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