Is Race A Problem In America?
Moving beyond the mainstream race discourse
James Baldwin, the most prolific writer of black-white relations in America, once made a contrarian but crucial observation about racism:
It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one’s flesh and blood, especially one’s children. — from “No Name in the Street”
Baldwin saw American streets as one vast orphanage because, in a way, blacks were abandoned by their white fathers. The blacks, then, are the bastards of America. But these are not like your typical bastards of Westeros who, with some talent and luck, can become lords of the realm. The problem in America was, and I still think is, the great denial by the majority that blacks are not Americans, denying them as rightful heirs of the great American family. American racism, along with the country’s exceptional wealth, was built on centuries of enslaving black bodies. Therefore, the problem in America is about power and wealth. And who can claim this has been made contingent on one’s skin color.
Thus, the black and white identities are hierarchical. The powers that be have had to fight to keep the discourse of racism focused on black and white because it maintains their position in the hierarchy.
Last week, The New York Times published an op-ed, “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii.” The writer of the article believes that the multiracial harmony of Hawaii can dampen the racial animosity, exacerbated by Trump, that we see on continental America. The article is comprehensive about ethnic relations on the island and is cautious about adopting the Hawaiian model of racial harmony. But the article, representative of mainstream race discourse, continues to propagandize several assumptions, including the commercial argument on why we need to be less racist, America is not already multiracial, multiracial unions could rectify racial inequality, and racism is only about one’s skin color.
The Commercial Argument
The author urges the readers to adopt a less racist mind because a mind more welcoming of racial diversity is one with the ability to “navigate multiple worlds,” unlocking latent cognitive abilities:
Plenty of research indicates that diversity has many benefits. Diverse groups
are better at problem-solving; in mock trials, diverse juries give fairer
verdicts; diverse companies are more profitable; researchers argue that
diverse countries have stronger economies.
But this argument assumes that as if being less racist itself was not good enough and a worthwhile human endeavor. It is supposed to encourage people to forgo their racist views by activating their self-interest drive. Thus, by welcoming racial diversity or supporting multiculturalism, one is doing it for the commercial interests of oneself or one’s country.
This is, of course, not a new argument. In the 1980s, businesses started to look at blacks as potential consumers. The rise of professional sports sustained by black bodies created a billion-dollar spectator sports business and its supporting apparel and shoes industries that we know now.
In Gruttinger v. Bollinger, Justice O’Connor supported affirmative action, arguing that diversity was important for the national interest: “major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.”
The rhetoric on diversity, then, is not to persuade opponents that diversity is an end but a means for expanding commercial interests. So, by trying to redress historical and arbitrary injustices of slavery, which was based on the commercial interest itself, with a profit-first solution is backward and illiberal. Back to Hawaii, one wonders, then, what exactly is the purpose of being “creative problem-solvers” if not to serve the powers that be.
America’s Wealth Was Built On Multiracial Labor
The NYT’s op-ed cites the 1676’s Bacon’s Rebellion:
shook the elites, who worked even harder to enforce the color lines. A series of laws meant to prevent interracial mingling went into effect.
But we know now that slave masters often appropriated black women as sexual property, in order to produce more slaves, and so to speak, multiplying their profit from the original investment. So, while anti-miscegenation laws were to keep poor whites from joining with black slaves, they did not stop wealthy slave owners from profiting from miscegenation, resulting in many black Americans who are descendants of slave owners.
Therefore, the problem in America regarding race is not that that it isn’t already strongly multiracial. The 15 percent or 50 million black Americans are a multiracial group. And perhaps many of those with pale skin have black heritage as well. As I mentioned earlier, the blacks of this country have been treated like bastards, perhaps even worse at times. Despise their physical appearances, black Americans have as much claim to “whiteness” as any American. The reason to keep these Americans “black” is the root cause of “the race problem” in America. The problem in America is that we have a majority of people willing to subjugate their own kin for power, for commercial interests, which are not easily swept away simply by visiting or living in Hawaii.
While white Americans might be able to temporarily suppress the dominant black-white relations while they are in Hawaii, it doesn’t mean that they won’t revert back to accepting the dominant paradigm once they return to the mainland. Racial identity is fluid and people adopt certain labels depending on whether the labels are beneficial or harmful. While many Portuguese Americans identify themselves ethnically while living in Hawaii, they might see that there are more benefits to being identified as white when they come to the mainland.
If the white majority in America were to accept this reality, the reality that blacks are part of the American family, the implications, from the economy to foreign affairs, would be vast. While racial discontent is perhaps more easily managed by those in power, economic discontent can lead to a potent social mobilization. Often times, the national racial hierarchy that exists in America is reproduced on the world stage. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese peasants became the “blacks” of Southeast Asia. The villages became the ghettos, to be searched and destroyed. When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke against the American war in Vietnam in 1967 and against the wish of senior officials within the civil rights movement, he saw the war as anti-black and anti-poor, and feared that
America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
To King, if blacks were regarded as citizens of America and their needs were accounted for, the war would cease to continue. Toward the end of the twentieth century and early this century, Muslims have become the new “blacks” on the global stage. The powers that be do not wish to lose the national consensus for such foreign wars, wars that allow them to accumulate more power and wealth to themselves.
Racial Diversity Does Not Mean Racial Equality
The article uses Obama as an example of the goodness that comes from a multiracial union. The 44th President was born in Hawaii to a white American woman and Nigerian man. But Obama is a product of wealth and ethnic inequality. Both of Obama’s parents were extremely well-educated by standards of those times. Furthermore, the President was raised by white grandmother who was an executive at the Bank of Hawaii. So, when Obama was elected President, it seemed like progress for multiracial equality, but it was a step back for material equality, as evident by the Wall Street bailout. An American from the middle class is more likely to marry someone of the same comparable socioeconomic class of another country than to someone from the same country but of lower economic class. Under American eyes, Obama is an African American, but his education, character and politics are in aligned with the powers that be.
Whites and other groups do not marry blacks not necessarily because blacks are blacks. It is because blacks are poor. But they are poor not because they are black. In Hawaii, the interracial marriages happen between different ethnic groups, but usually among Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans and whites. The one thing they have in common is that they are high-income earners and occupy important private and public positions.
To me, what we consider as racial equality is simply racial representation. But racial equality is a means to which economic equality can be achieved. Economic inequality, more so than representation, is the source of racial or ethnic divisions. Equal representation will likely to follow once everyone in America gets a fair share of the economic production according to her abilities and needs.
Power, Not Race, Is The Problem
The author, like mainstream America, sees diversity as mainly based on race or ethnicity. But this discourse of diversity is limited because it doesn’t address historical and generational wealth inequalities. In America, it has never really been about race. It has always been about power. And this power is mainly derived from wealth or the potential to accumulate wealth. In the mainland, that power relations separate people into two main groups in what we have known as white and black.
American racism was built on the economic relations between white Protestants and black slaves. As much as Americans like to cheer for the underdogs, every immigrant group arriving on American shores soon find themselves upholding the black and white social relations and racial hierarchy. When the Irish and Jews first came to America in the nineteenth century, they saw it better for them to maintain the racial structure that was already in place, the structure created and sustained by slavery.
During the 1960s, Civil Rights leaders, when they spoke of racial equality, often married it to economic opportunities for blacks and non-whites. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King spoke of the economic condition of blacks one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862:
One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
The dream, according to King, was for blacks in America to escape from the ghettos and jail cells to occupy the hill of prosperity, as promised by the sacred documents of the country, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Political rights are effective if one has the wealth to exercise them. One needs to have a secure income and dignified shelter and safe neighborhood to begin participating in politics because politics takes time, time to read and think. In a similar way, racial or ethnic representation can only go so far in destroying the ghettos and closing the vast wealth gap. A mixed-race population does not mean much for eliminating inequality if this new class creates a new social hierarchy and continues to dominate the wealth of the country.
When the American Civil War and slavery ended, the capitalists no longer had use for black bodies, so they segregated and imprisoned and murdered them. In our times, the moneyed bosses have no use for white bodies as well because of what they can find on the global market. The sooner we unchain ourselves from the mental rigidity of the black and white binary opposition, the sooner we would find ourselves working together to have our freedom.
