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Javier E

Opinion | We're Asking the Wrong Question About Kamala Harris and Race - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kamala-harris-race.html

race identity blackness culture history

shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.
  • This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?
  • I’ve fielded questions from people from France to Japan about why Obama is considered Black, rather than both Black and white. The question always feels naïve to me at first, but if you imagine stepping outside our particular national framework, it’s the foreigner who is making sense and the American version that is weird.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Today, those who express different ideas about racial identity often encounter serious resistance. When Tiger Woods, the child of two mixed-race people, announced himself to be “Cablinasian” — as a combination of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian — he was mocked as not knowing who he is. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams encountered skepticism when he said he couldn’t see his blond, blue-eyed child as Black.
  • all signs indicate that my children are growing up in a world that’s very different from the one I grew up in. I experienced plenty of passing instances of racism, even as a student at fancy private schools. But it’s been a half century now. Experiences of the kind Harris has recounted, of suburban white kids whose parents told them not to play with her because she was Black, have been alien to my girls so far.
  • If someday they decide not to define themselves as Black, it will not be because they are ashamed or in some kind of denial. It will be because the world has changed, and we should be thankful for that.
  • American discourse is, happily, becoming more amenable to the idea that a person who is half Black can be two things rather than just one
  • What is most important is that Harris, Obama and other people of mixed racial heritage can now get as far as they have. As for our habit of processing Blackness as foundational — much as Strom Thurmond did — it will be ever more absurd as the races mix further over the coming generations. On this custom, history will look upon us in puzzlement.
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