After the RNC's new website, featuring Chairman Michael Steele's blog, "What up," was subject to merciless ridicule yesterday, the RNC changed the name of the blog to "Change the Game." People have speculated why -- with most chalking it up to Steele's ill-fated quest to make the GOP seem "cool." I think it probably has more to do with a certain president who ignored Steele's overtures while he was in the Senate, but that's just speculation.
At any rate, there's a point at which Steele's attempts to perform a certain cartoonish imitation of urban blackness becomes offensive and makes people angry. Yesterday on twitter, the #blackerthanmichaelsteele hashtag emerged, with twitter users mocking Steele as being "whiter" than say, U2 or Asher Roth.
This kind of ridicule is counterproductive and reinforces the very thing people are angry at in the first place. What's humiliating about Steele's signifying is not just that it's so blatantly insincere -- it's that it reinforces the idea that being "black" means behaving a certain way. Last year, liberals recoiled at the blatantly racist argument made by some conservatives that Barack Obama wasn't really black because, you know, black people don't go to Harvard.
Of course conservatives and white people weren't the only ones making that argument, and neither have a monopoly on racism or the perpetuation of racist views. While racism on the conservative side ranges from the ignorance borne of knowing very few black people to just outright racial resentment, racism in liberal circles is far more insidious. Because liberals are often from more diverse worlds, because they do come in contact with people of color, they assume a familiarity, an intimacy that sometimes makes them less likely to question their own assumptions about race. Whereas conservatives might not realize they're slotting black people into absurd, reductive binaries, liberals sometimes feel like they're simply entitled to. After all, some of their best friends are black.
Many of the people using the #blackerthanmichaelsteele hashtag were black -- but what this argument does is give anyone the permission to become arbitrary judges of other people's racial authenticity, which ultimately just reinforces the same harmful notions about blackness that people are angry at Steele for perpetuating in the first place. Some people suggested Steele "deserves" to be treated like this because he is a "sellout" -- personally I disagree -- and generally recoil from that kind of criticism. Having political views different from most black people does not make one a sellout. Being a black Republican does not make one a sellout. Being a black conservative does not make one a sellout. A "sellout" is someone who actively works against his own people for personal gain -- and while Steele's behavior has sometimes veered into that territory I think he honestly believes that black people ought to be voting Republican.
Steele's behavior is worthy of harsh criticism. But the last thing anyone should be doing is suggesting that there's a "correct" way to be black. That is absolutely tiresome.
-- A. Serwer
