November 1, 2009

Nobel Peace Sparks War…

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the November 9, 2009 edition of The Nation.

October 21, 2009

 

Statistics show that there is a marked uptick in the amount of genuinely hateful yammering one finds in public and political discourse. “Interactive” media are all well and good, but there does seem to be a recurring motif of pointlessly fulminating ping-pong, no matter what the subject at hand. Someone writes an article. Some readers like it, some readers don’t. At first they fling praise or invective at the author, but soon they’re calling one another political poopy-heads and snarling about who’s stupider than whom. Then it goes from being accusative in the singular (you’re an idiot) to the stereotyped plural (your kind are all idiots).

Rush Limbaugh has applied this schoolyard Punch and Judy narrative to every topic he touches. But it has also been spread by “reality” TV and extends from Jon and Kate to Congressman Joe Wilson. Donald Rumsfeld was masterful at it, and George W. Bush used it to suck the air out of every diplomatic space he entered. As a national discourse, it’s silly and uninformative. When elevated to the level of international relations, it has been disastrous, as clichés like “You’re either with us or against us” have shown.I say all this because I think that the art of diplomacy is something that has become largely invisible to us in the United States. We value directness, even where it insults someone; we want instant responses, even where answers don’t come easily. Diplomacy, a carefully choreographed ballet with words, is quite foreign to our perceptions of the world. We tend not to think about strategies of approach and deflection, negotiation and accommodation, patience and translation, and care in choice of words combined with pointedly applied pressure.

This was certainly evident in the response to President Obama’s having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Lots of sniffing about his readiness, lots of disparagement about his “pretty words” and “empty promises.” And then, of course, the formulaic fights: he’s a wizardy warlord with the power of hypnosis! He’s a dangerous con man whose only gift is charisma. You’re wrong! You’re wronger! Dope slaps all around!

It’s helpful to consider exactly why President Obama was cited. It was given to him, said the Nobel judges, for his having “created a new climate in international politics.” “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” Indeed, Obama has brought the United States back to the status of the most admired nation in the world, based on a survey of thousands of people in twenty countries around the globe.

Some commentators have chalked this up to Obama’s silver tongue, as though great oratory is inherently about smoke and mirrors, emptiness and hype. But what Obama has done is nothing less than steer our huge ship of state back from the brink of “preventive war” and economic free fall. He restored competing theories of constitutional interpretation. No longer is the executive branch battling in a different textual universe: between due process and none at all; between the courts and images from 24; between privacy and supersurveillance; between accountability and official holes of dark secrecy.

These are serious accomplishments, with pragmatic consequences. As just one small example, after Obama was elected 1.6 million South Africans registered to vote. Maybe that just doesn’t matter to many Americans, but diplomacy is the art of creating a geography where citizens and their leaders can develop means of negotiating with one another. Around 90 percent of Britons, French and Germans believe that Obama has affirmatively changed the course of diplomacy and that the United States is now a superpower that listens. The guiding question, the committee reminded us, was, “Who has done the most to enhance peace in the preceding year?” To enhance peace–that’s the standard. It is not the impossible metric of ending all wars, of delivering peace on earth, right now. The committee summarized its conclusion succinctly: “Who has done more than Barack Obama?”

So how do you turn that into a negative? The headline in the Chicago Tribune read, “Europeans Honor US President for Not Being Bush.” The New York Times sniffed, “Normally the prize has been presented, even controversially, for accomplishment”–making it quite clear the editors thought Obama had accomplished nothing at all. Everywhere, it seemed, the prize was described as “a political liability,” “a mixed blessing,” a “poison chalice,” a reminder of the “gap” between his “star power” and “actual achievements.” The prize was figured as somehow devalued by the choice, as though when this man enters the space of the world’s highest honor, the property values fall. It was suddenly a European socialist foreign thing rather than a global honor, and therefore one more sign that Obama is not one of “us.”

Whether or not Obama was your personal pick, the Nobel Peace Prize surely confers honor on our president, on America’s reputation and on us, the people. Among left and right, there’s a kind of shortsightedness of ingratitude and a failure to acknowledge the degree to which Obama’s carefully constructed rhetorical interventions have created a new diplomatic space.

The words of an American president matter. The executive power is nothing more than the ability to craft policy, guide action, provide direction–all with words, and all with consequences for the future of the world. So Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is something all Americans should feel good about, a reassurance that we are moving toward a light, a globally hailed goal of prosperity and nuclear disarmament. It speaks to the unfortunate power of our “It’s a Good Thing! It’s an Evil Thing! Slimeball! Sucker!” habits of thinking, however, that not a single US newspaper I could find had a headline with anything as simple as: “Congratulations, Mr. President! Congratulations to Us, Every One!”

November 1, 2009

Post “Post-Race”

The Observer Debate

A year on, has Barack Obama met the hopes of the world?

Last November, in Chicago’s Grant Park, world politics was transformed by the arrival of America’s first black president. But has he made good on his groundbreaking promises?

Barack Obama on stage in Grant Park, ChicagoBarack Obama on stage in Grant Park, Chicago, on 4 November 2008. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Patricia Williams: On race

The volume of abuse has not shaken him

The honeymoon has ended. While Barack Obama’s overall popularity remains relatively high, the right wing of our nation has become well-organised and noisy, voicing grievances in bitter terms that leave little doubt that the United States is not yet the haven of “post-racial” harmony for which most of us yearn.

For much of recent history, American racism has been expressed in terms that stereotyped black people variously as criminal, buffoonish, bestial, or less intelligent. This typecasting remains a powerful legacy; and the divide it still imposes is evident in the vastly disproportionate rates of incarceration, residential segregation, employment, and educational opportunity.

In addition to the general enormity of the problem, however, tackling racism poses a serious Catch-22 for the president. Even for many who voted for him, Obama has been boxed in by an historically less-visible sort of racial stereotype: that of “the good one” — the exceptional person of colour who proves the rule, the well-scrubbed model minority, the socially acceptable brown face, the black person white people love to love because loving him proves that there is no hatred in our hearts.  This particular configuration is heavily dependant upon the anointed black person remaining “above” race at all costs: talking about race as little as possible, remaining apart from the masses, staying silent as the lonely figurehead of that conferred exceptionalism.

But even if he wanted to, the president of the United States cannot remain apart from racialised frays – they are too much part of our domestic life. And so whenever Obama attempts to address real racial disparity, he risks being perceived as having broken the covenant of the “post-race” ideal. Perhaps predictably, the backlash to his not being that imaginary icon of race-less-ness has been significant and constraining. If, for example, one listens to Fox News-– which in the US has millions more viewers that CNN – virtually anything Obama does is depicted as “playing the race card” or “reverse racism” or “racial favouritism.” Not only is he a “racist” by this measure, he is constantly – and I do mean constantly – compared to Hitler, to Stalin and to Osama Bin Laden.

It’s a truly perplexing development: fear of “the black man” has been seamlessly flipped from nightmares about the rebellious dispossessed thug, to those of the too-powerful, much-too-smart-for-his-own-good, oppressively dispossessing autocrat. Indeed, in the alternative universe of Fox News, President Obama is the new face of racism itself, a man who supposedly hates white people and is out to take away their guns, indoctrinate their children, and kill old people.

It’s hard to have a sensible conversation about anything in a climate polarised in this manner. It is one reason that rational discussion of health care has become so unfortunately side-tracked by ridiculous non-issues and imaginary fears. At the same time, President Obama has remained steadfastly engaged with the jobs at hand. If his address of racial disparity has, out of indubitable political necessity, remained oblique, his grace in dealing with all constituencies, no matter how hostile, has been salutary and exemplary. His message has remained consistent and reasonable through all the surrounding nonsense. As he first posited in The Audacity of Hope, tackling structural racism is something that all Americans will be better for. The goal of this collective enterprise must be to enable all Americans to feel safe not only within our various racial groupings or ethnic enclaves, but also and equally comfortable in the uniquely multi-faceted human community that is the United States of America.

Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University

September 26, 2009

Voice of America?

Voice of America?

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the October 12, 2009 edition of The Nation.

September 23, 2009

The cover of the September 28 New York magazine has a picture of President Obama’s face overlaid with the suddenly common currency of our “national debate”: Parasite-in-Chief. Hitler. Liar. Impostor. Stalin. Nazi. Socialist. Muslim. Kenya-born.

That these labels are incoherent is clearly not what matters. That they are untrue means even less. The president’s Christianity is no match for the power of his imaginary Muslim doppelgänger. What the healthcare bill actually says is much less exciting than the fantasy of Grandma’s last gurgle as she is tossed into the tumbrel. Official documentation of Obama’s citizenship and place of birth means nothing to those who apparently need to have seen it before they’ll believe it. (As one commentator on the Drudge Report wrote in a parody of birthers: “We also demand a mason jar filled with the actual afterbirth, a copy of the birth filmed in HD, satellite imagery of the hospital, a record of the comings and goings of both parents from the moment of conception to birth, and a sworn statement from G-d. Is that really too much to ask for?”) That the president pursues solidly centrist economic policies is of no import to those who entertain themselves scribbling little mustaches on his portraits.

It is clear that common notions of reality are not what motivate or inform the rabidly hateful calls for revolt that have overtaken our national discourse. By no measure of the real world is Obama evil or a mass murderer or an “alien” or even just a socialist. As Barney Frank put it–on what planet do these people spend most of their time?

The answer to that, of course, means taking a serious look at the narrative worlds created by Fox News and AM radio, where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are the reigning kings. This is a world in which the president is not really American. The presidency has been stolen. The president does not believe in a Christian God. He takes his orders from a cave in Afghanistan. He wants to take away your guns, impoverish your children and kill your elders. If this balloon of fear were not bad enough, it’s supplemented by repeated calls to “retake” America, to “regain” a golden past, to “revolt” against the kleptocracy.

This is not the kind of speech that can be shrugged off by calling for “more speech.” And no, I am not suggesting censorship. But I do think we need to take the growing power of this fear-fueled, alternative, imaginary universe more seriously. It has consequences for the physical world in which our real bodies reside. If one really believes that Obama is the Antichrist, then one goes out and starts arming oneself; and violence directed against those perceived as less than all-American begins to be justified as “pre-emptive” self-defense.

We know that incendiary media can foment terrible consequences. We all know that Stalin propagandized against “counterrevolutionary infiltrators.” Similarly, Goebbels used mass media to incite resentments against Poles, Jews and “friends of the left,” coolly trading on fears that German civilization was being debased, its government overtaken by “parasites” and “degenerates” and that true Germans must defend themselves against such forces or be annihilated. “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent,” he once observed. Rather, “its task is to lead to success.”

My point is not to compare birthers and tea baggers to Goebbels–there’s been enough of that ping-pong already. So lest the Nazi example evoke more than I mean, there are plenty of more recent instances. Argentina leading up to the junta, for example. Or Rwanda, where Human Rights Watch has documented how well-coordinated radio broadcasts systematically created the illusion that the Tutsi minority were internal traitors; gave out lists of names to be targeted; and instructed Hutus to “kill them before they kill you.” Yet Radio-Television Libre des Milles-Collines, one of the most bilious stations, also aired good music and lively interviews with ordinary folk, populist chatter that sounded like “a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus.” The poison was packaged appealingly, and as the killing escalated, radio talking heads vaunted it all as “self-defense.” As then-commander of the UN peacekeeping force, Roméo Dallaire, put it, “replacing [the broadcasts] with messages of peace and reconciliation would have had a significant impact on the course of events.”

Professor Frank Chalk, of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, has documented some of the ingredients that can tip a society from expressive speech into excessive fulmination and then into full-scale repression or violence. They include: demonization of an identified or target audience, accusations of treason and blaming one’s neighbors or leaders for conspiring or sympathizing with foreign enemies. In addition, the media can exploit “widespread perception that a crisis exists…a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information…and a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience.”

I know this will be misread, so let me underscore my meaning. I am not urging censorship. As Professor Chalk points out, mass media can be just as easily used to spread the messages of human rights. Nor am I without a sense of proportion: I do not believe we are on the cusp of chaos or genocide. Rather, I’m concerned about what Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman described as “a bad hangover of [a] bygone period, and a forewarning that these hangovers still prevail and can recur, time and again.” I do believe, therefore, that it is high time we all anticipate and grapple lucidly with the sustained, long-term effect of crazy proselytizing by Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh. Their influence is growing, not waning. They represent a force that resorts to dehumanizing neighbors, fellow citizens and, in the embodiment of President Obama, the American Dream.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

August 31, 2009

Close Encounters

Aug 31, 2009

The Daily Beast

Close Encounters

By Patricia J. Williams

Sunday, August 23

Till now, it has been a quiet summer on Martha’s Vineyard—fewer tourists than usual, much more rain than normal, so little sun that fruits have remained hard and small and vegetables have failed to ripen. All that changes the moment the president arrives. The sun breaks out. The ferry disgorges hordes of happy visitors. House rentals are hard to come by. Mopeds clog the little roads. The afternoon lull is broken by the heavy thwumping of military helicopters. People stand on their decks, turn their faces to the sky, and cheer.

Monday, August 24

He’s golfing! The neighborhood is a-twitter. A small crowd gathers round the entrance to Farm Neck Golf Course, cellphones and cameras held aloft. A solemn police officer gently pushes the pack to the far side of the street. Down the road, a woman stands on her lawn putting the finishing touches on an enormous OBAMA sign made entirely of red and white balloons. Up the road, the Portuguese-American Society puts out a sandwich board advertising their weekly “Fish Fry Friday,” but adding, “First Family Welcome.”

A man enters the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore and loudly, aggressively, grandstandingly, demands to know if “you have any books by Ann Coulter. She’s a Republican. Do you people carry books by Republicans?” More quietly, Cindy Sheehan sails back and forth across the pond that the Obamas’ farm overlooks; she is protesting the very notion of a presidential vacation. Locals advise her to bring a pole to the enterprise, that the fishing is good over there. That night, I dream that Obama turns his weary face into his pillow and groans, “I just need a nap.”

Tuesday, August 25

Friends make dinner reservations at the Oyster Bar and Grille in Oak Bluffs. I drive up moments after the president and his entourage arrive at Sweet Life Restaurant, just next door. Circuit Avenue, the town’s main street, is blocked; the sidewalks, the side streets, the little surrounding parks are packed. I stash my car half a mile away, edge my way through to the front of the goggling crowds. I approach a police officer to ask how best to get to the Oyster Bar. He asks if I have a reservation. Yes, I say, and give him my name. He lifts the yellow police tape and ushers me across the street. I feel a small thrill of euphoria: it’s like getting past the velvet rope at some chic New York nightspot. I passed the test! I want to wave in modest condescension to the throngs pressed back behind me.

Our party is well-seated right by the window. We spend the entire meal with our noses pressed to it. The only time we turn our heads is when the chocolate-truffle mud cake arrives. It is at that precise moment the presidential party exits Sweet Life and is hustled into a large, black tank of a car. All we get to see are the tail lights of the president’s SUV as he pulls away. After the police tape is taken down, hundreds and hundreds of people pour into the street, comparing photographs and stories. Circuit Avenue turns into a jubilant street party.

I meet a college classmate who was seated in Sweet Life only a few feet away from the president. We press around her for a firsthand account. She says that the president had steak, the first lady had halibut. Valerie Jarrett wore her hair combed straight back, “very beach-y,” and sported a fashionable pair of little heels. The president’s sister was there with her baby; Malia and Sasha were not. Another friend claims to have taken a good, clear picture of the Obamas with her iPhone, but when she tries to summon it, there is only a blank screen with a blurry spot of light, like all those purported sightings of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. The stores stay open late. We, the people, eat lots of ice cream and dance in the streets.

Wednesday, August 26

I wake up to the news that Senator Ted Kennedy has died.  The railing of August cicadas rises shrill and unbearable. My head throbs. Flags fly at half staff. The cardboard signs welcoming Obama to the island are amended to include messages of condolence to the Kennedy family, as well as defiant messages of support for universal health care. President Obama expresses his sorrow with a short but eloquent statement that renders the island’s media center (otherwise known as the auditorium of the Oak Bluffs Elementary School) a steroidal hive of international satellite activity. Later in the day, he is spotted biking along the beach. The fact that his daughters wear helmets but he does not gives rise to some leisurely tsk-tsk-ing. A hand-painted sign by the side of the road welcomes—then warns—the first family to check their bodies for the Lyme-disease-bearing ticks that abound on the Vineyard. Life feels very fragile.

Thursday, August 27

I travel into Boston for the day. Traffic comes to a standstill as the funeral cortege accompanying Senator Kennedy’s body leaves the family compound in Hyannis Port around noon, winds its way up Route 3, and on through downtown Boston, followed by limousines transporting 85 of his closest relatives. The cortege travels past the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Memorial School, past the Kennedy Federal Building, past the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway (which is built over the old John F. Fitzgerald Expressway), past a landscape rich with the landmarks of intergenerational public service. It is an arresting event, an amazing grace, the miles upon miles of gathered mourners, the miles upon miles of tears and applause. The senator’s family members open the windows of their cars, waving back their gratitude and acknowledgement.

Friday, August 28

Senator Kennedy’s body lies in state at the Kennedy Presidential Library in South Boston. Tens of thousands line up to pay their respects as Hurricane Danny moves slowly up the Atlantic seaboard and darkens the sky.

Back on the Vineyard, there are gatherings at many of the local churches. The Kennedys are much loved on this island, and perhaps nowhere more so than among the African-American summer population. Senator Kennedy’s early endorsement of Barack Obama’s candidacy for the presidency meant a great deal. And just as Mayor John Fitzgerald, the senator’s maternal grandfather, was Boston’s first Irish-Catholic mayor, and just as the senator’s brother was our nation’s first Irish-Catholic president—so many African-Americans think of Barack Obama not merely as the first black president, but as “our Kennedy.”

Saturday, August 29

On what would have been the last full day of his vacation, President Obama fulfills the sad task of travelling to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston to deliver the eulogy at Senator Kennedy’s funeral. Kennedy was “the soul of the Democratic Party,” he says. Offshore, Hurricane Danny is downgraded to a tropical storm but the wind whips ferociously at the welcome balloons and the hand-lettered signs. The Secret Service packs up in the driving rain. I log onto my computer to read the news of the day. It’s a very busy world out there. Somehow I doubt he got to take that nap.

Patricia J. Williams is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster’s Egg; and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. She is a also a columnist for The Nation.

August 31, 2009

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy

My family’s debt to the Kennedys’ America

Edward Kennedy was one of the ‘north east elite’, but his commitment to fairness and opportunity meant he was loved across the usual divides of class and colour

When I woke up to the news that Senator Ted Kennedy had died, I was taken by surprise; I had been so irrationally certain of merciful miracles. The railing of August cicadas rose shrill and unbearable. My head throbbed. It was a vivid green morning, the air muggy and sad.

It was 10 years ago this summer that John Kennedy Jr’s body was pulled from the sea off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, the island from where I now write, his ashes returned to the sea days later. I feel a commingled grief; so much promise lost; the end of a legacy.

Flags fly at half-mast. The cardboard signs welcoming Obama to the island are amended to include messages of condolence to the Kennedy family, as well as defiant messages of support for universal healthcare.

There isn’t anyone who grew up in Massachusetts who doesn’t feel personally touched by the life of Kennedy. There’s the family legacy. His maternal grandfather was the amiably colourful mayor of Boston, John Francis Fitzgerald, the child of immigrants and the first Irish Catholic to achieve such power in the then-English – or “Boston Brahmin” – dominated-political landscape of New England.

The election of “Honey Fitz”, as he was known, was significant because this was the Boston of Henry James and the Irish were very much looked down upon. I remember my grandmother describing signs in the windows of certain establishments that read: “No Irish, no coloured, no dogs.”

Years later, when Mayor Fitzgerald’s daughter, Rose, married Joseph Kennedy, the son of a competing Irish politician, Honey Fitz saw to it that his grandsons grew up aiming to break the same barrier at every level of government, even the presidency.

And so they did. This past Thursday, when Senator Kennedy’s funeral cortege wound the 90 miles from the family compound on Cape Cod up to Boston, it made its way through a landscape littered with memorials to his siblings, his parents and his grandparents: Lt Joseph P Kennedy Jr Memorial School; the Kennedy Federal Building; Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway (which is built over the old John F Fitzgerald expressway); the Robert Kennedy School; the JFK Presidential Library.

The particular struggles of the Irish in Boston is largely forgotten today; indeed, the Kennedys are often characterised as part of “the north east liberal elite”. But the origins of their family success are rooted in a fight that spans all aspects of a broader civil rights movement that stretches back to the 1800s and included not merely African Americans but Irish and Italian immigrants, the descendants of indentured servants, the poor, the labouring classes.

In addition, Mayor Fitzgerald was one of 12 children, only three of whom survived to adulthood, an experience that marked his career by a particular commitment to bringing medical access for all.

It was a legacy that he passed on through the generations. It is no accident, therefore, that his granddaughter Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics. It is no accident that Edward Kennedy helped pass Medicare and called universal health insurance his “life’s work”.

It is true that the senator’s life history was one of great human complexity. And just as the healthcare debates have been disrupted by an astonishing amount of hateful speech, so the national blogosphere is filled with bitter, ungenerous commentary about the time he cheated on an exam at Harvard; or how he called his political advisers before he called paramedics when his car plunged off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, leaving the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young campaign aide, submerged for nearly nine hours; or whetherhe drank to excess.

But here in Massachusetts, it is the political commitment that counts. It is his public service that means the most and the regional allegiance to this man crosses all partisan boundaries. The Boston Herald, a local tabloid that spilled oceans of ink denouncing him in life, remembered him with uncharacteristic mistiness.

Virtually all the callers to the normally right-wing, shock-jock local radio stations made tearful testimonials that began: “Although I disagreed with everything he stood for…” and ended with: “They don’t make men like him any more.”

Edward Moore Kennedy was a dogged player at the game of constituent politics. Flawed as he was, he never ever forgot the people with whom he came in contact. When my great aunt died, he sent a large bouquet of flowers. She had worked as a maid at Harvard when he was a student.

She adored him. He was “a good man”, by which she meant that he was a man who treated her – that is, people of colour – with respect. She became a lifelong campaign volunteer for every political race he entered. Yes, in all probability, someone in his office sent the flowers, but at her funeral we all wept harder at the very gesture. Aunt Sophie was no doubt smiling down from heaven, just bursting her buttons with pride.

As I write, President Obama is giving the eulogy at Senator Kennedy’s funeral. To African Americans, Obama is “our Kennedy”. I wept when I discovered that the funeral was to be held at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Although many in the national press cite the church as one close to the hospital where his daughter Kara was treated for lung cancer, or one that is in a neighbourhood once inhabited by Irish immigrants, it is also in the neighbourhood where I grew up. It is in what most Bostonians know as a black neighbourhood, a “dangerous” neighbourhood, a neighbourhood “in transition”.

These days, it reflects the demographic that both Kennedy and Obama represent: a new generation of the American dream. It is a neighbourhood filled with hopeful immigrants from the Caribbean and West Africa and Bosnia and the Middle East. It is on the cusp of gentrification – a neighbourhood of college students and the underemployed, of medical technicians and starving artists.

There’s a black barbershop next door to the church, and a pizza joint and restaurant that serves Jamaican food. If some reporters were surprised when they set up the satellite feeds, those who knew anything about Ted Kennedy and the tradition from which he came were not.

There was a quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses that Senator Kennedy loved, a quote that he read at his brother Robert’s funeral, and one that is now being read as he is laid to rest: ” I am a part of all that I have met… ” begins the stanza. Senator Edward Kennedy lived his life precisely at the crossroads of all that he encountered – at the intersection of statesmanship, of history, of moral purpose, of tragedy, of compromise.

There are many who think that his passing means the end of an era. When I look at the unparalleled outpouring of those he met, whose world he touched, I am confident that the work he began lives on not only in the politics and presidency of Barack Obama, but in the dreams he ignited in so many, many others.

August 27, 2009

Metalinguistics of The Health Debate

Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.

August 26, 2009

The spinmeisters of the right have done quite a job with what used to be straightforward English etymology. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, “integration” was inverted to mean “takeover” and “colorblindness” is code for abandoning the advances of the civil rights movement, which itself is synonymous with an “industry” of exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that whenever a piece of progressive legislation comes to the table, the same manipulations come into play from right-wing pundits who shamelessly profess their desire to see the Obama presidency fail. Thus it is that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is being turned upside down as the neat equivalent of Germany’s Bankrupting Forced Death Act of 1939.

If you are watching the healthcare town-hall ruckuses with only common dictionary meanings in your head, you will be struck by the protesters’ general incoherence and outright nonsense, bearing no rational connection to the actual draft of the healthcare bill. As Representative Barney Frank demanded of one constituent who likened the bill to Nazism, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal… then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

So reversal is key to understanding what’s going on. It’s not just “lies”; it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down. It’s not factually accurate, but this is how they feel. Obama is Hitler! Health insurance for all means euthanasia for me! “My” country is suddenly “their” country.

Of course, there are special interests who profit from the magnification of these fears. Betsy McCaughey, a former shill for a medical instruments company, is the original source of the “death panel” rumors. From the beginning, big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, with an almost inconceivable amount of money to spend, have been muddying the waters. Think about the recent revelation that Merck secretly financed the publication of a fake medical journal that was designed to look objective but merely touted the supposed benefits of its products–and included “paid advertisements” for the company’s drugs. What is truth in such a corrupt hall of mirrors?

But what does the bill actually say? A quick summary of the most contentious point: the act would provide reimbursement if you seek medical counseling about end-of-life decisions. This option allows you to plan what you would like to have done in the case of catastrophic or terminal illness–nothing forced about it. All extraordinary measures will continue to be used to resuscitate someone whose wishes are unknown: feeding tube, intubation, cracking ribs to defibrillate, whatever it takes. By contrast, it is private, profit-motivated insurance companies–which deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and restrict one’s choice of doctor, medical treatments and length of hospital stays (based on actuarial tables)–that bear the greatest resemblance to a mulching euthanasia machine. When nearly 50 million US citizens live without any health coverage, how on earth could a purely voluntary public option be considered throwing people under the bus?

Let me acknowledge the genuine ideological and moral misgivings behind some of the protests. Many libertarians hate anything the government does, no matter how monopolistic or quasi-governmental the power of pharmaceutical and insurance companies. But they are a minority and not generally the bloc using the language of reversal and code. Similarly, there are those with genuine moral or religious qualms: “prolifers” who, if they believe that life begins at the molecular moment of conception, could also think that any end-of-life consultation is against God’s will. This would be the same line of reasoning followed by those who wanted Congress to keep Terri Schiavo on life support no matter what. While I can certainly respect that as a belief, it is clearly even more of a minority position than libertarianism. In addition, it requires strong-armed government intrusion over the wishes of patients or family; and it is totally unsustainable as national public policy.

All of this is complicated but surely, with a bit of listening, comprehensible to the average citizen. So how do we connect the reality of our dismal life-expectancy and health-cost statistics to the hysterical sobbing of people who come to town-hall meetings furious that “the insurance companies won’t be able to make a profit”? Much of the epic woe is not about healthcare or public options. It’s about roiling resentments that need to be dressed up as something else, the coded mummery of Halloween monsters hybridized into new chimeras of hate. It’s about fear that precious resources are being transferred to “alien” others. Fear that the gains of others are ill-gotten, leaving the lonely patriot survivalist as victim, “thrown away,” trash. In these fiery monologues, even our president is figured as conspiratorially alien-birthed, from a galaxy far, far away, who’s just pretending to be one of “us.”

This morning I saw a picture of President Obama dressed as Hitler, complete with little mustache, tacked high on a tree trunk. At first it seemed jaw-droppingly ridiculous, sociopathically paranoid. But if the rule of reversal is what’s encoded in that image, all people of good will must worry that what’s really at stake for some of our gun-toting, demagogic fellow citizens is nothing less than America’s very own Weimar moment.

August 24, 2009

Striver’s Row, updated….

Obama and the Black Elite
by Patricia J. Williams
August 21, 2009 | 8:22pm

Obama and the Black Elite

by Patricia J. Williams

August 21, 2009 | 8:22pm

Dmitry Kostyukov, AFP / Getty Images

As the first family departs for Martha’s Vineyard, Patricia Williams says the trip illuminates their delicate relationship with the black upper class—a clubby world of debutantes and BMWs.

When President Barack Obama appointed Valerie Jarrett as his senior advisor and Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary, there was, among the mainstream media, a bit of muffled gasping about from where on earth such designer-clad doyennes might have emerged. In what hidden universe do black people exist who can actually distinguish a fish knife from a shoe horn? And are there more of them?

View Our Gallery of the Obamas on Vacation

AP Photos (2); Getty Images

The phenomenon of a black upper class has always been complicated, ambivalent. Often the descendents of “house slaves,” some significant percentage grew up imitating the manners, mores, and various condescensions of white plantation society—including setting up private clubs and exclusionary networks. More recently, the ranks of the black upper middle class have been increased with beneficiaries of the civil rights movement–with people such as Barack and Michelle Obama, who represent a generation able to take advantage of increased access to jobs and schools once off limits. This new mobility has not altogether erased some of the clubbishness and snob appeal of older black organizations, however. There are still fault lines and hidden hierarchies within black social life.

For those whose only exposure to upper class African American social organizations may be the black student organization on one’s college or grad school campus, well, brace yourselves: there’s a world of black debutantes out there, and they mean to do serious, social-climbing business, the wheels of their black BMWs and silver Mercedes Benzes sinking up to their plantinum hubcaps in the soft white sand of the beaches on Martha’s Vineyard, the North Fork of Long Island, and the islands off the coast of South Carolina.

Colson Whitehead’s novel, Sag Harbor, reveals a glimpse of this Cosby-inflected world of strivers, arrivistes and “black boys with summer houses.” These relatively well-off African Americans come largely from the ranks of what the novel’s narrator describes as “the magic seven”: doctors, dentists, lawyers, preachers, teachers, nurses, and undertakers. This is the world that those African Americans not part of such networks sometimes refer to, with a dismissive sad sigh, as “boogie, ” which is a class reference seemingly unknown to most white people. The New York Times, writing about Whitehead, spelled the word, with utter, and utterly cringe-worthy, uninitiated innocence: “bourgie.”

So, a little background for those terrified that the ship of state is about to be steered toward the shoals of Rush Limbaugh’s wildest fears : it may come as a surprise that the black middle class is just that, middle class. It is conformist, pleasantly centrist, relatively conservatively Christian, overweeningly upwardly mobile and generally better (if more anxiously) dressed than its white counterparts.

The media often speaks of “the black middle class” as though it were a solid singularity that includes any dark-skinned person with a job or an education—from bicycle messengers to Oprah Winfrey. Likewise, any black person without a permanent 9-5 job is tossed into “the underclass.” This is in stark contrast to the way “middle class” is applied to white citizens, where it connotes a specific income level lodged above the “temporarily unemployed” and the working class and just beneath the upper-middle class, with the wealthy and the super-rich above that. In other words, popular depictions frequently suppress the political presence of a large black working class, as well as a black upper-middle class, to say nothing of those wealthy African Americans who are bankers or industrialists or computer geeks rather than just movie stars or sports figures.

Hard as it might be to imagine if your head is filled with the Hollywood haze of Gone With the Wind, whatever Miss Scarlett yearned for, so did succeeding generations of her ex-slaves—who in real life were as resolute and deeply ambitious as she was. And so, after the Civil War, African Americans arranged themselves into all manner of self-help groups patterned upon the gilded hierarchies of Tara. Most Americans are at least aware of the role of the black church in this effort at uplift, as well as of the NAACP, of the Tuskegee Institute, and of the Urban League. Thanks to Spike Lee’s movie, School Daze, perhaps a few more are even aware of the contribution of historically black colleges—as well as the function of segregated Greek fraternities and sororities—in coalescing fairly conservative, life-long networking circles.

As with white fraternities, hazing rituals can be snobbish, or bullying. And as with white country clubs, exclusivity can have its ugly edge: some black social groups have the reputation of discriminating based on “connections” of ancestry or education or income, or, in the not-so-recent past, skin color (must be “lighter than a brown paper bag”) and texture of hair (a comb would have to move flowingly through smooth and therefore presumptively not-kinky hair). As for those debutante cotillions…well, what can I say?

Today, some of the largest of these organizations were set up to provide dating opportunities for the children of suburban black professionals—that is, teens living in nearly all-white neighborhoods and attending nearly all-white schools, environments that unconsciously or otherwise exclude them from social events or coming-of-age rituals. But most of these groups—Jack and Jill, The Links, The Girl Friends, The Coalition of a Hundred Black Women—are also philanthropic; they raise money for scholarships, public relief efforts, mentoring, and health care. Like Hadassah or the Junior League, the most vibrant and visible of them are matriarchies, serviced by well-educated, mostly married women whose husbands are well-to-do enough to allow them to engage in charitable work.

There are lots of men’s organizations too, of course, but they have historically been somewhat more secretive, with more rituals and even better hats. Like the Knights of Columbus or the Bohemian Club, they are all about bolstering manhood through mutual esteem, fine whisky, cigars, and purest nepotism. 100 Black Men of America. The Guardsmen. The Boule. These and a thousand other networks are the backbone of the black bourgeoisie.

Yet such organizations operate within a distinctly ambivalent theater of relationship: On one hand, there is all that philanthropy. On the other, it’s all funded by terribly effete events like golf tournaments, tennis meets sponsored by law firms and cigarette companies, gourmet get-togethers, Caribbean cruises, black-tie dinners, fashion shows, and bachelor auctions. Oh, and did I mention those cotillions…?

One of the most interesting aspects of the Obamas’ ascendency is that neither one of them is the product of this approval-dependent world of relentless obligation, prayerful duty and punishing well-scrubbed-ness. In the first place, Obama’s mother was white, and membership in organizations such as Jack and Jill depends on mama-geniture (mother must be African-descended; it’s not as important that one’s father be black). And since both of Michelle Obama’s parents were working class, it’s doubtful that they would have considered the hefty fees and consuming time commitments a priority, even assuming they’d have met the more social-climbing criteria that a number of such clubs emphasize. (As in: You will be dropped if you miss too many meetings—unless, of course, you’re a legacy. You are likely to be shamed out of the ranks if your kids have the kinds of learning disabilities that preclude their becoming—at least!—doctors, dentists or lawyers. You can buy back into the ranks if you have enough money, influence, or celebrity.)

A friend who declines to be identified describes his experience as a teenager in Jack and Jill: “You were taught to be an Adam Clayton Powell kind of black person. We had dances at the Copacabana. You learned how to dress up, and competed in memorizing long passages from Ellison’s Invisible Man or the Bible. You were judged for your diction. If you succeeded in acting white, you succeeded at being an acceptable kind of black person.”

Sigh. But maybe we’re poised for a new, more mixed up chapter in all this. Last year, Michele Obama was made an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the oldest black sororities. And, hallelujah, these days there are few social clubs in the world—of any race, religion, class, or ethnicity—that wouldn’t welcome the Obamas and their gloriously well-mannered children into the fold.

Better still, the Obamas have begun to model a new, more ecumenical kind of community service that welcomes the contributions of traditional organizations but depends less on the need for exclusivity. It was no accident that Rev. Lowry ended his inaugural benediction with words that every African American heard as a call for an end to old, internecine prejudices, and a new day when “black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what’s right.”

As president, moreover, Obama has consistently emphasized the need for a broad, unified dedication to national service and political engagement—not just military service, but charitable efforts both large and small. Service that all of us can render—old, young, rich, poor. Not just spending years in the Peace Corps, but small tasks that add up in the aggregate: reading to young children, repairing homes, planting gardens, volunteering at hospital, teaching computer skills, stuffing envelopes, picking up litter, organizing book exchanges, food banks, small business support. This less-narrowly bounded vision of who can be a resource for whom is democratizing, energizing, a welcome step forward toward a collective future of mutual regard.


August 24, 2009

The New Patriotism


The New Patriotism

By Patricia J. Williams, September & October 2009

Presidents since Lincoln have urged us to follow our “better angels.” Now Barack Obama’s call for national service is inspiring a new era of people helping people

If the Stars and Stripes are the truest symbol of national pride, then patriotism seems to be flying high. You can feel it as much as see it. At coffee bars in Seattle, in midwestern farm communities, on college campuses, in New York City subways, Americans from all walks of life—old, young, white, black, Republican and Democratic—are fervently, happily, waving the flag, both literally and figuratively, and bursting with a renewed spirit that is helping redefine what it means to be a patriot. It’s a zeal that celebrates more than just symbols: these days Americans are rallying to make citizenship a participatory sport.

It is a welcome shift in mood. After years during which the flag—indeed patriotism itself—has been used as a polarizing line in the political sand, the country seems to have entered an era of energetic involvement in our collective fate. Fueled in part by President Barack Obama’s resonant and reiterated call to service, the melting pot of our citizenry is rethinking the matter of our social contract—seeing in it a vehicle for cooperation, a link that allows us to combine our human capital and reinforce the strengths we have in common.

Service Rocks!
Find out what you can do on September 11, the National Day of Service and Remembrance. Go tocreatethegood.org.

Volunteerism at food banks has risen. Donations to blood banks are up. And interest in national service jobs has skyrocketed: between November 2008 and May 2009, applications to the AmeriCorps program soared 226 percent over the same period a year before.

No doubt the urgency of these recessionary times has played a role. But it’s probably too easy to cast the sudden attraction to the public sphere as merely one big desperate job hunt in a tough economy. “People are looking for something of meaning beyond themselves,” notes Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures and author of Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life(Public Affairs, 2007). Especially among those 50 and older, “there’s a practical idealism at work—a desire to leave the world better off than we found it, but a recognition that we’re not going to live forever, so we’d better make an impact now.”

This yearning to make a difference is perhaps why Thomas Weller, a 61-year-old mechanic near San Diego, patrols the local highways in his station wagon, helping people stranded on the road, then slips them a card that reads: “Assisting you has been my pleasure.” Or why Mary Kay Gehring, 52, a former Portland, Oregon, chef, spends hours each week teaching struggling young women how to cook nutritiously for their families. “We’re not talking about their drug use,” she says. “We’re talking about the carrots.” Or why in January an estimated one million volunteers showed up at 13,000 projects across the country for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service—the largest turnout ever.

Public officials are taking the cues: last spring, with the enthusiastic urging of AARP and scores of other volunteer organizations, Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, a $5.7 billion bill that significantly expands volunteer opportunities for Americans of all ages and helps nonprofit groups marshal and manage the thousands eager to do the work—from feeding the hungry and helping students achieve, to rebuilding cities and greening our communities. Though named for its major sponsor, the bill was a bipartisan coup, a fact marked most dramatically by the intriguing and patient collaboration between Senator Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and his friend and frequent ideological foe, Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah and coauthor of the bill.

Rarely in our history have people rallied so cohesively across partisan lines to try to make such good things happen. Hatch himself called the achievement a milestone—a nod to “a keystone of our country’s traditions” and a big stride toward “renewing the can-do spirit” that in many ways is the essence of true patriotism.

He’s got it right: for too long, patriotism has connoted an unfortunate jockeying about who best loves liberty. But we seem to be wearying of this aimless enervation of national spirit. Perhaps it was the accumulated grief of September 11, or the terrible incentive of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, or the debacle of Wall Street. In times such as these, when jobs, homes, and hopes are sliding away, it is hard to ignore our interdependence. If ever there was a time to band together and be inspired by do-gooders like Weller and Gehring, or start a neighborhood watch, or a barter exchange, or a modern-day bucket brigade, now is that moment.

Polls show that a majority of us subscribe to some version of charitable or volunteer service. And studies show that involvement makes us happier. It even seems to be correlated with a longer life span.

But where to begin and how to squeeze it in? The good news is that no one has to do it all. We tend to imagine that service means we can make “a world of difference” all by ourselves, or that it must be some soaring moment of visible and immediate transformation. This is a punishing standard, and a paralyzing one, unless we leaven our ideals with humility and a sense of proportion. Service can indeed mean putting one’s life on the line in the military or giving over one’s career to fostering children. But it also includes smaller but no less valuable contributions. It includes the man who stops smoking, stashes away a dollar every time he has a hankering for a cigarette, and gives the money to cancer research. It includes the woman who uses her backyard to teach children how to grow lettuce, the neighbors who socialize on Saturday morning by picking up litter in their local park, the college students who spend spring break hanging dry wall in New Orleans, the bored middle schooler who gets a spark of satisfaction working at the local food bank.

There’s a lovely children’s tale about a wanderer who comes to a town where all the inhabitants cry out that they are starving. The wanderer proclaims that stone soup is just the thing. To the wonderment of the townsfolk, he sets a large pot in the middle of the square, fills it with water, and places a stone in the pot. Then he instructs the people to go back to their homes and bring whatever they can to flavor the stone. This one brings a carrot; another, a potato; someone else, a turnip—and before long there is a bubbling stew sufficient to feed all.

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We Americans have all the ingredients for a magnificent stone soup. But like Kay MacVey, 83, who with her Ames, Iowa, friends has clipped more than $1 million in coupons to ease the PX grocery bills of military families overseas, even more of us must come to the public square with the offering of our choice in hand—some small contribution to toss into what we have just begun to appreciate is a rather magical, all-encompassing pot.

Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr professor of law at Columbia University and a columnist for The Nation.

July 31, 2009

Council for Responsible Genetics, Race and Genetics Project: briefing paper

http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/Projects/CurrentProject.aspx?projectId=8

THE ELUSIVE VARIABILITY OF RACE 

 

Patricia J. Williams, JD 

 

      The question of race is, at its core, a questioning of humanity itself.  In various eras 

and locales, race has been marked by color of skin, texture of hair, dress, musical 

prowess, digital dexterity, rote memorization, mien, manners, mannerisms, disease, 

athletic ability, capacity to write poetry, sense of rhythm, sobriety, childlike cheerfulness, 

animal anger, language, continent of origin, hypodescent, hyperdescent, religious 

affiliation, thrift, flamboyance, slyness, physical size, contamination and/or presence of a 

moral conscience.  As random as such presumed markers may be in the aggregate, they 

have nevertheless been deployed to rationalize the distribution of resources and rights to 

some groups and not others.  Behind the concept of race, in other words, is a deeper 

interrogation of what distinguishes beasts from brothers;  of who is presumed entitled or 

dispossessed,  person or slave, autonomous or alien, citizen or enemy. 

 

       In the contemporary United States, race is based chiefly on broad and variously 

calibrated metrics of African ancestry.1  To get a full sense of the ideological incoherence 

of race and racism, however, one must also include the longer history, in other contexts– 

whether the centuries-old Chinese condescension to native Taiwanese Islanders,2 the 

English derogation of the Irish for “pug noses,”3 the plight of the Dalit (i.e., 

untouchables) in India,4 or comprehensively eugenic regimes like Hitler’s that threw into 

the ovens Jews, homosexuals, tinkers, conceptual artists, nomadic peoples, the sick and 

anyone else designated less than “well-born.”5 

 

       Despite the enormous definitional diversity of what race even means, and despite the 

fact that the biological studies—from Charles Darwin’s observations to the Human 

Genome Project–have patiently, repetitively and definitively shown that all humans are a 

single species, there remain many determined to reinscribe a multitude of old racialist 

superstitions onto the biotechnologies of the future.  Despite that biological evidence– 

and in the social sciences, a towering body of social science that is cumulative 

(observations over time), comprehensive (multiple levels of inquiry) and convergent 

(from a variety of sources, places, disciplines)—still we are asking the same centuries-old 

questions. 

 

       That said, for purposes of this paper let us stipulate that race is not a “scientific” or 

biologically coherent category.  I ask for such stipulation because it is beyond my scope 

to prove or disprove creationist theories of polygenesis, or theological tracts about God’s 

intention to keep races separate, or essentialist polemics about whether black women are more or less endowed with testosterone than white men. 


          It is true that race-as-biology remains a major hurdle in the cultural imagination: at one extreme, there are those zealots who actively deploy races as the innate mark of beings so different that they constitute another species altogether–aliens, sun or moon types, untouchables, non-persons, beasts. 

And at the other end of the ideological spectrum are those ordinary creatures for whom 

discussions of race remain heavily inflected by assumptions of biological difference, //if// 

as a largely unexamined and unconsciously malleable mush of assumptions about genes, 

social history, law and culture.  

 

       Ergo, let us just agree that, as hard as many have tried to find it, there is no allele for 

race (as distinct from skin color); there are no separate proteins indicating that some of us 

are chosen by God over others; and there is no distinct cellular pattern that distinguishes 

the tribal intelligence of any one group on the planet as opposed to another.  At the risk of 

being tedious, I underscore this point precisely because it, like some of the most 

reproducible of scientific consensuses–like evolution, climate change and the value of 

vaccinations–remains fiercely disputed as “mere” contestable “theory”.      

 

         So what is race if not biology? 

 

         Race is a hierarchical social construct that assigns human value and group power. 

Social constructions are human inventions, the products of mind and circumstance. This 

is not to say that they are imaginary. Racialized taxonomies have real consequences upon 

biological functions, including the expression of genes. They affect the material 

conditions of survival–relative respect and privilege, education, wealth or poverty, diet, 

medical and dental care, birth control, housing options and degree of stigma–freedom 

from stigma being something like permission to be happy, or to live unburdened by the 

constant disapprobation of others.  

 

           In ante-bellum America, race was determined by a number of variables, 

depending on the state:  color, ancestry, ethnicity, association, behavior, property records. 

During the Jim Crow era, appearance became foregrounded as singularly important. 

Since the civil rights movement, class and speech have sometimes been included among 

the criteria of line-drawing. 

 

       In the industrialized west, racism (as well as related prejudices like class bias, 

sexism, and religious intolerance) is constructed from a complex intermingling of 

individual vision, historical happenstance, social milieu, political decision-making and 

legal structure.  If not actually rooted in biology, race is nevertheless the subject of 

relentless biologizing.  From the slavery-apologist Samuel Cartwright to Adolf Hitler, 

each generation has brought new utensils to the enterprise of racial demarcation:  calipers 

to measure the size of buttocks or length of leg muscles or circumference of skulls or 

width of noses.6  There have been mathematical models to measure percentages of 

“blood” or wavelengths of skin color or degrees of curvilinearity in the arcs of kinky hair.7  

But over and over, ra ce has been proved and proved again to be illusory as a matter of hard science.  

 

        Yet still the questions come:  If we are one species, what about sub-species? As in: 

“Blacks, Jews, Asians—you can’t deny they’re different.  It’s like a poodle or a 

dachshund or a St. Bernard is to the species of dog” according to one of my former 

students.   This sort of perception is a not a matter that will be resolved by yet more 

scientific testing. Rather, I think this reiterated resistance to data is testament to the 

persistence of human imagination.  That we still wonder if there aren’t significant 

disparities in human intelligence that might be logically tracked through the randomness 

that is race is testament to the power of belief over documentary evidence. 

 

       This infernal miasma invites a bit of consideration about the Manichean constructs of 

determinism and free will, mind and body, choice and constraint, illogic and sheer 

destiny.  Like Dostoevsky’s annoying man from the underground we must wonder:  Am I 

a mere piano key, an organ stop?  A mathematical inexorability, or a creation of my own 

intelligent design?  The more we tease this out, the more important becomes the narrative 

lens through which we seek our truths, and the more aware we become of humanity’s 

own constructive power. Am I three fifths of a human?  Ninety-six percent of a 

chimpanzee?  One hundred percent pure tragic mulatta?  One fourth of a nuclear family? 

An atomistic rational actor? A deficit expenditure of an impoverished underclass?  

 

       What, in other words, makes “race” both so dangerously essentialized as well as so 

fleetingly, maddeningly, beyond definitional containment?  

 

       Let’s begin with a story.  A few years ago, there was an article in the New York 

Times titled “DNA Tells Students They Aren’t Who They Thought,”8 about a sociology 

class at Pennsylvania State University. Sociology Professor Mark Shriver regularly 

administers DNA tests to students and has them analyzed for what the article calls 

“genetic ancestry.” Shriver is also a founding partner of the now-defunct company 

DNAPrint Genomics, which devised a test that “compares DNA with that of four parent 

populations, western European, west African, east Asian and indigenous American.”   

 

          The first indication that this was a more romantic than wholly rational enterprise 

is the classification of these as “parent” populations. The four categories are overly broad 

for purposes of meaningful ancestry-tracking, and unduly, randomly narrow in terms of 

geographic exclusivity.  Given the actual diversity of present-day American populations, 

the only logic behind this choice of the four groups is that it roughly segregates according 

to older anthropological descriptions of race-as-color:  white, black, yellow, red.  

 

           And indeed, that’s exactly what the students in Shriver’s class read into their test results. 

The article in the Times went on for three full columns discussing the degree to which the 

Penn State students were revealed to be “white” or “black.”  

 

          ”About half of the 100 students tested this semester were white,” according to an 

instructor. “And every one of them said, ‘Oh man I hope I’m part black,’ because it would 

upset their parents… People want to identify with this pop multiracial culture. They don’t 

want to live next to it, but they want to be part of it. It’s cool.”9  

 

          But the test purported to show (albeit flawed) geographic origins; it is interesting 

to see how quickly that was conflated with the matter of color and then from there into 

the politics of exoticized inclusion against a backdrop of ritual exclusion. 

 

      There is no allele for race, however. As a sociological matter, skin color is a 

presumptive indicator but historically it is not the exclusive marker.   And as a biological 

matter, melanin concentration merely reveals how one’s ancestors adapted to more or less 

sunny climates—and dark skin is more or less distributed around the equator, no matter 

which continent.  Similarly, evolutionary selection for sickle cell anemia, often 

mischaracterized as a “black” disease, is an inherited defensive response to having 

ancestors who lived among malarial mosquitoes.  

 

         That Shriver’s test could reveal ancestry based on broad migratory patterns over 

human history is not a surprise. Certain clusterings of genetic mutations over millennia 

occur more frequently among specific populations.   But those kinship populations cannot 

be scientifically correlated to the malleable social designations of race.  

 

          There is, nevertheless, a remarkable persistence in re-inscribing race onto the 

narrative of biological inheritance. This science is always pursued for only the noblest of 

reasons:  in Shriver’s instance, “the potential importance of racial or ethnic background to 

drug trials.”10 I will save for another paper my concern about the feckless commercial 

competition for “race-specific” medicines and suggest only that a more coherent 

enterprise might center on individualized genomic medicine rather than on the ever- 

changing political variables of racialized bodies.  

 

        For now, consider the description of one student who “discovered” she was “58 

percent European and 42 percent African.” The young woman “has always thought of 

herself as half black and half white because her mother is Irish-Lithuanian and her father 

West Indian.”11 Yet the “parent populations” tested for were described only as “western 

European” and “west African.” Lithuania is generally considered a part of Eastern 

Europe, and therefore not technically part of the population tested for. While “West 

Indian” is clearly used as a cipher for her African ancestry, one can be “white”–like 

Alexander Hamilton–while being West Indian. And the Irish were not considered white 

in colonial times. 

 

       Similarly, East Asians have gone in and out of being considered white in our history. 

South Asians, many being the closest descendants of the original “Aryans,” are generally 

not thought of as white in this country. Yet the incoherent use of Aryan is apparent in any 

dictionary, to wit, Webster’s: “1. Indo-European…. 2. Nordic… 3. Gentile….” 

 

       The degree to which these invisible habits of thought work despite us, or 

unintentionally, is perhaps evident in what the Irish-Lithuanian-West Indian student–the 

one who thought she was half and half–had to say about the test results: “I was surprised 

at how much European I was, because though my father’s family knows there is a great- 

great-grandfather who was Scottish, no one remembered him… I knew it was true, 

because I have dark relatives with blue eyes, but to bring it up a whole 8 percent, that was 

shocking to me.” What is remarkable—yet not uncommon as a cultural construct–is her 

flat conception of half and half ancestry, a kind of assumed “purity” of blackness and 

whiteness. One side had to be entirely African by her measure, one side entirely 

European. If she’s 58 percent European, she assumes the embodied 8 percent must be on 

the “black” side. The discussion never moves into the more difficult recognition that most 

West Indians probably have more than 8 percent European ancestry (but, like so many 

American families, hers might “know” but “not remember” the complicated, often 

clandestine couplings of the slave trade among Europeans, Africans and indigenous 

island peoples). It certainly does not seem to occur to anyone that her white parent might 

also have an African ancestor. 

 

       The jumble of who we are, particularly as residents of the New World, with its 

centuries of rapid, recent migrations, is not explored in the Times article. The single 

mention of migratory patterns is misleading: The students whose DNA revealed both 

African and European ancestors were described as “members of the fastest-growing 

ethnic grouping in the United States…mixed race.” But to the extent that a DNA swipe 

shows “mixing,” there is nothing “new” about it; our ancestors have been mixing it up 

since the first mothers left central Africa–in the long-ago, ancient sense, of course, we 

are all “African.”  

 

           Not only do genes not assign race, neither do they have anything to say about the 

cultural practices we usually refer to as ethnicity or identity.  The absurdity of thinking 

otherwise is highlighted by one of the Penn State students, a warm-brown-colored young 

man pictured in cornrows, who said that even though he tested at “48 percent European” 

he values his blackness, since “both my parents are black.” He went on to muse: “Just 

because I found out I’m white, I’m not going to act white.” The article ended with an 

observation that “whatever his genes say,” the young man will likely always “be seen as 

black–at least by white Americans.”  

 

         Consider the narratives therein: Genes “speak” race; whiteness is a biological 

inheritance that can be consciously “acted”; blackness is defined by the eye of the white 

beholder. 

 

       If history has shown us anything, it’s that race is contradictory and unstable. Yet our 

linguistically embedded notions of race seem to be on the verge of transposing 

themselves yet again into a context where genetic percentages act as the ciphers for 

culture and status, as well as economic and political attributes. In another generation or 

two, the privileges of whiteness may indeed be extended to those who are “half” this or 

that.  Indeed, some of the discussions about candidate Barack Obama’s “biracialism” 

seemed to invite precisely such an interpretation. Let us not mistake it for anything like 

progress, however: biracialism always has a short shelf life, and by the time he was 

elected, President Obama not our first “half and half president” but had become all 

African-American all the time.  Indeed, Obama himself seemed to acknowledge the more 

complex reality of his own lineage in an off-the-cuff aside, when, speaking about his 

daughters’ search for a puppy, he observed that most shelter dogs are “mutts like me.” 

 

          In fact, of course, we’re all mutts. And as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up 

faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of 

tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by 

which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of who is more like 

whom, tells us who can be considered marriageable or untouchable. The habit of burying 

the relentlessly polyglot nature of our American identity renders us blind to how 

intimately we are tied as kin, as family, and as intimates. 

 

           In the United States’ vexed history of color-consciousness, anti-miscegenation 

laws (the last of which were struck down only in 1967) enshrined the notion of 

hypodescent. Hypodescent is a cultural phenomenon whereby the child of parents who 

come from differing social classes will be assigned the status of the parent with the lower 

standing. There are many forms—most parts of the Deep South adhered to it with great 

rigidity, in what is commonly called the “one drop and you’re black” rule. Take for 

example, New York Times editor Anatole Broyard, who denied any relation to his darker- 

skinned siblings and “passed” for most of his adult life: there were many who expressed 

shock when it was uncovered that he was “really” black. Some states, like Louisiana, 

practiced a more gradated form of hypodescent, indicating hierarchies of status with 

vocabulary like “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octaroon.” And even today, and despite our 

diasporic, fragmented, postmodern cosmopolitanism, there is a thoughtless or 

unconscious tendency to preserve these taxonomies, no matter how incoherent. Consider 

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the daughter Senator Strom Thurmond had by his 

family’s black maid. She lived her life as a “Negro,” then as an “African American,” and 

attended an “all-black” college. But in her 70s, when Thurmond’s paternity became 

publicized, she was suddenly redesignated “biracial.” Tiger Woods and Kimora Lee 

Simmons are alternatively thought of as African-American or “biracial,” but rarely as 

“Asian-American.” 

 

          In contrast, many parts of Latin America, like Brazil or Mexico, assign race by 

the opposite process, hyperdescent. That’s when those with any ancestry of the dominant 

social group, such as European, identify themselves as European or white, when they 

may also have African or Indian parents. As more Latinos have become citizens of the 

United States, we have interesting examples of this cultural cognitive dissonance: Just 

think about Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Lopez. Phenotypically they look very, very 

similar. Yet Knowles is generally referred to as black or African-American; Lopez is 

generally thought of as white (particularly among her Latino fan base) or Latina (among 

the rest of us), but she is never called black or even biracial. 

 

         Among Native Americans in the United States there is a combination of both 

hypo- and hyperdescent, encouraged by the interventionist history of the Bureau of 

Indian Affairs. Anita Hill, for example, is part Creek, but the narrative about her is 

entirely about African-American origin. And membership in many tribes remains closed 

to those who have any discernable mixture of African ancestry, but not to those with 

European ancestry. 

 

           The New York Post regularly offers up fascinating tabloid renderings of these 

contradictions in our culture. When Angelina Jolie adopted her son Pax from Vietnam, 

the Post featured a breathless front page story, complete with what was described as “a 

stunning mother-child portrait” of the two.12  Their faces were aglow with interracial 

bliss. 

 

          But the lower half of that day’s very same front page was given over to a second, 

more somber story.  Entitled “Baby Bungle: White Folks’ Black Child,” it trumpeted “a 

Park Avenue fertility clinic’s blunder” that “left a family devastated–after a black baby 

was born to a Hispanic woman and her white husband.”  Long Islanders Nancy and 

Thomas Andrews had had trouble conceiving after the birth of their first daughter. They 

employed in vitro fertilization and baby Jessica was born. Jessica is darker skinned than 

either of the Andrewses, a condition their obstetrician initially called an “abnormality.” 

She’ll “lighten up,” said that good doctor. Subsequent paternity tests showed that Nancy’s 

egg was fertilized by sperm other than Tom’s. The couple sued. 

 

         If this were the end, the story might simply fall within the growing body of other 

technological mix-ups resulting in what are sometimes called “wrongful birth” suits, for 

lost eggs, failed vasectomies, malpractice, broken contract and so on. There is, after all, a 

legally recognized expectation that a certain standard of care will be observed in the 

handling of genetic material.  

 

          What was distinctive about the Andrews case was that the parents also tried to cite 

(ultimately without success) Jessica’s pain and suffering for having to endure life as a 

black person. The Andrewses expressed concern that Jessica “may be subjected to 

physical and emotional illness as a result of not being the same race as her parents and 

siblings.” They were “distressed” that she is “not even the same race, nationality, 

color…as they are.” They described Jessica’s conception as a “mishap” so “unimaginable” 

that they had not told many of their relatives. (Telling the tabloids all about it must have 

come easier.) “We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other 

children,” the couple said, because Jessica has “characteristics more typical of African or 

African-American descent.” So “while we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded 

of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her…each and every time we 

appear in public.” 

 

          One wonders what this construction of affairs will do to Jessica when she is old 

enough to understand. But here’s the really interesting part. When I turned to other media 

accounts I found a picture of the family–from a 2006 greeting card, no less.13 And Jessica

looks exactly like her mother and elder sister. It is true that Jessica is slightly 

darker than her mother and that her hair is curlier than her sister’s, but all three females 

are pretty clearly African-descended. As one of my students put it, if anything it is the 

paleness of the father’s skin that marks him as the “different” one. 

 

           The picture underscored the embedded cultural oddities of this case, the invisibly 

shifting boundaries of how we see race, extend intimacy, name “difference.” According 

to The Post, Ms. Andrews was “Hispanic” and apparently, by the Post’s calculations, one 

Hispanic woman plus one white man must equal “a white couple.” The mother is “a light- 

skinned native of the Dominican Republic,” which seemed to indicate that while she may 

not be “white,” she’s also not “black.”  

 

          No matter which of many media accounts I looked at, each narrative implied that 

if the correct sperm had been used, the Andrewses would have been guaranteed a lighter- 

skinned child. But as most Dominicans trace their heritage to some mixture of African 

slaves, indigenous islanders and European settlers, and as dark skin color is a dominant 

trait, it could be that the true sperm donor is as “white” as Mr. Andrews. But that 

possibility is exiled from the word boxes that contain this child. Not only was Jessica 

viewed as being of a race apart from either of her parents; she was even designated a 

different nationality–this latter most startling for its blood-line configuration of 

citizenship itself.  According to this logic, discrimination is no longer a social problem 

that implicates all of us and our institutions as unloving or under-inclusive. 

Discrimination becomes destiny, the normative response to biologized “abnormality.” 

Racial constructions not only oppress by normalizing inequality, they can also 

make the lie of race seem liberating, attractive, romantic.

 

           A small digression to clarify what I mean:  a few years ago, there was an interesting convergence of inquiries into the nature of truth. James Frey published his book A Million Little Pieces, a wholly fictional account that he proffered as personal memoir.  When the fraud was discovered, he defended himself saying that the book was concerned with “emotional truth” rather than literal truth.  This triggered deep epistemological soul-searching about whether simple 

lies can signify, represent, or constitute any kind of figurative truth at all. After a swirl of 

media confusion, a sound tongue-lashing from Oprah Winfrey seemed to seal up the 

answer as a resounding Not On My Dime. 

 

           At the same time that Frey’s soap opera was playing itself out, researchers in 

France were searching for any charred relics at the site where Joan of Arc was said to 

have been burned at the stake. They wanted to subject any putative remains to DNA 

testing. Why one would want to do this became something of an issue in the European 

media: She didn’t have children, the site of her martyrdom is in dispute, and the 

legitimacy of any so-called relic would be highly contested. But the pursuit of “the truth” 

in so attenuated a context raised questions about the hunger for certainty in the face of 

such uncertainty. What are the limits of historical insight? How many graves shall we dig 

up to settle old scores? What are the possibilities of knowing absolutely? 

 

          At the same time, there was a similar pursuit unfolding in the American media.   

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was hosting a series exploring his roots and those 

of a handful of other prominent African-American figures, including comedians Chris 

Tucker and Whoopi Goldberg, scholar Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot and, of course, Oprah 

Winfrey. It was a fascinating series of TV programs, particularly from the perspective of 

the discipline of history. It revealed the peculiar difficulties of tracking lines of descent 

through slavery–the sales of human beings that acknowledged no family ties, the absence 

of last names, the absence of first names in some cases and the necessity of consulting 

not just census records but also “the master’s” property holdings for listings of possible 

relatives. The reconstruction of family history was like an archeological dig, part 

intergenerational storytelling, part study of migratory patterns, part recovery of 

commercial transactions, and part science. 

 

           The science du jour is, of course, DNA testing. On the one hand, DNA testing can 

be quite useful in establishing certain kinds of family relation. (Since the program aired, 

Gates has set up his own ancestry-tracking company, AfricanDNA.)  Gates’ own test 

results showed that he had no relation to Samuel Brady, the white patriarch he’d grown 

up “knowing” as the man who impregnated his great-great-grandmother. Nothing had 

prepared him for Brady’s not being his direct ancestor. Indeed, one of Gates’s cousins 

remained adamant that the test must be wrong. If the test was right, he insisted, there 

would have to be “two truths”: One would be the story he grew up with, the other what 

the DNA says. 

 

           Somewhere in between what the DNA says and what shaped the family account is 

a gap that is something like a lie. A secret passing from black to white? An act of 

assimilation or aspiration? A myth to hide some shame, some rape? A change of identity 

to escape to freedom? Yet I do hesitate to think of it as precisely on the same moral level 

as the kind of “lie” that James Frey is said to have told in his book. There is something 

very human about the repetition of family stories until they become epic rather than 

literal, the burying of family secrets, the lying of ancestors, the reinventions of migrants, 

the accommodations of raw ambition, the insulations from terrible shame. This is, I 

suppose, distantly related to James Frey’s addled manipulations; it might also be related 

to, but of a different order than, the magical thinking of mental patients or character- 

disordered people or victims of great trauma.  

 

           There is something so commonplace about the kinds of family mysteries that 

Gates’ inquiries reveal–particularly in the American context. It is part of how many, 

many of our ancestors, regardless of where they came from, reinvented themselves in the 

New World. New York University Law School Professor Jessie Allen describes the 

“magic” of legal remediation as follows: “What ought to have been prevails over the 

past.” Family stories ritualize the past in a very similar way. It is part of what Professor 

Robert Pollack, head of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Science and 

Religion, calls the “eschatology of repair.” 

 

            If there is value to this kind of “emotional truth”–if I can be permitted that term– 

it is important not to confuse it with the sort of truth that DNA tells us. So while DNA 

can undoubtedly pinpoint certain aspects of our ancestry through sequencing and 

matching mitochondrial DNA, it does not make literal sense to say, as Gates did to Oprah 

Winfrey at one point: “You’ve got education in your genes.” Of course, he was speaking 

metaphorically at that moment, using the human genome as a metaphor for a pattern of 

socialization, a family habit, a thirst for knowledge modeled by parents.  

 

          But at other points in the program as well as in our daily parlance, that metaphoric 

dimension is applied rather more carelessly–and more dangerously. We have a long 

history of thinking of identity as genetically based, but again, there is no more an allele 

for being “white” or “Latina” than there is for “education.” These are malleable political 

designations that expand and contract with time and human circumstance.  

 

          It behooves us to be less romantic about what all this DNA swabbing reveals. I 

worry about the craving to “go back to Africa,” to “connect with our Yiddishkeit” or to 

feel like new doors have been opened if we have an Asian ancestor. The craving, the 

connection, the newness of those doors is in our heads, not in our mitochondria. It is a 

process of superimposing the identities with which we were raised upon the culturally 

embedded, socially constructed imaginings about “the Other” we could be. The fabulous 

nature of what is imagined can be liberating, invigorating–but it is fable. If we read that 

story into the eternity of our blood lines, if we biologize our history, we will forever be 

less than we could be. 

 

References 

 

1 

 For a history of ante-bellum litigation about what constituted “whiteness,” see Ariella 

Gross,  What Blood Won’t Tell: Racial Identity on Trial in America, (Harvard Press, 

2008) 

2 

 Brown, Melissa, “On Becoming Chinese,” in Melissa J> Brown (Ed.) NEGOtiating 

Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, (University of California Press, 1996) 

3 

 Gilman, Sander, Making the Body Beautiful:  A Cultural History of Esthetic Surgery, 

(Princeton University Press, 1999) 

4 

 Samaddara and Shah,  Dalit Identity and Politics (Sage Publications, 2001) 

5 

 Gilman, Sander, The Jew’s Body (Routledge Press, 1991) 

6 

 For an excellent compendium of such experiments, see Harriet Washington, Medical 

Apartheid:  The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From 

Colonial Times to The Present (Doubleday, 2006) 

7 

 Ibid 

8 

 Daly, “DNA Tells Students They Aren’t Who They Thought,” New York Times, April 

13, 2005 

9 

 Id. 

10 

 Id. 

11 

 Id. 

1 

1 

  

2 

 “Title,” New York Post,  March 22, 2007 

3 

 The Daily News 

 


July 28, 2009

post-race takes a pummeling….

 

 


of

Having Barack Obama as president doesn’t make America colour-blind

The arrest of an African-American professor and the vilification of a Latina woman judge show that prejudice lives on in the USA

  • , Sunday 26 July 2009

During a major policy speech on healthcare, even President Obama found time to weigh in: “… I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three – what I think we know separate and apart from this incident – is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately…” Needless to say, the next morning’s papers talked about Obama calling Cambridge police “stupid”.

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates has been officially swallowed by the larger narrative of race in America. Now I love a good racial escapade as much as the next person, but this one strikes me as uniquely unfortunate both in its timing and its capacity for becoming a flashpoint for unrelated resentments.

The facts not in dispute are straightforward. Gates came home from a trip and found his front door jammed. With the help of his driver, he tried to push the door open, unsuccessfully. He then went to the back door, opened it with his key, turned off the alarm system and called Harvard’s property management company to report the sticky door. Meanwhile, a passerby called the police to report that “two black males” were breaking into a house. When the police arrived, they encountered Gates in his living room. Gates provided his driving licence and his Harvard ID.

Here the stories diverge. Gates says he asked the officer to identify himself and the officer refused. The officer says that Gates was unco-operative, called him a racist and began shouting so loudly – “Your momma!” and: “You don’t know who you’re messing with!” according to the police report – that the noise constituted “tumultuous behaviour” and “public disorder”. Gates was handcuffed and hauled off to jail for a few hours. A day later, a judge dismissed the charges, saying both sides had acted badly. Gates demanded that the arresting officer apologise; the officer demanded that Gates apologise. The Cambridge police department demanded that President Obama apologise, which he did, quite eloquently as usual. Gates took to national television to set the record straight. Al Sharpton announced his intention to march in protest. And Michael Jackson, pushed from the front pages for a hot minute, was finally able to rest in peace.

Most unfortunate, but as American crime blotters go, this one is no big deal. Yes, racial profiling is an endemic, massive problem, but in this instance the police were called because of at least minimally suspicious behaviour – two men trying to force open a door. And yes, (allegedly) shouting angry taunts at the police isn’t tea-time politesse, but it does seem that the officer might have responded to it in a more professional manner than elevating it to the level of public “tumult”.

What makes this case so interesting – and alarming – is the vitriolic public commentary that ensued. Early newspaper and on-line accounts helped seed confusion, varying wildly: some gave the impression that Gates was trying to break into a house not his own, some that he refused to identify himself or that he resisted arrest. None of that was true.

But the larger backlash has quickly moved from the individual incident itself to condemnations in the stereotyped plural, concentrating on a very tight set of recurring themes: Gates is “uppity”, arrogant, pseudo-educated. He should have been grateful that the police came to his house at all. Harvard was stupid for hiring him. African-American studies, the department Gates chairs, is a non-subject, only on the curriculum to keep black students from rioting. The Ivy League is run by politically correct “wusses” who don’t have the courage to get rid of “undeserving” “whiners”. Who could blame police officers for refusing to come to black homes or neighbourhoods if this is what they get? “Those people” have jobs a “more qualified” white person should be holding.

(Where, oh where, our fleeting “post-racial” moment of Kumbaya?)

I mentioned that timing was also a probable factor in this brouhaha. The entire week before Gates’s arrest was consumed with reports of the congressional hearings for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She would be the first Hispanic and only the third woman sitting in our highest court. Hence, racial resentment had already been simmering on the shock-jock media burners. Three ultra-conservative senators in particular grilled her, day after day, using some of the most prejudiced, stereotype-laden language we’ve heard publicly in many a year. Despite the fact that Sotomayor graduated at the top of her class from Princeton and Yale Law School, she has been attacked as not qualified, chosen not for merit but because she’s a woman or Latina. Pundits such as Pat Buchanan railed that “affirmative action is to increase diversity by discriminating against white males”. Furthermore, said Buchanan, there could be nothing wrong with a court of all white men, because, after all “white men were 100% of the people who wrote the constitution, 100% of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg…”

Then, too, controversy erupted over a statement Sotomayor made years ago, in which she hoped her life experience as a Latina woman would lend her wisdom in ways that might allow her easier insights into situations that others might not have lived through. This, the so-called “wise Latina woman” statement, has got her relentlessly labelled a “reverse racist” by the shock-jocky press.

Finally, Judge Sotomayor was part of a panel of judges that ruled, based on established precedent, that a hiring test given by the New Haven fire department should be scrutinised for bias, after all the African-American applicants and all but one Hispanic failed the test. Coincidentally, barely a month ago, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court narrowly overruled that holding, saying that disparate impact was not alone sufficient to strike down the test – and that it was “racism” against the white firefighters who did pass the test. As a visual flourish, during Sotomayor’s hearing, row upon row of New Haven firefighters (in uniform, all white men but for that lonely Hispanic) sat in on the hearing, there to object to her nomination. The cameras loved it, panning their solemn faces relentlessly.

In short, the Sotomayor hearing and the New Haven firefighters case have reignited the general American debate about affirmative action. So when the extremely distinguished Harvard university professor Henry Louis Gates was carted off in handcuffs, allegedly calling out: “This is what happens to black men in America!”, there was a distinct shimmer of schadenfreude in some parts of the national psyche. The reactionary themes that had been percolating during the last few weeks came bursting to the fore: minorities are taking over! Obama is only appointing non-whites! White people are the truly oppressed! People of colour, particularly ones who went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, are reverse racists.

The arrest itself is hardly the best example of either racial profiling or police-state oppression. But the discourse that has welled up in its wake reveals a public inclination that is marred by that and more.

Patricia Williams is professor of law at Columbia University