Race, Cultural Identity and The Election

Remarkable.  The events of the last few weeks are deserving of that oft overused adjective. The people of the United States, in a show of wisdom and courage, elected a man who is truly and accurately an actual “African-American,” half Kenyan and half Kansan. In the welcome, resounding reverberations of a “black” man cresting the last political hurdle, we, all of us, additionally have a marvelous launching point for an open and wide-ranging discourse on the festering wound of the US “race” matter. The issue is not going to change immediately, of course, but the reverberations of the event have a potential to alter the nation and world, if channeled and directed with conscious effort.
     
The first conundrum is to begin to shift the gestalt, recognizing that there is more that unites than separates, beginning with a larger view of “race.” The larger message of the election is not so much that a “black” man will be the next US president, but more to the point, that the office will be filled by a man who is so demonstrably multi-ethnic. “The first black president,” the news thunders, again and again, understating that Barack Obama is as much “white” as “black,” terms that have little meaning in this nation of many nations.
     
From the very beginnings of English-speaking America, the myth of race as separate, distinct, vertical divisions collapsed, first with the Lost Colony. A dominant theory, of British academic David Beers Quinn and others who drank Quinn’s Brown Savage-brand poison, states that the Lost Colonists’ fate lay in the bloody hands of the Powhatan Indians, following a nonsensical, difficult and hazardous move to a hostile region of Virginia. In opposition, family narratives, historic accounts and court records much more strongly suggest that the abandoned Lost Colonists, mostly poor British foils of a tin-pot investment scheme gone sour, abandoned the under-supplied settlement and assimilated with the natives of the immediate region, the mix augmented later by maverick and freed African slaves. The descendants of the Lost Colonists likely measure in the millions, coast to coast.
     
A quick scan of area phone directories and beyond, along likely routes of cultural movement, shows listings of surnames known to have shipped on the 1587 voyage, in percentages that far transcend coincidence. Amid the names, the faces of eastern North Carolina and the nation display a melange of ethnicities which display what a mutable, indeterminate and nonsensical concept is the whole fiction of “race.”

Another commonality shared by the poor of all shades is slavery, the full history of which remains virtually unknown. Africans were the third group of people to be ground under the wheels of Anglo-American capitalism. In a twisted version of democracy, slavery displays yet another angle on how much the early poor of America had in common. The first victims were, of course, the natives, viewed as no more than a troublesome nuisance after attempts at enslavement met with utter failure. Cheap labor had to come from somewhere. The initial exploited were thousands of England and Ireland’s poor, orphans and “convicts”—guilty of, say, cutting the Duke’s trees—who were cajoled, stolen, kidnapped (a period allusion to stealing children), jammed on stinking, crowded ships and brought to America. The African slave trade came later, as the trading companies, ancestors of multinational corporations, expanded their reach.
     
This knotty side-story is revealed in an account by Frederick Law Olmstead, the daddy of Landscape Architecture and Central Park in New York City, during one of those oh-so-fashionable period tours of the antebellum South. In Mobile, Olmstead watched as African slaves loaded a ship with large, heavy bales of cotton by sliding the bales down a ramp and into a hold. Below, Irishmen scurried about, performing the hazardous task of arranging the bales in the hold, at any point in danger of being creamed by cotton. When Olmstead could no longer let the question in his head rest, he asked the boss why the Irish had the more dangerous of the tasks. The following is a quote:
     
“The n——rs are worth too much. One of them Micks gets killed, there’s plenty of them.”
     
That money negated “race” in antebellum days can be seen as well in photos of slaves in plantation settings, which commonly display mama’s baby, daddy’s maybe, slave children, with straight hair and fair complexions, “white” one could say, slaves nonetheless. The truth is visible also in the surprising percentage of persons of African decent, many of them women, especially in Charleston, who by virtue of their status as “free” were able to and did own slaves. Money doesn’t care what shade the person to be exploited is. The whole concept of “race” has been employed to keep the poor separated, stemming from da Man’s justifiable fear of the mass of the poor en toto, for the simple reason that there are more of “them” than there are the rich.
     
In the years after the War, the Ku Klux Klan was created, not so much over an idea about white supremacy, but as a ploy by elites to prevent their game from being undone by a coalescence of the poor of all shades. The simple fact was that “poor white trash” had more in common with their darker cousins than with some dude who’d climbed to the top of the heap by virtue of birth or capitalism. The Klan was a propagandistic terror campaign to divide and conquer, another model of which was seen on the heels of the Brits getting their snotty, superior duffs properly stomped in Mesopotam… oops, Iraq. The Brits simply armed the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds, threw a few bombs, pointed fingers, sipped their pink gin and watched the “problems” take care of each other.
     
Just as “whites” in slavery have yet to penetrate the US psyche, so has the later career of Dr. Martin Luther King, from 1965 until his murder. Having borne the Civil Rights Act and achieved the placing of the US’s dreadful record in the mind of the nation and the world, King moved on to his Poor People’s Campaign, heralded by his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church, King’s eloquent best, one that never appears in the media. Class? King stepped over the line. That was what got him killed in Memphis, an awful day that ignited rioting across the US and drove a stake through the heart of his work.
     
The conundrum was summed up at a talk I attended at Historic Hope Plantation in Bertie County, by Memphis University historian Dr. Arvin Smallwood, a native of Bertie. It’s a place which resembles, say, the Dominican Republic, as much as the United States, where a multi-hued people live amid the dilapidated, sagging echoes of plantation culture. In his fine history of Bertie, Smallwood gave a focused view of the obvious absurdity of the antiquated concept of race—a basis of his talk. During the discussion that followed, a woman of indistinguishable ethnicity summed up the quandary when she remarked, “Well, I consider myself black.” That was it, a distillation of the essence of the torturous notion of race in the United States, how we got to where we are. You are as you think you are, influenced by these neat, tidy categories that society places you in.
  
Where and how does one draw the line on who is “white, black or other?” One sixty-forth, as in Jim Crow times? The “paper bag” test? To bring it around to the newly elected Barack Obama, how can anyone who is really thinking correctly say the man is “black,” he of an African father and a midwestern “white” mother? The concept is incorrect and divisive. I’m this, you’re that doesn’t mean much in the United States. This isn’t to say that one should lose his or her sense of cultural identity. Indeed, all of us could expand our sense of wonder in who we are by embracing all the ethnicities, all that DNA, which magically coalesced to form each of us and this nation, a national experience that has no equal in terms of diversity and sheer numbers of people.
     
The diminishing power of the concept of race in lieu of class divisions was seen this election in the cleansing power of the numbers of poor “whites” who, as during the dashed cooperation following the Civil War, defied the dividers and voted with whom they have more in common via the more truthful and accurate separation of economic divisions. As was the case after the Civil War, persons of every shade absorbed the Obama message and voted accordingly, not along the false and divisive lines of “race,” but with a shared experience of abandonment.
     
With this remarkable achievement of Mr. Obama, we, all of us, have now a golden moment, a spark to begin to educate ourselves on the ugly details of this culture’s history. I have held for years that as much as “they” would have us believe that the world is divided vertically, along lines of “race,” nationality, Ford or Chevy-type categories, it is more-so divided horizontally, along the lines of who has what economically, regardless of hue or shade. With the election of Mr. Obama, all of us, struggling in this land of plenty, have an opportunity and a duty to address that and begin to think about realigning the orientation.