What Can You Say?: America's National Conversation on Race

Preface

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a file folder on my desk in which I kept clippings of news stories about race. The idea was to keep on hand some current examples of how race matters today, which I could use to update my lectures or my writing. It quickly filled and then gave way to a series of similar folders, each labeled with a proliferation of titles—race and health, workplace discrimination, the race gap in education, and many more. I also subdivided these into liberal and conservative lines of argument and debate.

These articles ranged from reports of particular incidents to coverage of new poll results on racial opinions and to recent findings from studies on discrimination. They also included excellent journalistic essays and critical commentaries that sharpened my thinking about race. Eventually, too, there were stories about coverage of race in events like senate races or other political campaigns. As the files grew, I began to see a broad stream of public discourse unfolding, a meandering current of commentary, reflections, and reporting. Then I started to think about the larger question of how we settle on which examples have the greatest bearing in telling us something substantive about how race matters today. Sometimes these thoughts were sparked by the glass-is-half-full-or-half-empty debates over whether racial disparities in this country are diminishing or remaining fairly constant. But also, I wondered about the representativeness of any one example or incident as they just kept occurring, sometimes in novel forms, sometimes as maddening repetitions of the same old stories. Which ones were most exemplary of the enduring significance of race?

Eventually, I realized this question itself warranted a book. I settled on a framework as much out of practicality as based on an analytical rationale. I would take a year’s worth of stories and examine how they reflect the interpretive process by which Americans make sense of race. In terms of the rationale, I thought the value of this approach lay in trying to understand something about how we as Americans consume these stories, apart from their status as examples in arguments that race no longer matters or that it remains the bedrock problem in this country. But really, this decision was a practical one as well—the stories just never stopped coming. I settled on a year’s framework, in part, because there was no other way to get this project off my desk and into the light of day.

As I write this preface, President Obama just reworked his criticism of the actions of the Cambridge police in stupidly arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home. Gates figures prominently in the final chapter on this book, appropriately enough on the dynamics of apologies for racial incidents. This new story perfectly melds the elements of obviousness, ambiguity, and utter discrepancies that racial often entails. As well, it features remarkably well-cast characters—Gates, certainly, as a preeminent scholar who has incisively grappled with race; Sergeant James Crowley, a police expert on racial profiling; and, of course, our nation’s first African American president. Yet, in resisting the urge to add still another chapter, I hope I have settled on something else of value instead.

This book is about our national conversation on race, the sprawling, unwieldy, often maddening means we have developed in the United States for discussing and evaluating what counts as racial. I focus on the underlying dynamics of American culture that shape this conversation more than on the particular topics that variously surface and then recede. That is, I attend to the rituals and taboos, the selective vision, and the stylized reactions that culture generates. We humans are culture-bound creatures, and as Americans we share an underlying culture that is far more powerful than our various crucial, poignant, and devastating divisions. This common culture is on display in this particularly curious cultural artifact—our national conversation on race. I hope that in having this underlying culture drawn to your attention you will find a way to think differently about race. Whether or not you do, I remain certain that this conversation is a long way from over.

Inevitably perhaps, most writing on race is polemical. This stems from the fact that it is nearly impossible to have an entirely neutral stance about whether or how race matters. Race is clearly a political and polarizing issue; as well, the urgency and importance of racial matters compel us to take emphatic positions. At the same time, the polemics around race make it devilishly difficult to settle important questions, such as, when and how does race matter? My aim here is to present a view onto our racial polemics, via that oft-referenced national conversation on race. What I ask of the reader, then, is a bit of patience as you encounter on these pages voices and positions that are antithetical to your own views on race. The clash of liberal and conservative stances on race may be too powerful and passionate for you to suspend your own well-honed reactions, but my hope is that this book provides a means of stepping back from the fray to consider what might underlie all this turmoil.

1

From Gangsta Parties to the Postracial Promised Land

A Year of Race Stories

THEIR FACES ARE CONFIDENT AND CONTENT, which makes the images all the more absurd and bizarre. White college kids at Clemson University, displayed on Facebook, are draped in black garb, hands duct-taped to forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor. The women are arrayed with huge hoop earrings, and two guys are wearing baseball caps—one of them scowls behind his dark shades. Other whites in the crowd sport red bandanas on their heads and gold grills on their teeth. They appear drunkenly awash in a sea of racial signifiers, seemingly oblivious to any lines they may be crossing. The gangsta theme party was held over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2007. What were they thinking?

This wasn’t the only such party that weekend. A similarly themed event was hosted by white students at Tarleton State University near Fort Worth, Texas. Days later, law school students at the University of Connecticut threw a Bullets and Bubbly hip-hop party. And these were just the most recent in a series of such parties occurring on college campuses across the country over the past few years.¹ The emblems whites sported in each setting were the same—do-rags, gold chains, baggy pants, puffy coats, and dark shades. They flaunted bottles of malt liquor and flashed gang signs. Hadn’t they heard about the controversy months earlier when a fraternity at Johns Hopkins hosted a Halloween in the Hood party, or when the University of Colorado Ski and Snow-board Club had to cancel their gangsta party because of complaints about racial stereotyping? They must have also missed the stir over a similar frat party at Baylor or the cancelled ghetto party on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Texas A&M.

The pattern is remarkably similar in each setting. White kids adorn themselves with charged symbols from their media-saturated lives and parade about in gleeful amusement. Someone takes pictures and posts them online. The images circulate and protests follow, condemning white racism. And in each case, the whites who face the ordeal of public condemnation express a similar sense of confusion and deep regret. The apologies that follow each explosion of outrage convey a common sentiment. As a Clemson student explained on Charleston’s local WCSC TV news report on January 30, 2007, "We weren’t trying to be racial or anything. Several Clemson students circulated a letter of apology stating, We invited all races and types of people and never meant any racial harm. But even if it was not an all-white affair, how could they think that such images are not racial? Their surprise and befuddlement over being caught up in a racial incident—a common feature of the stories in this book—reflect an increasing confusion over what is racial" and how such assessments are made. These stories reflect the inevitability of being racial, the relentless significance of race, and the insufficiency of our cultural conventions to ever fully contain that significance.

White students’ confusion in the wake of such parties is an indication that the conventions by which we decide something is racial are changing rapidly. In cultural terms, we rely on a set of social conventions to contain the riotous meaningfulness of race. But these expectations and assumptions—concerning who can say what about race, for instance, or, more crucially, what people must not say about race—are themselves in flux. This is partly because the line between public and private, which long maintained conventional notions about race, is rapidly shifting. Though national media, from Fox News to the Washington Post, reported these stories as a trend rattling college administrators and opening up a disturbing view onto racial aspects of campus life, the deeper story here is that the public sphere for talking about race has greatly expanded. Thanks to such social networking sites as Facebook—and critical Web sites like The Smoking Gun, where party pictures were posted after they were removed from Facebook—once private settings, like these parties, are thrust into public space, opening up new ground for talking about why and how race matters. Rather than simply revealing well-hidden forms of covert racism, this shift highlights the instability of conventions that mold Americans’ selective views of what counts as racial.

Media race stories in the year that followed the Clemson party reflect a reconfiguring of race in the public sphere. Don Imus’s dramatic fall from his media throne is credited to an online posting of a video of his offending remarks about nappy-headed hos. The massive civil-rights protest in Jena, Louisiana, resulted from the rise of the black blogosphere, which both circulated news of events in that tiny town and provided a medium for organizing protestors from across the nation. In retrospect, the gangsta parties can be seen as just the first wave in a long series of incidents in which Americans have confronted a host of new examples of the continuing impact and importance of race. Each has been marked by some combination of confusion and certainty, of outrage and obliviousness, as private or local moments have been examined intensely in a national framework. This shift in audience from private to public—thanks to the many new means for electronically circulating remarks and images—has provoked a change in how we talk about race. This shift in the spotlight has not so much revealed a hidden set of white opinions about race; rather, it has caught whites in awkward moments when they traffic in signifiers previously coded black—from Imus’s word choice to the symbols whites adorn themselves with in the gangsta parties—but that have come to permeate mainstream discourse in the United States.

The white kids at these parties were playing with powerful symbols that have crossed bounded, racially segregated worlds to pervade American popular culture. Their use of these images—once free and easy—was drastically challenged, not simply by a black community, but by campus-wide mobilizations that decried their impact on the public sphere in general. But is this playing with hip-hop imagery—which feeds on Americans’ long romance with gangsters—inherently a racist act? Black students commenting on the parties were not entirely sure. Where some saw racism, others recognized a clumsy manipulation of pervasive, highly commodified images. Harold Hughes, a member of a black fraternity at Clemson, noted that white students see this on MTV and BET, they think it is cool to portray hip-hop culture.² But another student—Ranniece McDonald, a black junior quoted on Fox News on February 2, 2007—remarked, they didn’t know that they were being racist. It’s really sad. The uncertainty over their possible racial intent stems from the source of the imagery in question. The cultural realm of symbolic gestures and rituals presents a different kind of terrain for challenging race than that of affirmative action, job discrimination, or housing segregation.

Partly because of legislative and judicial accomplishments stemming from the civil rights movement, Americans increasingly discuss race in terms of cultural matters. In these discussions, hip-hop claims a central role. Commenting on the apparent failure of Bill Clinton’s national conversation on race in the late 1990s, Jason Tanz, in Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, asserts that the conversation has not ended: instead, it has been coded into beats and rhymes. Many of the most important race-related discussions of the last two decades have concerned hip-hop music directly: anti-Semitic statements attributed to a member of the rap group Public Enemy in 1989; the 1992 controversy over ‘Cop Killer,’ a song by Ice-T . . . ; the criticism by presidential candidate Bill Clinton of Sister Souljah ; the flap in 2001 over the rap CD made by Cornel West. In each of these instances and more, Tanz writes, white America’s relation to hip-hop shows us how the old racial verities of the 1960s and ’70s have transformed, and provide a fruitful avenue through which to examine a complicated and confusing new world.³ In this new world, appearances can be disorienting: When a white kid drapes himself in gangsta apparel at a hip-hop theme party, is this kid racist or just someone who imbibes and idolizes aspects of this public image?

Gangsta parties are a good jumping-off point for examining the complicated dynamics of race because the questions they raise do not have clear-cut answers. The white students addressing the news cameras convey this lack of clarity through their utter befuddlement that playing with stereotyped images from the much-hyped realm of gangsta rap could be considered offensive. An unidentified white student—only his hands were depicted on the screen because he feared harassment—explained to viewers on January 30, We have a lot of theme parties where we just dress up and try to have fun. And we decided that we’d do a gangsta party. On the same local WYFF TV news report in Greenville, South Carolina, a black student who attended the party described how the mood at the themed event quickly shifted when one guy showed up in blackface. It escalated after those gentlemen came in. And, it just kinda turned . . . it was palpable, the emotion that was there. And people just left. Would the party have caused a racial incident if those white guys who made the minstrelsy angle emphatic had not shown up?⁴ Like many such themed events today—such as 80s and 90s music parties or other stylized themes—it would have probably passed without notice.

Whites taking up hip-hop imagery can alternately represent, as Tanz argues, an urge to overcome historical and current separations based on race or a fantasy that equates garden-variety suburban alienation with the struggles of ghetto life.⁵ These contrasting ways of interpreting the same gesture involve more than uncertainty regarding the individual beliefs and intentions of particular whites. They reflect changing conventions around real and authentic experience that are notably keyed to race but not entirely reducible to it.⁶ The indeterminacy stems from the possibility that such gestures may reflect not certain racial values and ideals but rather a fumbling effort to make sense of how and why race matters. Yet, even as what counts as racial today grows unclear, news stories depict racial incidents as fairly obvious and straightforward, encouraging people to participate in emphatic judgments about the contradictory and confusing aspects of race.

In Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America, Bakari Kitwana reads whites’ interest in hip-hop as reflecting two seemingly antithetical aspects of American life today. One, not surprisingly, is the impact of black popular culture, but the other stems from the role whites play in producing and marketing hip-hop music. The Black presence in popular culture, Kitwana writes, has changed the way Americans engage race, especially for a generation of young people who have lived their entire lives with such access. The terms of popular cultural literacy now are often coded black. At the same time, "the white influence is so great in the hip-hop industry that it would be unnatural and odd, almost freakish, if the final product didn’t appeal to white youth" (emphasis in quoted material is mine unless otherwise indicated).⁷ Young whites are not just intensely subject to the marketing of this music, they recognize in it something uncannily familiar.

This recognition reflects a generational fault line in the significance of race.⁸ In Kitwana’s view, hip-hop is a framework, a culture that has brought young people together and provides a public space they can communicate within unrestricted by the old obstacles.⁹ Clearly this is exhilarating but also greatly unsettling. One year after the party at Clemson, South Carolina returned to center stage in the nation’s conversation on race; Barack Obama’s major primary victory there, buoyed by young voters, seemed to herald the triumph of his campaign’s theme of transcending racial difference. Sounding much like Kitwana, Obama told the audience that night in late January—after a week of heated campaigning marked by a public battle over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.—"It is a choice not between black and white, but a choice between the past and the future." This gesture cued a shift in conventions governing public images of race. In that moment, South Carolina’s image was no longer primarily defined by fights over the Confederate flag or Strom Thurmond’s fierce defense of racial segregation. Instead, it seemed to stand for a dramatic new possibility of the nation’s first African American president.

This is how our conversation on race goes: in fits and starts, with scenes that lurch suddenly from seeming hackneyed to appearing quite novel. The pop-cultural domain has become Americans’ preferred terrain to think about race because it offers just such images—familiar, yet capable of generating new meanings and implications, where scenes of shocking stupidity and offensiveness might be set in a different light, as audiences and frames of reference shift. These shifting scenes reveal how much we rely on cultural conventions to keep from appearing to be racial. Yet the instability of those conventions—as the line between public and private is redrawn, as generations change, shifting the frames of reference we bring to bear upon them—keeps supplying impressions to the contrary. We work at making sense of race using media stories because they are the most tangible and vivid. They are also the most confusing and changeable. How Americans make sense of race through this charged cultural material is the subject of this book.

What Counts as Racial?

Race is a fact of everyday American life. Wherever we turn, we see it on each other’s faces, and we typically sort ourselves by color where we live, work, and play. We do race when we socialize or consume, but usually in ways we hardly notice.¹⁰ Race is so routine for us we are largely unconscious of the pervasive conventions guiding our actions, words, and perceptions. Against the backdrop of these highly conventional and seemingly unremarkable ways of doing race, we label only a few notable events or encounters as racial. Of the myriad ways whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups interact in this country, a mere handful of comments or actions are characterized as being about race. In these moments, the subtexts and assumptions we rely on to get through daily life with minimal confusion and stress jump front and center. Generally, such instances confirm what everybody already knew or believed about race. But there are moments, too, when describing a situation as racial highlights, rather, how much these shared conventions and meanings are shifting.

Two primary ways of evaluating the significance of race stand out at this moment. First, there are the ways it creates disparate life chances, disadvantaging primarily blacks and Latinos through various forms of discriminatory practices (particularly in the spheres of housing, jobs, and access to credit), and, by extension, advantaging whites. This is the principal way, in terms of progress and policy, that we address—or alternately efface and ignore—race. But there is also another dimension to race, a cultural one that is not as clear cut and often more difficult to assess. Race, simply, is meaningful, and meaning, as we know, is often unruly and irresolute, barely constrained by intention or referentiality. Though we may strive to equate race singularly with issues of racism—which Americans widely accept to be a social and moral failing—we keep confronting the fact that the boisterous meaningfulness of race often makes it ambiguous and difficult to grasp. A few examples illustrate this predicament.

Across the U.S. South, Canadian has recently emerged as a code word for black, surfacing in the talk of white sales clerks, the banter of white waitresses, and even in comments of a white Houston district attorney, who referred to black jurors as some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant.¹¹ This is just one instance of the many endlessly inventive ways that some whites find for skirting the conventions against racist speech in the United States by finding code words that mask their racial animus. The Racial Slur Database, an online reference source, offers many more examples, including derivations of Canadian into Coonadian, and Canigger. However, this same growing social awareness of or sensitivity to the potential significance of race has also led to people finding racial meanings even where they were not intended. Niggardly, for example—a word with Norwegian roots, meaning stingy—has been practically driven from public discourse because of its resonance with a certain racial epithet.

More strikingly, the astronomical term black hole has even been rendered suspect. A recent discussion among Dallas County commissioners was abruptly halted when a white commissioner, Kenneth Mayfield, remarked that the county ticket collections agency has become a black hole because so much paperwork was being lost in the office.¹² Commissioner John Price and Judge Thomas Jones, both black, immediately expressed outrage over the comment and demanded an apology for his racially insensitive analogy. Mayfield’s protestations that the phrase had nothing to do with race fell on deaf ears. This form of heightened awareness to the potential for racial meanings is fundamental to how Bill Clinton’s use of fairy tale during the New Hampshire primary—in relation to Barack Obama’s purported stance in opposition to the Iraq war—could be seriously considered as a racial remark.

These contrary glimpses of the significance of race—either masking racial hate with code words or anticipating finding it potentially in any utterance—frame some of the challenges we face in grasping what counts as racial today. These opposed orientations induce a state of racial paranoia, as characterized by John L. Jackson. This condition, Jackson explains in Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, emerges from the ambiguous and nonfalsifiable sense of racial distrust at the heart of the new reality of race in America.¹³ Jackson does not see this paranoia as race-specific; rather, it delineates something essential about how all Americans confront social difference in their lives.¹⁴ Indeed, this condition is schizophrenic as well. We continue to commit to [race’s] social significance on many levels, but we seem to disavow that commitment at one and the same time. Race is real, but it isn’t. It explains social difference, but it couldn’t possibly. This kind of racial doublethink drives us all crazy, makes us so suspicious of one another, and fans the flames of racial paranoia. Nothing is innocent, and one bumps into conspirators everywhere.¹⁵ That is, the meaningfulness of race is outstripping the social conventions Americans have devised to contend with its unruly potential. This is one of the reasons we find media stories about race to be so fascinating: they offer society-wide opportunities to debate and evaluate what counts as racial these days.

But this effort is further complicated by increasing uncertainty over the role and extent of racism today. Is it still pervasive and unchanging, or is it finally gradually dissipating? The obvious way of framing this uncertainty is through the gap between the remarkable and impressive political ascendancy of Barack Obama and the enduring forms of racial inequality in housing, hiring, and health—on one side, an inspiring image; on the other, a source of infamy for this country. But so many instances and situations that might be characterized as reflecting racism fall in between these starkly contrasting representations. These are featured in Richard Ford’s The Race Card: How Bluffing