The paradox of race in the U.S.: In order to become a culture in which race does not matter, race must always matter.
Due this coming June, my first granddaughter will be born into this world a bi-racial child during the second term of the first bi-racial president of the U.S.
The symbolic power of that coincidence is, I think, significant, but the realities of the U.S.—I regret to add—far outweigh that symbolism (consider that Obama is popularly referred to as “Black,” and not bi-racial, and how that designation reflects not race, but racism).
It is 2014, and the U.S. suffers from a cultural blindness to the lingering scars of racism, sexism, and classism. U.S. mass incarceration disproportionately destroys the lives of African American males: White males outnumber African American males in the U.S. about 6 to 1, yet prisons hold African American males at a 6 to 1 ratio over White males. African Americans and Whites use recreational drugs at about the same rates, as well, but African Americans are overwhelmingly and disproportionately targeted, arrested, and imprisoned for that drug use.
The realities of inequity for women in the U.S. are disturbingly parallel.
However, Zak Cheney-Rice’s National Geographic Concludes What Americans Will Look Like in 2050, and It’s Beautiful details that the U.S. my granddaughter will experience is, in fact, increasingly multi-racial:
The Wall Street Journal reported a few years back that 15% of new marriages in 2010 were between individuals of different races. It’s unclear whether they’ve included same-sex unions in the count, but as currently stated, this number is more than double what it was 25 years ago. The proportion of intermarriages also varied by race, with “9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians [marrying] outside their ethnic or racial group.” Interracial unions now account for 8.4% of all marriages in the U.S. (please see the images and charts)
As the number of bi-racial and multi-racial children increase in the U.S., we may find that the pervasive blindness to the -isms that deform our culture is replaced by a will to confront as well as end those -isms.
But, what keeps those -isms alive, I think, is the wrong goal—a call for a post-racial U.S.
Humans will always necessarily be, individually and collectively, defined by the coincidences of race, gender, and sexuality—those qualities that we do not choose. And children (as well as adults) will always be defined by the class each is born into through no decision or action of that individual.
What we should be seeking, then, is a post-racism society, not a post-racial society; a post-sexism society, a post-classism society, a post-homophobic, post-heteronormative society.
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Much of literature is the artist’s effort to remove blinders from a people.
In American literature, a recurring theme is that the American Dream is a lie (or at best, far from being realized)—even though many in the U.S. remain capable of reading, celebrating, and then completely missing that point with key works such as The Great Gatsby.
Aging and quite likely crumbling under the weight of something like Alzheimer’s, Willy Loman becomes convinced that he literally is worth more dead than alive—because he loses his ability to earn a living but holds a life insurance policy.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a damning work of drama and even more directly challenging the American Dream than Fitzgerald’s modern classic.
But for all the critical insight found in both Salesman and Gatsby, the two works also leave out a great deal—a great deal about the interplay among race, class, gender, and that American Dream as a lie.
However, Lorraine Hansberry returns to the American Dream in A Raisin in the Sun in order to hold up to the U.S. and the world what Salesman and Gatsby mostly ignore.
Walter Younger, like Willy Loman, faces the weight of a “dream deferred,” personifying Langston Hughes’s questions in “Harlem.”
Few if any works of literature surpass Hansberry’s masterful dramatization of race, class, gender, and the “heavy load” that is not just a “dream deferred” but a dream that is reserved for only some (white) people.
Both Willy Loman and Walter Younger are tragic figures in the modernist sense; and these two men share a burden of reaching for and believing in a dream promised that turns out to be a mirage.
But Walter suffers exponentially, not because of his race, but because of racism—how the people with power respond to his race.
In a post-racial world, Walter being African American would be erased, and with that, part of his Being would be erased. The quest for a post-racial world maintains a racialized gaze on Walter, and not the agents of racism.
Walter does not suffer oppression because of his race; he suffers oppression because of racism.
And that, I think, is one of the many nuanced messages of a surprisingly optimistic play (much like Alice Walker’s A Color Purple) that asks audiences to see and even recognize—not ignore—race, class, and gender in the context of social realities that are themselves what must be changed. Not the people who are the consequences of their race, gender, and class.
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Having just co-edited a volume on James Baldwin, I cannot imagine Baldwin calling for a post-racial U.S., one in which we pretend race doesn’t exist. I can imagine Baldwin informing anyone willing to listen that the problem remaining in the U.S. is not anyone’s race, but the eye of the beholder.
In the recently published Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems by Baldwin, the opening poem, “Staggerlee wonders,” begins:
I always wonder
what they think the niggers are doing
while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,
are containing
Russia
and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
China,
nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,
from blowing up that earth
which they have already
blasphemed into dung
And I hear Baldwin, and I imagine him saying we must see each other fully in order to be no longer blinded by our -isms.
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My granddaughter will be born a bi-racial child in the U.S. where the half of her which is African American will be the default for calling her “Black” and where women still earn about 3/4s what men do for the same labor.
She is likely to feel the dehumanizing realities about her own worth that send Willy to suicide. She is likely to share the frustrations Beneatha and Ruth Younger personify.
Those realities give me pause, sadden me. And I share with Walter a good deal of anger.
In another modern classic of American drama, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily grows from childhood to falling in love to marriage and to her own too-early death. In the final act, Emily views her life in replay from beyond and exclaims: “I can’t look at everything hard enough.”
She then turns to the Stage Manager and asks, distraught: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” And the Stage Manager replies, “No—Saints and poets maybe—they do some.”
My hope lies in our ability to “look at everything hard enough.”
To pay attention—not to ignore, not to pretend in the way that calling for a post-racial U.S. is pretending.
The paradox of race in the U.S.: In order to become a culture in which race does not matter, race must always matter.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 