hapa is a word commonly used for the children of japanese-hawaiians who marry and have children with non japanese hawaiians

'White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” '

Funny, I have exactly the opposite reaction. Obama was vastly more interesting when he was post-racial and HLS/Chicago Law than when he allowed himself to be re-designated as the friend of the Black Power and Paranoia preacher.

Obama's appeal was as a post-racial figure, not one who's retro on race. The binary notion of "black" and "white" is increasingly an anachronism in a multi-racial society whose fastest-growing group, the one that will account for a third of the population by the time my children have children, tends ot avoid labels of color.

Race is a social construct that is less and less relevant to America's challenges and Americans' daily concerns and rhythms.The only issue where, arguably, race trumps other factors is the criminal justice system and the farce that is our war on drugs. Everywhere else-- educational opportunity, poverty, immigration-- the issues are mainly ones of class and culture and economics, not race.

Hey great, while we are at it, we should get into percentages like they did in South Africa (colored vs. negro) and maybe talk about noses (Hutu vs. Tutsi)...

Post-racial = meaningless, borderlne offensive phrase. Post bigotry, OK.

...Post-racial = meaningless, borderlne offensive phrase. Post bigotry, OK...

Didn't we talk about this some, almost a year ago, even though it seems like just yesterday?

Hi Bas!  Did we?  I wasn't part of that conversation - I wish I was.  

People are allowed to have racial identities! Their experiences with that part of their identity should not be considered menacing or alien - that's white people's problem to get over, not those who racialy identitfy (whether they want to or not, racial identity WILL be assigned to them based on their looks anyway, might as well be in charge of your own expereince).  

They should no more be asked to erase that part of themselves in order to be considered for some vague notion of responsible citizenship, than they should be asked to erase their eye color.  White peopledon't have racial identity, so they are too often defensive in the face of those that do. Like I said, it's up to white people to step up the plate and learn and grow on that one, stop being defensive for no reason.

Now, if what is meant by post-racial is: no more creating policies based on race and getting *all* the players on board to talk about that and come up with something together, I'm quite open to listening to that.  

If it means, people of color aren't allowed to be themselves and be open about it and be considired as American and patriotic as anyone else (because, like I wrote last night - we have never been a white nation culturally, we have been mulatto from Day 1) l - that's just a recipe for more generations of the same. Lance it and move forward.  Work towards creating an American sense of citizenry that respectfully includes everyone.

Black folks work:  find a way to advocate for yourselves that is positive (despite it all), continue your work on fatherhood, strengthening your families, attack the nihilsm that is destroying a beautiful people - be willing to be accountable to your country this way. And you middle and upper classers - get yourselves into the public eye more, there are millions of you and you're damn well invisible.  You have a responsibility to teach America to let go of stereotypes.

White Folks work:  check your assumptions, be honest about your socialization and your unconscious - we ALL have it, even President CLinton can have frogs jump out of his mouth that he probably still feels bad about.  I have unconcscious racism, you all do too - we're not evil because of it, we couldn't help it.  The only part that makes you wrong is if you refuse to acknowledge that and work on it.  

(Just the oher day I finally cracked the code for why I didn't much like Jennifer Lopez - lots of it had to do with lurking perceptions - planted in there by all sorts of sources since birth -  of what a latina woman should be like, and a gloriously ego driven large and in charge media mogul certainly doesn't fit into my unconscious notions, to put it mildly.  It was a relief to talk about it when friends, to go there and grow.)

Learn about issues of privledge, learn how it impacts your personality and values.  You can't simply give up your privledge, but you can damn well cultivate humility and be willing to learn to be more sensitive and accountabe to your countrymen in this way.

PS - sorry to lecture, but Obama said we could all talk about this stuff now and you know how I am:  WWOD ;)

I don't think "post-racial" is offensive or even meaningless, but I do think it applies primarily to white people.  Lots and lots of white people are post-racial in the sense that they don't really think about race -- or, at least, they try very hard not to think about race.  This isn't meant as a criticism, by the way; I think it's absolutely awesome to be post-racial.

But it's a lot easier to be post-racial when you're the majority and people like you were the ones benefiting from all the pre-post-racialism we've had in the past.  Being post-racial is a luxury of the majority.  Believe me, I wasn't post-racial when I was one of the few white kids in the DC public school system.  

So, my fellow white folks, let's strive for all the post-racialism we can get.  But let's try not to pretend that racial issues just disappeared sometime during the 1970s.

teplukhin 2 me:

I dedicate this link to you: www.nytimes.com/.../24kristol.html

That was a great post Wandrey, but ... that has to be the weirdest reason for disliking J-Lo that I've ever heard.  Can't you hate her for Gigli like everyone else?

Ha!  Nope, she isn't quite meek enough for my feeble unconscious to deal with.

Of course people "are allowed to have racial identities", just as it's normal and natural to have affiliations to whatever tribe or clan they wish. Kids raised on Web 2.0, er 3.0 are soaked in such affiliations, get their information filtered through them, connect with them constantly. But race is only one of those many affiliations, and for most people, will not be the most important one. Choose to be "black" if you wish. Or to affiliate with readers of Jane Austen, or with Rothbardian gold standard types, or one-worlders, or whatever the hell you like. The dimunition of race, its reduction to one among  many self-directed affiliations, is progress in my book.

"it's a lot easier to be post-racial when you're the majority"

Whites are not a majority in most large US cities. Whites are not a majority in any cutting-edge computer engineering lab or product development unit, or trading floor, or any top-notch California university.

Soon latinos in this country, who as the phrase goes, "may be of any race", will be almost as numerous as "whites" of European descent. I don't know what exactly race will mean when that time comes, but I suspect it will be a lot less important than it is today, and it's already a lot less important than when I was a child. Good news.

"Whites are not a majority in most large US cities. Whites are not a majority in any cutting-edge computer engineering lab or product development unit, or trading floor, or any top-notch California university."

True enough.  And if you think that racial tensions don't exist in those places, well, you've had quite different experiences than I have.

I agree that it will be great if we can all just get past race.  I just think it's rather unfair for white people to say "We're post-racial now!  Hey, black people, get with the picture!"

Wandrey I have to run, but will try to answer you some. But let me because I am in a good mood leave you for now with this: Why,  just as Tiger Woods is still black, I am still not funny:

Do you know the name of Walt Whitman's more inquisitive first cousin?

Walt Whatman!

Academe's probably another matter-- haven't been on campus for many years now-- but I don't now see and have never seen "racial tensions" on product development teams or trading desks. Race simply isn't relevant to the job, or the team dynamic.

"Hey, come on? Who needs this race stuff?" Tep - can you accept that you have the luxury of saying this while others do not?  Just try and see your privledge in this statement.

You say "hey, choose to be black..." it doesn't work that way.  Racial identity is assigned in that case - in many others as well.  An effeminate gay male is not choosing to identify as gay, that happens all by itself.  Might as well be in charge of it, process openly what being a sexual minority is like for you if you want.  Sometimes I wish I could choose to jettison my female identity (it's claustrophobic as hell sometimes, one of the reasons I love the web) but I cannot.

Racial, gender, orientation stuff is only a sliver of most people's identity.  But don't ask them to ignore it or slice it out because it's not the majority - why shouldn't it be the majority's job to learn about it instead? Or  meet each other half way?  The more we know about each other, the better I say.  This is America, we have a glorious opportunity to do that here.  Aren't we lucky?

This isn't to put a victim light on any of this, these are simple, socio-cultural facts.  I go nuts at Gloria Steinam and her ilk trying to convince me that I'm a victim, but that doesn't mean there isn't privledge that goes along with being male.  No one is inherently a bad guy here, it just is.

I agree that racial identity, sexual identity and god help us, even gender identity is unrecognizable in the generation of teens and young adults I work with, especially compared to say - Reverand Wright's generation.  Maybe I'm a  kook, but I love the differences in people, the more different from me, the more I learn.  Bt in the end, I prefer to leave identity up to the people experiencing it.

I think what you might be shooting for is closer to post-separatism.  I don't want to be post-racial. Where is a big ofay white chick on the Upper West side going to get my Domican chicken and rice fix?  Where would I go for Sedar if not my dear friends in Queens all these years? You ever celebrated the Hindu holiday, Diwali? You get to make kites with the kids, I love that.  And if you haven't been to a gay parade, enjoyed a drag show, appreciated watching a ghetto transform into a beautiful neighborhood thanks to the gay pioneers who move in - well, I'd go so far as to say you're un-American.

Post racial?  How boring!  Snore!  I want to be post bigotry.  

I'll believe Obama is serious about this "post-racial" topic when he announces that under his administration, we will end the racial spoils system known as affirmative action.  Until then, spare me the blather.

I see your point, rat, and maybe the job environments I have in mind are unique: both technology people and financial traders/investment managers use an arcane vocabulary and rely on a set of cultural-technical standards that are completely race-neutral. I can see how a field that involved cultural-social-political communications would be different, would be unable to avoid issues of race as they arise in the larger culture.

" I don't now see and have never seen "racial tensions" on product development teams or trading desks. Race simply isn't relevant to the job, or the team dynamic."

Oh I agree Tep - corporate America is bracing that way.  My husband sits inbetween a trader from India and a trader from Pakistan and those two throw french fries at each other across my husband's desk in "border wars."  Now THAT"S what I call post bigotry.  Now we're TALKIN.'

Not that you'd really know though Tep - anyone slighted waits to discuss until drinks after work or at the barber shop on Sunday.

Dont even get me started on academia.  You haven't lived unless you've sat through a grad school class with 22 year old white girls from Connecticut yelling at each other about racism.  I was trying to decide whether to put chloroform or anthrax in my coffee in an effort to get away.

(like I have said a zillion times, as hateful as this election has gotten or will get in terms of identity overload, Obama has seen and conquered much worse in early 90's Harvard Law School - it was a tedious war zone).

Basman - you contain multitudes, indeed!!!!

Tiger Woods is still black because he's dark skinned, even with his mother's truly lovely eyes and skin - he looks black.  He's still going to have a hard time getting a cab in New York.  That won't change any time soon.

fwiw, I don't "assign" racial identities to anyone. Neither would I ignore someone's chosen/constructed racial identity. If that's important to you, fine, I respect that and will be sensitive to it. I don't really care, to be honest, about Rev. Goof's rants, or whether Obama wants to embrace his Black Power self. I'm an adult, I've been around and been close to enough afr-amers to understand where they're coming from and what a tangled web is woven by their experience of race.

I guess where I come out on all of this is that, while I respect and can probably understand just about any racially-constructed identity, I just don't find _race_ itself very interesting. Culture, sure-- that's fascinating. Especially the differences WITHIN the races, which as TNR way back when used to remind us, "are greater than the differences BETWEEN the races." For ex., black culture in the US compared with its verlan cousin among noirs in France, or the differences between a "'Bama" hick a-a and a city slicker a-a from 516 or 718 NYC, or differences between the latter and west indians: very interesting. In my younger an more vulnerable days, I listened to enough pillow talk from sistahs in DC and NYC to know my way around those differences. But race itself bores me.

tep- Honestly, I have no idea what trading floors are like.  But I do work in the tech industry, albeit in a niche sector.  Maybe Silicon Valley is different, but over here in the East Coast/government contracting world, there are definitely racial tensions.  

But I don't mean that people are leaving nooses around or denouncing whitey or whatever.  It's a lot more subtle than that.  But a lot of white engineers think the Indians/Asians are taking their jobs, while the Asians feel that "American looking" people get undeserved promotions and pay-raises.  A very good friend of mine is a black Oracle DBA.  He's always professional on the job, but over Johnnie Walker he's told me that he feels he needs to work twice as hard as his white counterparts***.  And so on and so forth.  

Great strides have been made and I bet that 10, 20, 30 years from now we will be even more post-racial.  But I also bet that people are much more conscious of race than you give them credit for, even on the trading floor.

***Of course, since when did any DBA actually do any real work?

What's a DBA?  Database architect or something?

Usually stands for Database Administrator, irony.  But same difference.  "Architect" is just a word that people get to put on their business cards in lieu of a pay raise.

I used to call myself an Architect. Now I'm a Visionary.

Tep - you're still out there, I hear ya loud and clear :)

Actually, I'm not, given that to wiser heads in Silicon Valley, "visionary" = a**hole

Wandrey: a few brief thoughts without getting into the merits of Wright/Obama as such:

Of course “people are allowed to have racial identities.” And, equally, of course, people are allowed to jettison any particular identity. In a robust, free society people can constitute themselves any way they like. Your next step is more troublesome—how people express their identities “should not be considered menacing or alien.” But what if those expressions are menacing or alien? Part of the problem is that you are prescribing reaction. So the expression and its receipt will depend a lot on circumstances and the analysis of both needs to be sensitive and nuanced.

I don’t obviously think anyone  should ask anyone to “erase” any part of him or her self. And my understanding of “post racial” entails no such demand. Take the Wright thing, which has animated all this discussion, for an instance. And let's distinguish between private and public realms. Arguably, in the private realm no problem arises. But, publicly, problems do arise. And they have at least two different components. They are the arguable rightness or wrongness of what Wright said and the public receipt of what he said, which tracks the above distinction between expressions of identity and its receipt. And there, differentiations should be made between fact and opinion. The facts will either be right or wrong. The opinions, which also can be right or wrong, will more likely be reasonable or questionable.

We move from the private to the public realm insofar as Obama is a public man now running for high office. And in the public realm your blanket prescription, I think, of needing to accommodate racial expression has no purchase. Your underlying point, I also think, is that we need to accommodate—in your terms, not be menaced or alienated by—Wright’s *excesses*. And then your points on top of that are, I think: 1. therefore, there is nothing for Obama to answer for; and 2. even if there is something menacing or alienating, Obama is not to be tainted by Wright. But it is entirely appropriate to take on Wright in the public realm for wrong facts—the AIDS virus thing, for instance; —and questionable opinions—moral equivalence between America and al Qaeda, for instance. With a strong enough assault on Wright’s facts and opinions, one could conceivably dispense with your point 1. And if 1 is gone then 2 at, a minimum, is arguable. And there is no getting rid of 2 by fiat. If people feel Obama is tainted, especially considering that he is in part running to be the symbolic embodiment of America, those feelings simply cannot be gainsaid.

Why “post racial” does not entail any scrubbing away of the racial component of identity is because it aims at criteria for choice under which race is irrelevant. Those race neutral criteria are by and large the law of your land save for exceptions where race counts, for example affirmative action. The real progress to be made in this, therefore, is where, de facto, race becomes not something to suppress but incidental to private-become-public decisions like voting. Considering the complexities of race in America, such real progress has difficult shoals to navigate as the divided (and divisive) reaction to Wright/Obama shows.

You won't let this endless racial sanctimony go because you all need to feel so fucking virtuous.

"The pillars of American liberalism -- the Democratic Party, the universities and the mass media -- are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender. They have insisted, moreover, that pedagogy and culture and politics be just as seized with the primacy of these distinctions and with the resulting "privileging" that allegedly haunts every aspect of our social relations."

-- Krauthammer (who's still on TNR's masthead)

What Itzhik said. Spot on, and eloquent.

Thanks to Barack Obama is finally facing the long-standing reality that it is a multi-racial country