jersey. In this tribe, the bond between skin color and identity had been decisively severed (with help from a nearby tanning salon), and it was discovered that not all the stars were of pure Italian heritage. One of them, known as Jwoww, posted a clarification on her Twitter page: “I’ve said a billion times I’m a spanish/irish!! Its a life style not an ethnicity or race the term ‘guidette’!!”

In current debates about whiteness, no identity is more destabilizing than “Hispanic.” The 2010 census explains that “Hispanic origins are not races,” and yet in America the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” indicate a population that is often viewed as a racial minority. (When Anglos in America think of the Latino “race,” they are often thinking of the identity known in much of Central and South America as mestizo, which refers to mixed-race descendants of Europeans and various indigenous groups.) In “Searching for Whitopia,” Rich Benjamin is surprised to find himself drawn into conversations with white residents about illegal immigration, especially from Mexico. “For the first time in my life, I am treated like an innocent bystander to the ‘scourge’ of race and poverty,” he writes. “Latinos now take the heat.”

In 1963, when George Wallace was inaugurated as the governor of Alabama, he told the crowd that he was standing in the “heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” and he issued his famous rallying cry: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But when Wallace campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he stated his case more circumspectly, saying, “This civil-rights bill will wind up putting a homeowner in jail, because he doesn’t sell his home to someone that some bureaucrat thinks he ought to sell it to.” Wallace professed to be defending the common “homeowner,” presumably white, against the faceless “bureaucrat,” also presumably white. It was possible for Wallace to portray himself as a defender of the white race without mentioning race at all.

This was not a new strategy. Throughout history, the power of whiteness has often been linked to its invisibility: white supremacy lurked in seemingly race-neutral language, unmentioned and therefore incontestable. (Think of the Constitution, which tacitly condoned slavery—“importation” of “persons”—without mentioning race.) The success of the civil-rights movement had the paradoxical effect of strengthening this pernicious tradition by making white pride taboo; white politicians had to rely on increasingly subtle forms of coded speech. Roediger is impressed and disturbed by President Reagan’s appeal to working-class white voters, which stemmed, he says, from a “sure command of divisive code words such as ‘state’s rights,’ ‘welfare moms,’ ‘quotas,’ and ‘reverse racism.’ ”

The problem with a fixation on “code words” is that you can start to see them everywhere. At one point, Roediger analyzes the politics of America in the nineteen-seventies through the prism of “such racial ‘code words’ as crime, busing, welfare, and taxes.” Taxes! Is there any hotly debated political topic that couldn’t be considered, in some context, a code word? (Glenn Beck recently argued that “social justice” and “economic justice” are “Marxist code words”; it would be hard to prove that they aren’t or never have been.) And is there any way for a white politician to criticize a black President in front of a disproportionately white audience and be certain that he or she isn’t, however inadvertently, appealing to a sense of racial solidarity?

These are the questions that liberals have been asking of the Tea Party movement, a decentralized libertarian-influenced conservative movement that has cast its opposition to President Obama as an opposition to runaway government spending, runaway public debt, runaway taxation. (The movement’s unofficial motto turns “tea” into an acronym: Taxed Enough Already.) There have been race-related controversies. A white activist in Houston was photographed holding a sign that said, “Congress = Slave Owner. Taxpayer = Niggar”; he was swiftly disavowed by the Houston Tea Party Society (even though, strictly, he was calling himself a “niggar”). At the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the former congressman Tom Tancredo voiced his regret that “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country,” which reminded some commentators of the schemes that disenfranchised black voters during Reconstruction. (Tancredo declined to apologize, saying that he wanted only to combat “civic ignorance.”) And two African-American congressmen say that they heard someone shout a racial slur during the recent Capitol Hill rally against the health-care bill.

More often, though, the Tea Party movement has been relatively disciplined in its focus on spending and taxing. Conceivably, arguments about health-care reform have been advanced in bad faith, in the hope of stoking white racial resentment. But the other possibility is more unsettling: maybe health-care reform is merely one more topic on which Americans’ opinions correlate, however loosely, with race. Certainly it’s hard to assess the protests without also assessing the politics. Those aggrieved (mainly) white folks look a lot different if you think they’re speaking out against fiscal malpractice.

Because explicit formulations of white-identity politics are taboo, we have no non-pejorative way to talk about the disproportionate whiteness of the Tea Parties. (We don’t even have a good way to measure it. Keith Olbermann included “Hispanics” on the list of people he didn’t see represented in Tea Party crowds, but, really, how could he tell?) Supporters of the Tea Parties can’t decide whether they should refuse this identity, by highlighting black speakers and attendees, or defend it, by suggesting, as Beck did, that anti-white racism is a serious worry. In fact, Beck’s slippery concern with racism—outrage over false charges of anti-black racism, combined with outrage over anti-white racism—seems central to a certain kind of white-identity politics. This professedly anti-racist argument is about as close as anyone comes to articulating a mainstream political agenda that is explicitly pro-white.

In the Warner Bros. movie “The Blind Side,” Quinton Aaron plays Michael Oher, a black football prodigy who is adopted by Leigh Anne Tuohy, a white materfamilias, played by Sandra Bullock. Early on, Michael explains why his new surroundings feel so strange. “I look, and I see white everywhere,” he says. “White walls, white floors, and lots of white people.” They—the white people—are the film’s true subject; Michael remains a sweet but silent cipher. (The real Michael Oher is now a lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, and before the movie’s release he told the Baltimore Sun that he was “not in a hurry to see it.”) The Tuohys’ whiteness is expressed as a series of red-state signifiers: they are Republican and Christian and they live in Tennessee; Leigh Anne’s husband is played by the country star Tim McGraw. There is even a reference to anti-white racism: when the cute young son, known as S.J., complains that a “Chinese” kid was picked, instead of him, to play the Indian chief in the school play, he wonders whether “multicultural bias” might have been at work.

At times, the movie seems to be building toward the familiar moment when the whites atone for the past by confronting their unexamined racism, but that moment never arrives. Instead, a climactic scene has Leigh Anne facing off against a black thug from Michael’s old neighborhood. He insults her with a racial slur (the “s” word—“snowflake”), and threatens her family; she responds by threatening him right back. “You so much as cross into downtown, you will be sorry,” she says, adding that she knows the district attorney and belongs to the National Rifle Association. This kind of threat, a Southern white woman telling a black man to stay in his own neighborhood, has a long and dismal history, but Bullock delivers it with verve, and without a trace of self-consciousness. (No doubt the scene helped her win her Academy Award.) Leigh Anne is refreshing, because there’s no trace of anxiety in her white identity—for her, it’s neither something to live down nor something to live up to.

Is white identity shifting? Painter thinks so. She argues that “being white these days is not what it used to be,” partly because a number of nonwhites have joined the cultural and (more important) economic élite. But she concludes pessimistically, reminding readers that “poverty in a dark skin endures as the opposite of whiteness.” It might be more accurate to say that “poverty in a dark skin” is one of the opposites of whiteness, because, as Roediger’s book demonstrates, the white-identity project has often been conceived in populist terms, as a defense of scruffy local values against the wealthy alien élite. This form of white-identity politics, far from being undermined by the election of President Obama, was strengthened by it. Apparently, a black President born to a white mother can represent the opposite of whiteness, too.

A tension between élitism and anti-élitism is central to white identity, and always has been. The old race theorists couldn’t decide whether the spirit of whiteness was best reflected in the noble refinement of royalty or in the rude vitality of laborers and soldiers. Often, white identity has reflected both traditions at once, as with Emerson’s beloved Scandinavian kings, who conducted themselves like drunken brigands. The “white people” in Lander’s book are rich snobs who view themselves as rebels, resisting the culture of corporate greed in vague solidarity with the world’s poor. The “whitopians” in Benjamin’s book consider themselves “folksy” salt-of-the-earth types, no matter how much money they have accumulated. And “The Blind Side” is a perfect distillation of white identity as anti-élitist élitism: Leigh Anne’s husband owns nearly a hundred fast-food franchises; he’s white-collar, in a blue-collar kind of way.

Roediger and Painter are right to remind us that whiteness was built over centuries on a foundation of deceit and confusion and disguised political imperatives. But neither seems fully to grasp the ways in which this artificial category has, over the years, come haltingly to life. Yes, whiteness is a social construct, and not (as race scientists used to think) a biological essence—but then so, too, is every collective identity. It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be.

Demographers predict that, sometime before the middle of this century, non-Hispanic white people will cease to be a majority in America. This doesn’t mean that there will be a white “minority”—whites will continue to be the country’s most populous racial group for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t mean that white is the new black—the two races have never been symmetrical, and never will be. And it doesn’t mean that whiteness is innocent of history—you can’t tell the story of whiteness (or, for that matter, blackness) without talking about racism. But, if the old race theory was brutally reductive, there is something reductive, too, about the idea that whiteness, for all its paradoxes, isn’t real. The history of human culture is the history of forgeries that become genuine, categories that people make and cannot simply unmake. So we should probably stop thinking of whiteness as an error, and start thinking of it, instead, as a work in progress. Historians have sometimes framed the treacherous history of whiteness as the slow death of an idea. Perhaps it’s time we start viewing it, instead, as the slow birth of a people.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/04/12/100412crbo_books_sanneh?currentPage=all#ixzz0kGO2JXDj

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Mar 28, 2010

Book Review - The History of White People

cropped from :Image:Races2.jpg 1820 drawing of...Image via Wikipedia

THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

by Nell Irvin Painter

Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

Review by Linda Gordon

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.

I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.

The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine ­creations and were designed with a range of quality.

The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as “white.”

Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach’s influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic “science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,” predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.

In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence that even the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements, other researchers computed with new categories the proportion of different “blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent Nordic (the superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish were 30 percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European race). Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans from heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.

Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic absurdities that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by Francis Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people as good, medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and thus demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in average beauty.

Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating anti-Catholicism and ­anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America. Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter ­misses some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were nonwhite in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the racial “inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census categorized ­Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial under­standing, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for Mexican.

In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.


Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.”

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Mar 3, 2010

A Write-In Campaign

The Arab American National Museum celebrates t...Image via Wikipedia

Many Arab-Americans check 'white' on the U.S. Census. Why community leaders want to change that.

Mar 1, 2010

Ten years ago, when Sarah Kazem's dad filled out the U.S. Census form for the household, he racially identified his family of Egyptian descent as "white" when he answered the question on race. But this time around, Kazem, a 22-year-old Michigan resident, is going to make sure her dad marks "Some Other Race" and write in "Arab" instead.

"Why are we marking white when we're Arab?" she asks. But that is how the Census counts Arabs. After 20th-century Syrian immigrants won citizenship as "whites," Uncle Sam applied the label to all Arabs. To change that, a California-based group of Arab-American leaders formed the Arab Complete Count Committee and launched a campaign dubbed "Check It Right, You Ain’t White." The campaign—which has been circulated nationally through the Web—is an attempt to get people of Arab origin to write in their true ancestry.

"We're like an anomalous minority," says Omar Masry, 30, co-chair of the Orange County-based committee. "It seems we get counted or magnified whenever something bad happens, but where there's an opportunity for minorities, we feel marginalized."

If the campaign is successful, experts say the official Arab-American population could swell from an estimated 1.2 million people to more than 4 million—a leap that could help the group coalesce into a distinct and formidable political block.

The problem: many Arabs, fearful of terrorism-related witch hunts, are reluctant to fill out the census form at all, much less self-identify unnecessarily as Arabs. "There's fear of profiling, especially heightened after 9/11," says Masry, who is an Irvine, Calif., city planner of Lebanese and Saudi descent. "So what we try to do is educate Arabs that, by law, the information they provide can't be shared." (The Census Act prohibits the disclosure of individually identifiable information.)

"The laws that govern our confidentiality are very strict," says James Christy, regional director of the U.S. Census Bureau in Los Angeles. "We don't share information with any other agency; it's not allowed, and it's not done."

After being contacted by community leaders with concerns that Arab-Americans are fearful of filling out census forms, the bureau hired Arab-speaking specialists, such as Manar Fakhoury from Claremont, to work directly with the population, Christy says. "Throughout the years, Arabs have become distrustful of the government," Fakhoury said. "We understand they've been hurt in the past, but we reiterate that the census is safe."

Masry contends that an inaccurate count negatively affects Arab-Americans' political influence. "When policymakers and pundits in the political sphere see these artificially low numbers, it's easier for them to cast us as this minority-fringe element."

"We want to assimilate to the point where we are accepted and heard, but still want to hold onto our identities," says Ahmad Ullah, 25, a financial analyst who is primarily of Pakistani descent but also part Arab. "We want our political leaders to include us in dialogue concerning foreign policy in the Middle East."

Helen Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation in New York, says some Arab-Americans do not feel the need to create a separate identity. Being classified as white, she says, "is a reflection of acceptance into the majority culture, one that was not so easily offered to the pioneer immigrants a century ago."

But for other Arab-Americans, the racial categories designated by the Office of Management and Budget—which handles the classification standards of federal data on race and ethnicity—can be confusing or irrelevant."Those who have recently immigrated or who have come of age in the distinctly diversity-conscious America of the past several decades often relate more with American minorities and people of color," Samhan says. "The sting of racial profiling, discrimination, and cultural intolerance some have felt, especially since 9/11, has only added to the feeling of being distinct from the white majority."

While reluctant to identify as such on government forms, many Arab-Americans still strongly identify with their origins. "You don't stop referring to your culture just because you were born here or have been here for a long time," Kazem says. "Ethnicity and culture are strong in our families, so we'll always be American as well as identify with our mother cultures and pass them along to our children."

These issues have also become part of Arab-American comedy. "We're an underrepresented group," says comedian Dean Obeidallah, who is half Palestinian, half Italian.

"A lot of Arabs do not respond to the census, and they don't realize that it gives us more influence politically to have people know how many of us there are in this country." He raised the issue along with colleagues Aron Kader and Maysoon Zayid on their recent "Arabs Gone Wild" comedy tour, which had stops in Los Angeles and Anaheim, Calif., a city dubbed Little Arabia because of its high concentration of Arabs.

And if Arabs are still fearful of identifying their ethnicity, the activists are deploying humor too: "We [joke that Arabs] are already being tracked," Masry says. "Or you remind people that whether you're Arab or whether you're any other group, you've already lost your privacy or you've given it away by posting your life on Facebook."

Ashmawey is deputy editor of InFocus News, a Muslim newspaper in Los Angeles, and a part-time temp for the Census Bureau.

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Nov 17, 2009

A Racial Divide Is Bridged by Recession - NYTimes.com

An African American drinks out of a segregated...Image via Wikipedia

McDONOUGH, Ga. — During the housing boom, Henry County, a suburb of Atlanta, had its share of racial tension as more and more blacks joined the tens of thousands of others pouring in, creating a standoffish gap between the newcomers and the county’s oldtimers.

But the recession has begun to erase those differences.

Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time. Struggling black-owned businesses are attracting the attention of white patrons. Neighbors are commiserating across racial lines.

At the Division of Family and Children Services, Keasha Taylor, 36 and black, helped explain the system recently to a white mother. Ms. Taylor, who was there because her family had been evicted, told the mother, who was in line for food stamps, that a child with acute asthma might be eligible for Social Security.

“Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation,” Ms. Taylor said, recalling the conversation later. “We’re already used to poverty; they’re really not.”

Denese Rodgers, the county director of social services, who is white, has held several lunch meetings at A J’s Turkey Grill, owned by Diane Walker, a black woman, in hopes of helping business.

“It was in one of our abandoned strip malls, a forlorn looking kind of place, but when you walk in, it’s just pristine,” Ms. Rodgers said. “She’s doing everything right, it’s just not full.”

Peggy Allgood, a 54-year-old black woman who lost her job and four-bedroom house and is now living in a trailer park, said she had noticed the recession obliterating racial differences up and down the economic scale.

“It’s gotten to the point where everyone I talk to, their hours have been cut, their jobs have been cut,” Ms. Allgood said. “My neighbor, she’s white, she’s trying to find a job. She hasn’t had any luck.”

The recession hit Henry County, for years one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, at a time when it was already struggling to come to terms with startling demographic change. In 1990, the county was almost 90 percent white. Now, as its population has more than tripled to 192,000, according to 2008 census estimates, the white percentage of the population has shrunk to 60 percent.

The county’s elected government is still all white and Republican, and some leaders and newcomers alike have tried in various ways to make local board and governments more diverse. But nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship.

“There used to be a lot of racial tension here, but everybody knows that we need each other to survive this recession,” said Eugene Edwards, the president of the Henry County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People now, they seem to be starting to care for one another.”

Once fueled by construction, the county has been left by the recession with a blighted crop of abandoned white utility hookups, meant for new subdivisions, sprouted in the woods.

Last year, the Chamber of Commerce took a multiracial group of leaders to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but such officially sponsored efforts at bonding have slowed.

“The recession has pretty much tied folks down to survival mode,” said Steve Cash, the executive director of the Henry Council for Quality Growth, who is white. “A lot of things that were happening before aren’t happening now.”

And a lot of things that were unheard of before are happening now. Women in Jaguars pull up to the local food pantry, and former millionaires hunker down in grand, unsellable homes.

One reason blacks have not gained more political power is that they are not heavily concentrated in any single area in the county — the cul-de-sacs carved out of farmland and pastures in the last decade became racially mixed enclaves for the upwardly mobile. Now, the foreclosure notices and uncut lawns in those same subdivisions reinforce the notion that everyone is in the same sinking boat.

Statistics also suggest that the recession’s burden is falling with similar force on both races. In June 2006, 55 percent of the families receiving food stamps were black, and 44 percent were white. Those percentages remain the same today, although the size of each group has increased by about 50 percent.

Unemployment claims follow that pattern: in January 2008, 49 percent of those who filed for unemployment were white, and 45 percent were black. In August 2009, 49 percent were white, and 48 percent were black.

Across the country, there have been many reports about the recession’s racial divide, as blacks have lost their jobs and houses at far higher rates than whites. But Henry County, about a 30-minute drive south of downtown Atlanta, has a very different profile from the rest of the nation. In Henry, the median income of black families, $56,715 in 2008, approaches that of whites, $69,728 (nationally, the average income gap was $20,000). Blacks in Henry County, many of whom are retirees from the North or professionals who work in Atlanta, are more likely than whites to have a college degree.

That does not mean that Henry County is a perfect laboratory of equality. Blacks made up a disproportionately high number of those seeking government assistance both before and after the slowdown. Since 2006, the number of blacks on Medicaid has more than tripled, outpacing the increase among whites.

And as in the rest of the country, blacks in Henry were more than twice as likely as whites to take out risky sub-prime mortgages, meaning more black families than white are struggling to keep their homes.

Keith and Kenya Rucker, who are black, recently declared bankruptcy in an effort to keep the home they bought for $155,000 with an adjustable-rate mortgage when they had two incomes, before Mr. Rucker lost his job as a restaurant manager. Both said they could not rely on family members for help with their ballooning payments.

“I’m not racist, but it’s harder for black men,” Mr. Rucker said, as his wife huddled with their 8-year-old daughter, KéUnica. Mr. Rucker, who is from Orlando, Fla., echoed many experts who say that middle-class blacks have fewer resources, either financial or social, to fall back on if they get into trouble. “Where I’m from,” he said, “every friend that I had is a drug dealer, locked up, on drugs or dead.”

But Dennis and Jenny Duncan, a white couple who once owned millions of dollars in real estate assets as former developers, felt equally stymied. Interviewed in the lavish home they built for themselves, they said the sheriff had just come to call and told them their belongings would soon be seized to satisfy debts. Unlike Ms. Rucker, neither has a college degree, making work difficult to find.

The idea that the recession is an equalizer has become accepted in Henry County. Both black and white residents were hesitant to say that either race had taken a greater hit. But Ms. Taylor, the black woman who dispensed advice at the county food stamp office, said there were some notable distinctions between blacks and whites.

“They’re a little weaker than we are at handling things like this,” she said, adding without rancor, “but I know they get more sympathy than we do.”

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Nov 3, 2009

Will a Racial Divide Swallow Obama? - Nation

Congressional Black Caucus Foundation headquar...Image via Wikipedia

by Melissa Harris-Lacewell

On Sunday I went to the Prudential Center in Newark to hear President Obama make the case for Governor Jon Corzine's reelection here in New Jersey. Already a strong supporter of Governor Corzine I wasn't going to be convinced. And I wasn't particularly excited about standing in a long line, on a chilly afternoon to listen to two men I've heard speak dozens of times. But I was determined to go. One year ago I'd been in Newark to hear candidate Obama make his closing arguments, and I wanted to check out what an Obama rally looks like one year later.

Some elements of the atmosphere were familiar: insanely long lines, intense police presence, surprisingly jovial mood despite the chill. One thing was noticeably and distressingly different: the crowd waiting to see President Obama in Newark on Sunday was much less diverse than the crowd that greeted him in the waning days of the 2008 election. By my estimation the supporters in Newark yesterday were not exclusively, but certainly predominately, African American.

The event mirrors recent trends in the polls. Presidential job approval polls by Gallup have tracked two consistent trends in President Obama's ratings: overall decline and a widening racial gap between black and white Americans.

As a public opinion researcher, I am not surprised by this racial gap. Political science has convincingly and repeatedly found a wide and persistent gulf between the political attitudes of white and black Americans.

For example, one of the most consistent finding of public opinion research is how African American partisanship differs from that of whites. African American allegiance to the Republican Party of Lincoln was solid for the decades between Emancipation and The New Deal, but by the 1940s black Americans had become overwhelmingly Democratic in affiliation. At the same time, white voters increasingly moved to the Republican column, particularly in the South.

African Americans are unique both in the direction of their affiliation and in the homogeneity of the attachment. But despite the strength of this attachment, black Democratic partisanship is quite different from that of white Democrats. There is marked racial division of opinion within the party ranks and leadership. The Congressional Black Caucus often finds itself at odds with party leadership, and among voters, black and white Democrats differ on issues of economic redistribution, domestic public policy, and even foreign policy.

This means that President Obama is not the first contemporary president to experience a noticeable racial approval gap. African American animosity toward Presidents Reagan and Bush, who were well liked by most whites, was a salient feature of the 1980s. African American attitudes toward Clinton were quite different. In 2000, black respondents reported average warmth toward Clinton of 79 points, a presidential score, that for the first time, outstripped black American ratings for Reverend Jesse Jackson. The approval ratings among African Americans for George W. Bush made history when they plummeted to single digits in some polls during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

This history suggests that black voter support of Obama is not driven solely by his identity as the first African American president, but instead is rooted in more persistent racial differences in American politics.

Therefore, while my academic-self is unsurprised by this racial gap, my citizen-self is distressed. One of the distinctive and exciting features of the Obama candidacy was the appeal of its multi-racial coalition. I appreciated the Obama yard signs in Hebrew and Arabic, the bumper sticker that read Older White Woman for Obama, the sustaining role of hip-hop music in the campaign, and watching Americans of all backgrounds chant Si Se Puede.

I have always been more impressed by the Obama coalition than by Obama himself. Perhaps this is because as a Hyde Park, Chicagoan I began following Obama's career when he was a smart, but awkward, state senator who endured a tough congressional loss. Perhaps it's because I've always secretly like Michelle better. Whatever his shortcomings, I was thrilled by Obama's 2008 campaign because his candidacy became a space where a real, winning, multi-racial, electoral coalition emerged around progressive issues on the national stage. My greatest hope for this campaign-built-on-hope was for America's racial possibilities if this diverse coalition could be sustained.

I was not alone in my enthusiasm. In the weeks immediately following the election of President Obama, Americans reported significant optimism about the future of race relations and racial equality. But late last week Gallup reported that post-election racial optimism has waned among all Americans, and particularly among black people.

On October 29, Gallup reported responses to the question: "Do you think that relations between blacks and whites will always be a problem for the United States or that a solution will eventually be worked out?" Responses reflected patterns similar to 1963, with 40% of Americans expecting race always to be a problem. And though black Americans had become more optimistic a year ago, they are now significantly more pessimistic about race in America.

These Gallup findings mirror decades of public opinion research showing that African Americans and whites differ dramatically on their perception of the existence of discrimination, and in their assessment of the potential for realizing a racially fair society. These differing perceptions of racial discrimination translate into enormous gaps in support for public policies. These gaps have effectively stymied effective coalitions for progressive policies for decades.

Despite the presence of white and Latino voters at the Newark rally on Sunday, this racial divide felt troubling and present.

Black Americans have become significantly more supportive of President Obama and more pessimistic about the country as the President has endured attacks that seem personal and racially motivated. This trend is potentially troublesome for several reasons. If black voters feel the need to rally around the President to protect him from racial attacks, then they are less able to function as full members of the coalition. Black voters need to be able to both praise and criticize the President in order to ensure their individual and collective interests are voiced.

Further, if President Obama's poll numbers are primarily bolstered by an enthusiastic, but racially isolated core, then his administration becomes more vulnerable to unfairly racialized attacks from opponents. Those opponents could seek to cast President Obama as a protector of identity-group interests, rather than as a broad representative of American interests.

President Obama and his administration may seek to distance themselves from the negative implications of racialized support by enacting social conservatives policies. This was a strategy used by President Clinton during the second half of his first term. It has the perverse effect of punishing African Americans for their political support and loyalty.

Even as Democrats seek to pass health care reform they need also to aggressively rebuild the foundation of mullti-racial enthusiasm that drove the 2008 election. President Obama's efficacy is seriously undermined to the extent that his base shrinks and divides along racial lines.

Even more important, Americans' faith in our capacity to find common ground and achieve collective aims is eroding--quickly.

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Sep 22, 2009

In S.C., One Road Divides Two Ways of Thinking - washingtonpost.com

ORANGEBURG, SC - JANUARY 22:  Olivia Gentol of...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Views on Obama, and Race, Hold Firm

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

ORANGEBURG, S.C. -- The Bolen and Elmore homes, three blocks apart in opposite directions off Columbia Road in this small city, could not seem more alike. Both are simple brick ranch-style houses occupied by retired couples, the men former police officers, who spend hours a day in dark dens where cigarette smoke wafts beneath the whirl of ceiling fans.

Inside the hush of these rooms, however, their differences become clear. Columbia Road is a long and narrow country highway that serves as the border between the congressional districts of Rep. Joe Wilson, a white Republican who heckled President Obama during a speech, and Rep. James E. Clyburn, Capitol Hill's top-ranking black Democrat, who led the House vote to punish Wilson for it.

Along Columbia Road, and throughout Wilson's and Clyburn's districts, race has long been an inescapable topic of debate. And as Wilson's outburst brought the issue back to the surface, residents here voiced both divergent and hardened opinions. Their emotions are raw, even if cloaked in Southern gentility and graciousness.

The Bolens have seven antique miniature wooden grandfather clocks hanging on their wall. Their den is decorated with metal trinkets and classic Coca-Cola memorabilia. They said they could not bring themselves to watch Obama's health-care address on their 60-inch Magnavox because they think he is a liar. They live west of Columbia Road, in an area represented by Wilson, and they are white.

"Joe Wilson apologized to the president, and the president accepted it. My God, give me a break. I'm sick of this racism stuff," said Barbara Bolen, 66, a retired textile factory manager. "Oh, and Jimmy Carter! I'm so mad about him calling it racism. I think that's awful."

The Elmores have a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. hanging on their wall. Their den is sprinkled with Obama campaign souvenirs, including a card that reads "Yes We Did." They watched the president's speech together, but they have grown disillusioned, saying that the election of the first African American president has not transcended racial divisions, pointing to a summer of loud and angry opposition to Obama. They live east of Columbia Road, an area represented by Clyburn, and they are black.

"Everybody tries to say that it's merely because of the health care, but there is some underlying, you know, racism," said Joseph Elmore, 66. "The South has its way of covering up racism. They're not used to a black man running America. They're not used to a black man wielding that kind of power. You had 43 presidents who were white, and now you have a black one."

More than two dozen Orangeburg residents interviewed here last week -- white and black, rich and poor, doctors and lawyers and plumbers and biscuit bakers -- had varying opinions about the role of race in the opposition to Obama. Many were outspoken and shared the views of the Bolens or the Elmores, but some offered more nuanced thoughts.

Orangeburg lies at the heart of the Old South, a working-class, well-educated and heavily Democratic city in the South Carolina midlands. Blacks outnumber whites by about 2 to 1, and the subject of race still hovers over the sleepy historic downtown, where a monument to Confederate soldiers stands. In 1968, police here fired into a crowd of demonstrators protesting a segregated bowling alley, killing three unarmed black men and wounding 27 others in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

But the city, home to two historically black colleges, has a youthful energy and is attracting businesses. At a fundraiser for the local technical college one evening, many of Orangeburg's well-to-do shushed away questions about race as they sipped fine wine and nibbled on scallops and lamb chops.

"I've known Joe for a long time, and I do not think there was any racism involved," said Brad Hutto, 52, a lawyer and Democratic state senator who is white, but is supported by both black and white voters.

But Linda Blume whispered in a corner that racist sentiments bubble up when she and other white women play bridge twice a month.

"Although they won't admit it, I really think it's prejudice in Orangeburg -- prejudice against blacks," said Blume, 63, who owns an entertainment booking agency and said she supported Obama. "They're all doctors' wives and old Orangeburg society people. They're all good women, but you can't mention anything about Obama or they go crazy. They have fear of outside elements, fear of the unknown, fear of their world changing."

At South Carolina State University, one of Orangeburg's historically black institutions, political scientist Willie Legette said: "I think people are being dishonest if they don't acknowledge that this is to a large degree about race. But what can you do about it?"

South Carolina has been symbolic in this age of Obama, representing both the hope of moving beyond race in the nation and a test of how hard that can be. This is where Obama soared to victory in the Democratic primary with a coalition of black and white voters, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton by 29 percentage points. It is also where former president Bill Clinton made remarks about Obama that many -- including Clyburn -- believed were racially charged.

But Obama lost South Carolina in the general election, and since then, the Palmetto State has emerged as a hostile check on the new administration's ambition. The governor was the most vocal critic of the economic stimulus package, and one of the state's U.S. senators suggested that health-care reform could be the president's "Waterloo."

Obama's election alone "will not take us to a post-racial society," Clyburn said in an interview. "I think that it's a step in that direction, but my Lord, there's a long ways to go. One election cannot erase the long, sordid history of race that we have in this country."

Longtime state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D), who is black, said the euphoria African Americans felt about Obama's election has ebbed. "There was this inference that America had arrived because we elected a person of color as president, but what is incredibly clear is all is not right with the world," she said.

Some residents voiced deep suspicions of Obama and fear about the broadening reach of federal government, and dismissed talk that their opposition may be laced with racism as nonsense.

"I don't think much of him," said Henry Bozard, 83, a retired air-conditioning worker who joined his wife and daughter for the $6.85 baked chicken lunch special at Mama's Kountry Kookin'. "It's not because he's black. I've got nothing against a black man. He's nothing but a big liar who runs his mouth and can't do nothing right."

Bozard, who is white, continued: "Joe Wilson is the only one who has a backbone. He called Obama a liar, and he is a liar."

"Joe Wilson was speaking for me," added Judi Hagan, 56, the restaurant's owner, who also is white. "I don't like what President Obama is trying to do. But it's not a racist thing. No, no, no. We have lots of black customers. It's not like we only serve the whites."

Two miles up the road, at the Brown Derby, another Southern cafeteria, opinions were vastly different. Owner Daisy Brown Orr, 65, said she is disillusioned by what she considers racist attacks on Obama. She leaned across the table and told of growing up as an African American here. Her mother would force her and her siblings to stay quiet after dusk on Saturdays, when Ku Klux Klan members would ride through their neighborhood.

Change, she said, has been too slow.

"I knew [Obama] couldn't turn things around instantaneously," she said. "I knew there were still racists in the closet. I knew that there would still be people out to get him."

Back along Columbia Road, dozens of ranch-style houses like the Bolens' and the Elmores' are tucked off the main street, behind grassy driveways and Baptist churches. On one side are Clyburn's constituents; on the other, Wilson's.

"Joe Wilson was expressing what his constituents think," Joseph Elmore said. "His white constituents are probably saying, 'Hey, anything being done is not appropriate for us because he's black'. . . . But the people over there, I don't think all of them echo his beliefs."

Barbara Bolen sat on a folding chair in her carport, smoking a Seneca beneath an American flag and wind chimes. She said she takes offense at the assumption that because she is a white Southerner her opposition to a black president is rooted in racism.

"I've worked with the blacks all my life," Bolen said. "I'm not a racist. When I go to the grocery store, I talk to the blacks. When I was at the Wal-Mart the other day at 6 in the morning, I saw a black I knew and hugged him."

"Ohhh, don't bring up racism," she added. "It bothers me."

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Jul 21, 2009

Differences in Prevalence of Obesity Among Black, White, and Hispanic Adults — United States, 2006–2008

Differences in Prevalence of Obesity Among Black, White, and Hispanic Adults — United States, 2006–2008
Source: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (CDC)

The prevalence of obesity in the United States has more than doubled in the past three decades, and certain racial/ethnic populations have been affected disproportionally. Data from the 2003?2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), for which height and weight of adults aged ?20 years are measured by survey staff members, indicated the prevalence of obesity was 45.0% among non-Hispanic blacks, 36.8% among Mexican-Americans, and 30.6% among non-Hispanic whites. This report found smaller prevalences, using height and weight data that were self-reported to BRFSS and, therefore, likely to produce underestimates. However, differences among non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics in this report were similar to those found in the NHANES study: non-Hispanic blacks had the greatest prevalence of obesity, followed by Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.

At least three reasons might account for the differences in the prevalence of obesity among the study populations observed in this and other studies. First, racial/ethnic populations differ in behaviors that contribute to weight gain. For example, compared with non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics are less likely to engage in regular (nonoccupational) physical activity. In addition, differences exist in attitudes and cultural norms regarding body weight. For example, according to one study, both non-Hispanic black and Hispanic women are more satisfied with their body size than non-Hispanic white women; persons who are satisfied with their body size are less likely to try to lose weight. Finally, certain populations have less access to affordable, healthful foods and safe locations for physical activity. Evidence suggests that neighborhoods with large minority populations have fewer chain supermarkets and produce stores and that healthful foods are relatively more expensive than energy-dense foods, especially in minority and low-income communities. Evidence also indicates that minority and low-income populations have less access to physical activity facilities and resources and that traffic and neighborhood safety might inhibit walking.

Racial Disparities in Unemployment Vary Widely by State

By Algernon Austin

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This supplement, State Unemployment Trends by Race, Ethnicity and Gender, includes a national overview and takes a closer look at three hard-hit states: New York, Alabama, and Illinois

The United States is suffering its most severe economic crisis in decades. In each of the past 18 months, the economy has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs—an average of about 564,000 per month just in 2009—as the unemployment rate climbed to a 26-year high in June.

This economic hardship is not shared equally, however, and unemployment rates in many states are far worse than the national figures would suggest. In the first quarter of 2009, state unemployment rates ranged from 4.0% in Wyoming to 12.1% in Michigan. Eighteen states had unemployment higher than the national rate of 8.1% for the first quarter of 2009, with six of them (Calif., Mich., N.C., Ore., R.I., and S.C.) already experiencing double-digit unemployment.

Furthermore, the differences between states mask sometimes greater gaps within them—gaps defined by wide, sometimes growing disparities in unemployment rates by race and ethnicity. The United States has consistently had racial and ethnic disparities in unemployment rates. Nationally, the black unemployment rate tends to be about twice as high as the white rate; the Hispanic rate tends to be about 1.5 times the white rate. This means that within states with high unemployment rates overall, Hispanics and blacks tend to have even higher rates of unemployment.

From the last quarter of 2007 (when the recession began) to the first quarter of 2009, the national white1 unemployment rate increased 2.8 percentage points, rising from 4.0% to 6.8%. During that same period, the rates for Hispanics and blacks increased by 4.8 and 4.3 percentage points, respectively. At 13% in the first quarter of this year, blacks have the highest national unemployment rate of any major racial or ethnic group. Hispanics have the second highest rate (10.8%), but have had the largest increase in unemployment since the start of the recession, a rise of 4.8 percentage points overall.

Unemployment rates among racial and ethnic groups vary significantly from state to state. In 11 states (Ariz., Calif., Col., Conn., Fla., Md., N.J., N.M., Nev., N.Y., and Texas) the Hispanic population is large enough for the data to be reliable. In the first quarter of 2009 Hispanic unemployment in these states ranged from 7.7% to 14.5%. The states with the highest Hispanic unemployment rates in the first quarter of 2009 are Connecticut (14.5%) and California (14.3%). Hispanics in Connecticut were 2.5 times as likely to be unemployed as non-Hispanic whites. In California, the Hispanic-white ratio was 1.7 times.

Black unemployment, among the 17 states with reliable data, ranges from a low of 7.6% (Md.) to a high of 19.5% in Michigan (Mich.). The highest black-white unemployment ratio was in Louisiana, where blacks were three times as likely to be unemployed as whites. In Alabama, New York, Mississippi, and Texas blacks were more than twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.

Although the recession has caused widespread economic hardship, Hispanics and blacks have been hurt disproportionately in most states. Hispanics have lost a very large number of jobs in construction. Black job loss has not been concentrated in any one sector of the economy. Black workers in manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and utilities, and finance, insurance and real estate have all experienced significant job losses.

It is clear that the country is in a very deep recession. However, not all states are suffering equally and not all racial and ethnic groups are experiencing the same degree of economic hardship. In developing policies to address the economic crisis, the nation should devote extra resources to those states and groups that are hardest hit.

Table

Table

Endnotes
1. The racial categories “white” and “black/African American” exclude Hispanics.

Download a print-friendly version of this Issue Brief

This supplement, State Unemployment Trends by Race, Ethnicity and Gender, includes a national overview and takes a closer look at three hard-hit states: New York, Alabama, and Illinois