By Steve Thomas
Observer Nevis Editor
“A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”
-Frederick Douglass, former American slave and abolitionist
“Man creates—and he uncreates—by language. And I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of why there is no brake inside us, nothing which says you can’t say the next thing. This absolutely fascinates me, that there is no limit to the autonomous power of human speech.”
-George Steiner, philosopher and writer
The world is watching the candidacy of Barack Obama, the first American of mixed African-white blood to become a serious contender for the nomination of a major political party for the presidency of the United States and, perhaps, the next president.
Mr. Obama’s candidacy has brought out many of the expected platitudes about his own achievements and the defining moment this is becoming in American history. His life story is threaded through with his struggle to find his identity, a difficult task in American society where so much has traditionally been defined by color, a condition that goes back to the first meeting of white European settlers with Native Americans and later heightened by the importation of African slaves, with the entire situation further complicated by efforts in the early 20th century to drastically restrict immigration by southern Europeans and the late 20th century by the growing influx of people of Latin American descent. America has often been called a melting pot, but all the ingredients of that pot have been meticulously labeled throughout its history.
Much of this labeling stems from the U.S. Census, which is required by the Constitution to be done every 10 years. The census is essential to determining population, which in turn determines the number of seats a state receives in the House of Representatives. It is also necessary to help track the number of eligible voters, taxation, and aids in long-term planning, plus provides the nation with knowledge about itself.
Since the 1960s, the census has been vital in identifying where racial groups live to prevent districts of the House of Representatives from having boundaries drawn that deprive non-white voters from the chance to elect non-white candidates. Prior to this, district boundaries, especially in the southern United States, were drawn specifically to keep non-white candidates from having a realistic chance to win elections. The few black members of the House were exclusively from northern cities where the overwhelming non-white majorities could not be cheated.
In addition, census information is used today to help assign federal money to minority aid programs in fields like housing and job training. Although those funds do get channeled to poor people throughout the nation, the data keeps much of that money flowing to non-whites living in poverty, often in concentrated neighborhoods in urban areas.
So this race labeling does result in federal aid going to where it is needed and opens opportunities for fair elections where, two generations ago, those opportunities did not exist – plus gives America a wealth of self-knowledge.
Yet this race labeling, for all its necessity in the multi-racial, multi-cultural United States, seems to be rapidly approaching a point of counter-productivity and irrelevance as the country moves toward an era where merit, performance and promise begin to outweigh pigmentation on the scale of all significant matters.
This is not to say America is reaching a post-color state. Far from it. Incidents of race baiting and hatred are reported in the media. Discrimination, though not just based on race, still exits. There is no use pretending that America is all sweet love and brotherhood. It isn’t. However, foul habits of the past are on the wane, not only battled from official heights but – far more importantly – becoming increasingly unacceptable in the corridors of business, in scenes of social interaction, at places of faith and on the streets. What has been prohibited by law is now being accepted in the hearts of Americans, where the fight against discrimination will ultimately be won.
If there is a defining color in America today, it is green – the color of money. The more of it you have, the further you distance yourself from the people who don’t have it, regardless of the color.
Yet, despite these changes, it is rare to read of Mr. Obama without seeing him referred to as a “black” candidate or a candidate of “African-American” heritage. While these descriptions are certainly accurate in today’s lexicon, these references betray a pattern of thought beholden to the past, wedded to the “one-drop” rule, with its roots going back to the days of pre-Revolutionary slavery, refined in the 19th and 20th centuries and carrying up to this day.
As Lawernce Wright described it: “A peculiarly American institution known informally as ‘the one-drop rule,’ which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of ‘black blood.’ This notion derives from a long discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, which was correlated with physical appearance and social behavior. The antebellum South promoted the rule as a way of enlarging the slave population with the children of slave holders. By the nineteen-twenties, in Jim Crow America the one- drop rule was well established as the law of the land.”
According to Mr. Wright, the government went through some difficulty trying to figure out how this peculiar rule should work: “Thomas Jefferson supervised the original census, in 1790. The population then was broken down into free white males, free white females, other persons (these included free blacks and ‘taxable Indians,’ which meant those living in or around white settlements), and slaves. How unsettled this country has always been about its racial categories is evident in the fact that nearly every census since has measured race differently. For most of the nineteenth century, the census reflected an American obsession with miscegenation. The color of slaves was to be specified as ‘B,’ for black, and ‘M,’ for mulatto. In the 1890 census, gradations of mulattos were further broken down into quadroons and octoroons. After 1920, however, the Census Bureau gave up on such distinctions, estimating that three-quarters of all blacks in the United States were racially mixed already, and that pure blacks would soon disappear. Hence-forth anyone with any black ancestry at all would be counted simply as black.”
Thus, Mr. Obama is black, which because of the constraints of language diminishes his mother’s heritage because she is white. It doesn’t mean that even the most casual of observers has to be ignorant of his entire heritage. What it means is that Mr. Obama’s emergence should force us to rethink the words we use to speak of race because the way we talk now is already outdated and with each passing day – with each new baby born of mixed parents – becomes even less accurate and more obsolete.
We live in an ever-integrating world where the most international of languages is English and that tongue is nowhere near catching up to the times. By allowing the one-drop rule to continue to dominate how we speak of race, we verbally embrace ways of thinking that have very little promise for a future that is on a path to embrace ever-greater mingling of people of all colors and their cultures.
Articulate language defines us a species. The rule of law is only possible because of our ability to speak and then record incredibly complex ideas. Something as deceptively simple as singing “Happy Birthday” is only possible because we can speak. Take away our language and suddenly we are back in a prehistoric competition with all other creatures for food.
For all the glory of language and all its power, we are irresponsibly and inexplicably lazy about finding better ways to describe ourselves in terms of heritage. We no longer speak of “the electric” when we speak of power or “Victrolas” for music-playing machines or “horseless carriages” when we speak of automobiles, yet we’re perfectly comfortable allowing the language to wallow in an archaic vocabulary forged by the horror of human bondage.
It is time for the language to catch up to the candidacy of Mr. Obama, to discard the manacles of linguistic slavery and find new and better ways to express who we are. We admit new words to the language every day, many of them driven by technology, like “google” or “wifi.”
It is time to turn this talent for expression to something truly important: Finding ways to describe who we are without losing our heritage but relinquishing verbal roots bound inextricably to racism, reaching for new rhetorical paths that reflect a new and better age, when prejudice is consigned to the dustbin of history and we have the words to express that progress.
It’s often said that talk is cheap, but when it comes to defining who we are, talk is the most valuable commodity we have. Mr. Obama’s eloquence and history are stark reminders of this truth. We should seize this unique moment in time to find some better words for use in the lexicon of race and leave behind the phrases that have imprisoned our minds in the cold cells of racism.
And then we shall be, as Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted us to be: free; free at last; thank God almighty, free at last.
