John Judis says that by checking black on his census box, Barack Obama was "confirming an enduring legacy of American racism." Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:
The claim that biracial African-Americans who identify as such are confirming "an enduring legacy of American racism," is so broad as to be meaningless.Taken on face value, it can be applied to any American who checks any race on the census form, since our concept of race, itself -- not just biraciality -- is "an enduring legacy of American racism."
But it's telling that Judis is only interested in one side of the ledger -- he wags his finger at the "peculiar logic of blackness," but has nothing to say about the peculiar, and at times malicious, logic of whiteness. Shifting with the decades and the mores of the country, "whiteness" is as invented and dubious as the one-drop rule. But Judis does not think that referring to John F. Kennedy as "white" is somehow a problem. He is not asking what Joe Lieberman checked on his census form.
Indeed: Whiteness, as much as blackness, is an "enduring legacy of American racism." So is Jazz music. So is soul food. So is the poetry of Langston Hughes, the prose of Ralph Ellison, and the fact that people in my family sometimes jump a broom before they get married. Black American culture is, by definition, an "enduring legacy of American racism" because it was midwifed by the institution of chattel slavery.
I wrote about this when Obama was first elected, and I think everything I said here still applies. The question really becomes what "legacies" of the painful elements of our past do we voluntarily embrace and which ones we reject. To the extent that biracial black people identify as black, they are choosing to embrace a once-painful element of their history. It is not being forced on us. I happened to check both white and black on my census form, but that was my choice. Every mixed person has a right to tell their own story on their terms. You might as well tell Jews to stop celebrating Passover because it is part of the enduring legacy of Jewish slavery in Egypt. That's exactly what it is, but that doesn't tell you anything about its value to the culture or why it continues to endure.
There's a separate question here about why Obama's decision to check black was a story in the first place, which I think is the more important question, and I'll write about that later.
-- A. Serwer
