Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Read online

  Channel 11 by Kori Newkirk. 1999. Encaustic on wood panel. Collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Gift of Barry Sloane.

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  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION Seeing America

  Part One: A New Culture, 1963–1979

  CHAPTER 1. Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids

  CHAPTER 2. After Jericho: The Struggle Against Invisibility

  CHAPTER 3. “The Real Thing”: Lifestyling and Its Discontents

  CHAPTER 4. Every Man an Artist, Every Artist a Priest: The Invention of Multiculturalism

  CHAPTER 5. Color Theory: Race Trouble in the Avant-Garde

  Part Two: Who Are We? 1980–1993

  CHAPTER 6. The End of the World As We Know It: Whiteness, the Rainbow, and the Culture Wars

  CHAPTER 7. Unity and Reconciliation: The Era of Identity

  CHAPTER 8. Imagine/Ever Wanting/to Be: The Fall of Multiculturalism

  CHAPTER 9. All the Colors in the World: The Mainstreaming of Multiculturalism

  CHAPTER 10. We Are All Multiculturalists Now: Visions of One America

  Part Three: The Colorization of America, 1993–2013

  CHAPTER 11. I Am I Be: Identity in Post Time

  CHAPTER 12. Demographobia: Racial Fears and Colorized Futures

  CHAPTER 13. The Wave: The Hope of a New Cultural Majority

  CHAPTER 14. Dis/Union: The Paradox of the Post-Racial Moment

  CHAPTER 15. Who We Be: Debt, Community, and Colorization

  EPILOGUE Dreaming America

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY JEFF CHANG

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  To great teachers:

  Dicksie Tamanaha, Kathleen Dudden Rowlands, William Y.S. Lee, Gary Delgado, Don Nakanishi, Roberta Uno & Kate Hobbs

  To the memory of

  Ronald Takaki and Morrie Turner

  “The gods were fighting.… And the gods were fighting because the world was very boring, with only two colors to paint it.…”

  —A folktale from Chiapas retold by Subcomandante Marcos, La Historia de los Colores

  Photo by B+ from the series Is A Record Like A Wheel …

  Obama HOPE poster by Shepard Fairey. 2008.

  INTRODUCTION

  SEEING AMERICA

  I

  For most of 2008, the most arresting image in America was a screen print by the street artist Shepard Fairey that appeared on posters, stickers, and clothing from sea to shining sea. The image was of a Black and white man rendered in red, white, and blue. The man was named Barack Obama and the four-letter word below his image was “HOPE.”

  Obama was, of course, the presidential candidate who had come from the far geographic and cultural edge of the United States, its Pacific borderland in Hawai’i, to secure the Democratic Party nomination. He had run on a platform of mending a divided country. In a speech he gave in March that he called “A More Perfect Union,” he offered his own biracial heritage—the unity of Black and white histories in his own body—as a symbol of empathy and reconciliation.

  That address, now popularly known as the “race speech,” was in some ways as historic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial almost forty-five years earlier. “The complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through,” Obama said, remained “a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” If Americans could move forward on race, he seemed to say, they could move forward on anything.

  By then demographers had become accustomed to naming each new cohort of youths the most diverse generation the nation had ever seen. One in three Americans was of color. They formed the majority in a third of the country’s most populous counties, and in forerunner states like California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawai’i.

  In 2000, voters of color made up only 19 percent of the electorate, but in 2004, more than half of all new voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were Black or Latino. In 2008, youth and voters of color turned out in record numbers, forming the foundation of a new electorate that put Obama into office. By 2012, more than a quarter of voters were of color. It seemed apparent that an emergent majority had spoken once again at the polls, loudly.

  Experts had begun projecting that sometime, perhaps as early as 2042, the United States would become “majority-minority.” The notion seemed stranger with each new census—if no race was a majority, then wouldn’t each be a minority? And just what would it mean for the nation?

  The country in which Barack Obama could take the oath of office on the inaugural platform at the West Front of the Capitol building was most certainly not the same as the one in which Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. For that to have occurred, America needed to understand itself differently than it had for most of its first two centuries, which had been marked by formal racial segregation. Even after the civil rights movement enabled dramatic and sweeping legislative and judicial changes, those changes could take Americans only part of the way toward desegregation. Laws could not tell people how to see each other, how to be with each other, how to live together. They would have to find a new way of seeing America.

  The United States had been historically defined by whiteness, drawn in grays, shades of white and black. But in Fairey’s famous print Obama had been colorized, to coin a phrase, just as the country to and for which he had become a symbol had been colorized. Colorization describes the massive shifts that began taking place as the civil rights movement began to ebb. These shifts were demographic and would have political implications. But the most profound changes have been cultural.

  This is where we begin: How has the national culture changed over the past half-century that we could elect a Black president? And, just as important, how has it not changed?

  To begin to answer these questions we must address that most complicated of American words, another four-letter word: “race.”

  II

  We can all agree that race is not a question of biology. Instead it is a question of culture and it begins as a visual problem, one of vision and visuality. Race happens in the gap between appearance and the perception of difference. It is about what we see and what we think we see and what we think about when we see. In that sense, it’s bigger than personal affinities, preferences, tastes, and bonds.

  Race has driven centuries of civil and cultural schisms and periodically brought the nation to the brink of dissolution. In 1952, Ralph Ellison encapsulated the central problem of race and American visuality. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” his protagonist remarked in the famous prologue to Invisible Man. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

  Difference is human, and noticing difference is human. For us, it begins as babies, from our very earliest days of perception. But of course Ellison was pointing out that America’s race problem came from something deeper. For whites, historically, skin tone and physiognomy signaled not only difference, but notions of superiorit
y and inferiority. This was the way racial power worked. It went further than merely perceiving difference. It sorted difference into vast systems of freedom and slavery, commitment and neglect, investment and abandonment, mobility and containment.

  Then it drew a veil over these systems. It pretended not to have even seen difference in the first place. Racism, in other words, was supported by a specific kind of refusal, a denial of empathy, a mass-willed blindness. In this context, the Other’s true self might always remain unseen. The Other might always bear the burden of representation.

  The musician and intellectual Vijay Iyer has compared seeing to listening. When we feel empathy for another person, he reminds us, our brain’s mirror neurons fire. We understand another’s pain or joy at the root level of our being. Art, music, and literature can move us in the same way.

  But psychologists and neuroscientists also warn that visual racialized difference gets in the way of empathy. Between a child’s curiosity about difference and an adult’s perception of difference, something has changed. We have learned to be compassionate or fearful before what we see.1

  What made the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement—the last great consensus for racial justice—possible? Iyer speculates on the history of race, visuality, and popular music in the last half of the twentieth century by asking:

  Is it possible that music-heard-and-not-seen … might have overridden the visual, racialized, culturally imposed constraints on empathy? Could the essential humanity of African Americans been newly revealed for white American listeners in the twentieth century through the disembodied circulation of “race records,” by activating in these listeners a neural “understanding” of the actions of African American performers? Could a new kind of cross-racial empathy, or at least a new quasi-utopic racial imaginary, have been inaugurated through the introduction of recorded sound?2

  Listening, Iyer suggests, may have been crucial to the making of this consensus for racial justice, the aurality of race—powerfully shaped by twentieth-century Black music—firing the national conscience. But after the civil rights movement, race became a new kind of American problem. Seeing became increasingly important.

  With energy and urgency, artists and activists of color were pursuing their visions of a post-segregated nation, attacking the twin conditions of cultural segregation—the absence of representation and the presence of misrepresentation. The visuality of race—with its national history of erasure and debasement—became critical simply because people of color would no longer remain invisible.

  So the new formal conditions of legal desegregation gave rise to a movement of art and ideas meant to bring about cultural desegregation. Its proponents came to name it multiculturalism. By the late 1970s, artists of color were focused on the question of recognition of identity—both legal and cultural. They argued that American culture had never been only white and Western, a singular, unitary, exceptional model. America had always been multicultural.

  That is when multiculturalism began to encounter powerful resistance. As lawmakers and judges unraveled an already fragile national civil rights consensus, questions of racial justice and cultural equity combusted in the most unlikely places: urban galleries, elite museums and institutions, advertising and marketing agencies, the studio, the theater, the editorial desk—everywhere where creativity was stoked and those desires expressed; where the image, the sound, the story, the work of art was made.

  Within a decade, the ideas once incubated in a tiny West Coast avant-garde caused pitched battles from the classrooms to the editorial pages to the halls of power. Opponents argued that if multiculturalists were allowed to triumph, American democracy would crumble. Four decades after Ralph Ellison’s cogent articulation of America’s race problem, Pat Buchanan declared the start of the “culture wars.”

  These wars were declared in the name of restoration. As Buchanan began his 2011 Obama-era polemic, Suicide Of A Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?: “What happened to the country we grew up in?” Both questions—the first inseparable from the second—pointed to an aching imperial nostalgia, an ideal of a homogenous Christian nation, and a quaking fear of a future conditioned by cultural and racial change.

  Like all wars, the culture wars were not inevitable. But in the last epoch of the twentieth century these wars erupted because demographic change and multiculturalism had prompted new discussions about democracy, particularly around contested values of expression, recognition, inclusion, and empathy. After Obama’s election in 2008, the culture wars flared anew.

  On the forty-seventh anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck gathered hundreds of thousands on the Mall in Washington and told them, “For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.” Failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin clarified the intent of the gathering, saying, “We must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor.”

  The culture wars were always framed as a struggle for the soul of America, a clash of competing narratives: the story of the great America we are in danger of losing forever versus the story of a hopeful emerging America. The nation’s colorization might lead to the end of American civilization or the beginning of a great national transformation. The culture wars made clear that race remained America’s most troubled divide.

  Both sides understood that battles over culture were high-stakes. The struggle between restoration and transformation, retrenchment and change, began in culture. Culture was where change could be thwarted, or where it might flower.

  III

  Culture, the great thinker Raymond Williams once wrote, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”3 I may be about to do Williams and the community of serious scholars a grave disservice. But here goes.

  Culture is the realm of images, ideas, sounds, and stories. It is our shared space. It is the narrative we are immersed in every day. It is where people find community, and express their deepest-held values, where, as Eduardo Galeano put it, “the collective symbols of identity and memory: the testimonies of what we are, the prophecies of the imagination, the denunciations of what prevents us from being” are circulated.4 It is where what Abraham Lincoln called “public sentiment” is formed and moved, like a wave.5

  The metaphor of the wave seems perfect for this moment of broad change. But what are we talking about, exactly? A wave is a thing, an event. We can see a wave of water breaking over a reef like the one at Pipeline on the North Shore of O’ahu or Teahupo’o on the southwestern coast of Tahiti. These waves are beautiful, monumental, and deadly if you’re caught in the wrong place when it rolls through.

  But in scientific and lexical terms, as the writer Susan Casey has noted, a wave is a paradox. It is not only an event—it is a motion, a process. It’s the process of forces generated in the Arctic or the Antarctic, rolling from the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of miles until they gather to hit these shallow reefs. Then, boom—the famous waves at Pipe or Chopes. So a wave is an event. But it’s also a process—the movement of forces, some visible above the surface, much of it unseen, rising from the bottom up.

  When we talk about social change, many of us who are historians, organizers, and activists focus our intellectual energy on discrete events in time—elections, Supreme Court decisions, legislative votes, demonstrations. We privilege events—they form our story about how history thrusts forward. We alter our language to fit this worldview. Politics is hard, tangible like the earth. Culture is soft, slippery like water.

  But what if we thought of change not just as a chain of events? Instead, what if we thought of change also as a process that, like the ocean itself, never stops moving? We would have to acknowledge that there is a vast world out there whose substance and drift do not always cohere into big events—but within which invisible forces are pushing back and forth, creating meanings and movements all the time.

 
Here is where artists and those who work and play in the culture enter. They help people to see what cannot yet be seen, hear the unheard, tell the untold. They make change feel not just possible, but inevitable. Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Change presents itself not only in spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk, but in explosions of mass creativity.

  So those interested in transforming society might assert: cultural change always precedes political change. Put another way, political change is the last manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred. Obama could not have been pictured as a symbol of hope if the seeds of that hope had not been planted in the culture long before.

  IV

  By the new millennium, multiculturalism was less a movement than a platitude. While some still claimed diversity would be the ruin of America, many of multiculturalism’s former advocates had long forsaken it. To some—Aaron McGruder in The Boondocks, Trey Parker and Matt Stone in South Park, or the Martin Agency in their GEICO caveman commercials—it had become a cliché, a target ripe for parody, the last refuge of clueless hippiedom, the musty den of the PC police, the church of white guilt.

  Multiculturalism had also been wholly absorbed into the mainstream. Forty years after Sesame Street was introduced to Public Broadcasting Service audiences, the Nickelodeon network had Dora, Diego, Little Bill, and Kai-Lan. Multiracial TV casts became so normal that audiences objected when they did not appear. Our visual culture had been colorized. There had never been a time in American history when nonwhite people were more visible. President Obama and his beautiful young family were the apotheosis.

  Global companies and national political parties embraced diversity. Advertisers segmented market niches for nonwhites. Multiculturalism had generated a new face for global capital and what David Theo Goldberg called the post-millennial “racial state.” But although difference was everywhere, it seemed to mean less than ever. So it was now worth asking: What good had colorization done?