Dolls, Hair and White Power

          Here are two examples of white power, separated by sixty years and three thousand miles.          

       In 1950 Kenneth and Mamie Clark wrote a report for the White House. When shown identical white and black dolls, African American children often preferred the white to the black doll. Even more ominously, when allowed to give themselves a color, many of the darker skinned children used a white or a yellow crayon. The Clarks’ correctly concluded that “prejudice, discrimination and segregation” caused the African American youngsters to develop a sense of inferiority and self hatred.”

      In 2007, Professor Shirley Tate provided this evidence from London. In rejecting white standards of beauty, many dark skinned women adopted a new aesthetics. Especially when it came to hair, a clear binary set the tone; natural was appropriate and attractive, unnatural (e.g. wigs, hair straightening) was ugly and rejected. Working with “mixed race” women Professor Tate discovered the following. Some men and women hated the new antiracist aesthetic; if the women “wore their hair out”, others put cigarette butts and ashes in their coiffure.

    “Can you imagine what it must have been like to feel such hatred?” Professor Tate tried but she also had problems with this additional account. Having adopted the new aesthetic, the young women criticized themselves; try as they might, their hair looked too white. In response, a boyfriend sent a card with a photo of a “girl with long hair and brown skin with a red rose in her hair.” The young woman looked at the photo in a “negative way” even though she knew that her boyfriend wanted to show her what she actually looked like. Finally, the young woman looked at the photo again and discovered that he was right. “But I was so tied up in it that I didn’t see the fact that the girl looked like me. I just looked at the fact that she had light skin and long curly hair and rejected it because that was the image on it. And I thought is this how we get screwed up?”

      You bet it is. And even though this account comes from England, my students –and the literature on “mixed race” Americans- indicate that the same aesthetic and identity problems exist in the United States. After sixty years white people still sit on the throne because of this seeming paradox: Even when you reject the culture, you are still determined by it.  

       When the Clarks did their research white power operated with no revolutionary resistance. Alternative images of African Americans were few and far between; in the fifties, the choices on American television ranged from Beulah to Buckwheat. The Civil Rights Movement certainly got people thinking and in the sixties Black Power ushered in an anti-racist aesthetic rooted in the natural look. Angela Davis arguably personified the new standard but, despite the assertion that “black is beautiful”, the white/black dichotomy still acted like a prison cell. Professor Tate correctly stresses that it is an “antiracist aesthetic”; thus, the new positive is rooted in the hated negative and, even when they are told to go to hell, white people still run the aesthetic show.

      So called “mixed race” Americans and British are especially vulnerable because, given their double ancestry, they are forever caught in the middle. In the case of the young women interviewed by Professor Tate, they opted for an ideal they could never achieve. They wanted to look black so they used white people as the ultimate negative. Meanwhile, since they looked somewhat white, they learned to demean themselves and, in a terrible repetition of history, they replicated the findings of the Clarks, with this difference. Instead of a doll, the young woman looked at a photo of someone who looked like her and disliked what she saw. She disliked herself.

        That’s perverse. Nobody wins except white power. And it is a two nation tragedy because, as the hair example suggests, we are walking backwards through history. The only viable alternative is to follow the advice of Debra Dickerson, in The End of Blackness. We need to move beyond race and the white/black dichotomy because, whether as a positive or a negative, whites remain “at the center of the black agenda-setting”.

    To some this is a “maddening” outcome. As Ms. Dickerson notes, “if blacks accept it, then whites will have gotten away with their crimes.” Not necessarily. Suppose that, for example, high school and university students used the Internet to begin an extended national debate about the identity consequences of the dichotomy. Suppose we were able to show that, in 2008, the dichotomy still produces, as in 1950, the venom that destroys self esteem. Then, instead of whites getting away with anything, “everyone” would understand that the dichotomy is the longest lasting ideological consequence of slavery. We would move toward a transracial world by reaching an informed and shared consensus about the persisting and pernicious power of the white/black dichotomy.

     It will be painful. But it is the only way out of the prison created by the dichotomy. And it is the only way to make certain that a young “multiracial” woman never again gets screwed up by the terrible consequences of “racial” beliefs and values.

   (Professor Tate’s excellent essay appears in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, March 2007)

Max Weber and the War in Iraq

       Max Weber had a problem. If God was as omnipotent and kind as his followers suggested, how did God manage to “create such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity.” It’s an ancient question that Weber tries to resolve in an essay –“Politics as a Vocation”- that offers chilling advice about any politician’s use of violence.

    Weber makes a distinction between an “ethic of ultimate ends” and “ethic of responsibility”. They are not mutually exclusive but those drawn to ultimate ends have a much easier time sanctioning the use of force. As George Packer stresses in The Assassins Gate, many Bush advisers “summoned America to benevolent global hegemony”. The United States had a moral obligation to “take a hand in shaping mankind’s destiny” or, as Weber wrote, those who embrace ultimate ends champion “the flame of pure intentions”. Blessed by God or an extra dose of hubris, they know the future and that makes it much easier to justify the use of violence or even war to achieve their providential ends.

   In a rare display of anger, Weber stressed the “ethical irrationality of the world”. No religion or moral code offered a way to justify the means by the ends. In heaven all was peace, justice and social order. On earth anything could and often did happen. As in Iraq in 2008, the ultimate end might be as elusive as ever; meanwhile, on earth, the flaming efforts of the Bush Administration produced many thousands of deaths, nearly four million refugees, the horror of Abu Ghraib, and a terrible irony: the war in Iraq is now Al Qaeda’s greatest recruiting tool.

      Before defining an ethic of responsibility, Weber talked about evil. The world is “governed by demons” and anyone who decides to use force “contracts with diabolical powers”. To the most deluded “good can follow only from good and evil from evil.” In real life the opposite was often true so, “anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant”. Think, for example, of President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier that displayed the “mission accomplished” banner. It’s puerile and could have been avoided if the President and his advisors embraced an ethic of responsibility.

       That ethic understands an unalterable fact: “The leader and his success are completely dependent upon the functioning of his (war) machine and hence not on his own motives.” Suppose, as in Iraq, your machine creates an institutionalized conflict of interest. Your soldiers want to want to win an insurgency but the 40,000 plus private security guards have a higher responsibility: They want to protect their principals. So, they roar through the streets whenever and however they please. The result is great political damage to the American effort. As Thomas Ricks noted in Fiasco, “If there are one hundred PSD’s (Private Security Details) a day in Iraq (there are) and they each anger one hundred people a day (they do), that is ten thousand Iraqis a day getting extremely agitated at us over the last year.” Multiply 365 days by five years and the President’s motives seem trivial beside the seething resentment of those literally driven off the streets.

        Or, suppose that your war machine is going to pay former Iraqi soldiers. The machine’s representatives ask the soldiers to line up alphabetically but, oblivious to Iraqi culture, they do not realize that Iraqis line up by their first rather than their last name. Confusion led to fights, fights led, in some cases, to rioting, and bad followed from good rather than the opposite.

      In advocating an ethic of responsibility Weber never forecloses the use of force. But he does stress the utmost caution. It is a true conservative’s best advice because “everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the salvation of the soul.” As in the arming of seventy thousand Iraq tribesmen in the so called Awakening Council Movement, I may be giving guns and money to people, who, just last month, terrorized my soldiers and anyone else who got in their way. Next month or next year they may use those guns to once again kill Americans. It’s a roll of the dice that should frighten any of our Presidential candidates.

      From the grave, Weber has great advice for those candidates. It is never a question of age or experience. Don’t make reference “to a date registered on a birth certificate” or, as with Senator McCann you may a find a man who says that Iran is training Al Qaeda. “Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly”

    For Weber the key is to grasp that however bad it looks, it can always get worse. In 2008, the alleged reasons for the war have nothing to do with today’s alternatives. A trained relentlessness would stress that, thanks to the Bush Administration, we have no good options. For example, in Dying to Win, Robert Pape convincingly argues that the occupation –not religion- is the biggest cause of the insurgency. Stay in Iraq and you nurture, not only Al Qaeda but Iraqi suicide terrorists who will seek to kill Americans wherever they are. Meanwhile, Juan Cole notes “that the United States has destabilized the cockpit of the world economy.” Make the wrong move and you threaten lives and the supply of oil that is vital to this nation’s well being.

         A trained relentlessness would honestly assess all the terrible alternatives. It would avoid banalities like “staying the course” or “victory is on the horizon” and it would keep the bar of success very low because we did contract with diabolical powers and, following Weber, we need to accept that the devil wins many more battles and wars than god.

   It’s a nasty assessment but it is still “immensely moving when a mature man (or woman) –no matter whether old or young in years- is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of their conduct and really feels such a responsibility with heart and soul. He or she then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere reaches the point where they say: Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Emile Durkheim and the Torture at Guantanamo

       One theme of this blog is that Sociology often forgets the wisdom its founders. In this case Emile Durkheim published an essay in 1898 that ought to be read by anyone considering the prisoner practices of the Bush Administration.

    Durkheim’s essay –“Individualism and the Intellectuals”- spoke to one of France’s greatest political controversies, the incarceration and cruel, inhuman and torturous treatment of Albert Dreyfus. By the time Durkheim published his essay, Dreyfus’ innocence was obvious; but, even more outrageous was his everyday life on Devil’s Island, a nineteenth century version of Guantanamo. Prisoners often died from the hellish heat; since it slowed their metabolism, digestion proved to be a problem for even the strongest specimens. Dreyfus, however, received special treatment. He lived in a hut, five feet by ten feet.  Two high walls prevented any view of the Caribbean and, at night, guards locked him down using a double metal buckle. In the middle of nowhere, Dreyfus was forced to put both ankles through the buckles, a guard then placed an iron bar through the foot of the bed and, as the buckles snapped shut, Dreyfus tried to maintain his sanity.

     Durkheim’s essay always keeps Dreyfus in the background. Up front is a “religion of humanity” that seeks to provide moral glue for everyone on earth. That’s a tall order but in a period characterized by anomie (normlessness) Durkheim saw the desperate need for a morality that allowed people to transcend the barriers normally erected by, for example, language, nation, culture, religion, ethnicity or social class.

     Durkheim called his moral code “individualism”; and he stressed that it had nothing to do with egoism, selfishness or, in today’s parlance, a need for my own space. “Individualism is the glorification not of the self but of the individual in general. It springs not from egoism but from sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for justice.” Champion individualism and you would create a new and lasting “communion of spirits”, rooted in the belief that “each individual consciousness contains something divine and thus finds itself marked with a character that renders it sacred and inviolable to others.”

    Strip away the religious language and you are left with what we today call human rights. Among others, Durkheim led the way to the Geneva Conventions by thirsting after justice and by stressing that individualism came with freedoms and responsibilities. The first freedom was “freedom of thought” and the first responsibility was to use reason to question the competence of those in authority. Fail to challenge authority and you committed “moral suicide”, an offense that was both unthinkable and unforgivable.

      Following Durkheim, we need to challenge the painful reasoning of the Bush Administration. The President and his advisors argue that torture exists only when the pain produced by interrogation leads to “organ failure, death, or the permanent impairment of a bodily function.”   Burn and scar a person with lit cigarettes. Use (as in one of the renditions to Morocco) a razor to slash the chest and penis. Simulate downing by the use of water boarding. None of this is torture, with the result that the President tortures both people and the English language. As the Cambridge University Dictionary defines it, torture “is the act of causing great physical or mental pain in order to persuade someone to do something or to give information”.

       Using this definition, the President is a Grand Inquisitor, a man who presides over torture chambers that, thanks to the rendition program, extend from one end of the earth to the other.

           The White House legal memos also note that, if torture is forbidden, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is permissible. In Guantanamo they use “a padded cell on wheels” that is reminiscent of Dreyfus treatment on Devil’s Island. The wheels allow the prisoner to be easily transported; meanwhile, the chair has straps for the arms and legs, and, specially designed for the Caribbean, two additional straps for the head and the chest. It reminds some people of the electric chair, except that in this hot seat the prisoner never dies. He simply sits there, in a vicious vise, for as long as his interrogators deem appropriate.

     Attorney General Alberto Gonzales provided the ultimate “legal” justification for Guantanamo. He defined the prisoners as “illegal enemy combatants”. Since Afghanistan was a failed state and the members of Al Qaeda a terrorist group, the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The prisoners were human beings without human rights.

      In response Durkheim’s essay emphatically asserts that the ideal of Individualism applies to all human beings. There are no exceptions to the rule because, when it comes to human rights, even the worst terrorist is marked with a character that is both sacred and inviolable. Forget that moral injunction and you destroy the communion of spirits that, as in the Geneva Conventions, provides a universal standard for what is civilized - and for what is contemptible.

       The final irony of this sordid story comes from Clive Stafford Smith’s, Eight Clock Ferry to the Windward Side. As of 2007, the Pentagon admitted that, like Albert Dreyfus, “well over half” of the original Guantanamo prisoners were innocent. Many of the “worst of the worst” were arrested outside of Afghanistan, as a result of bribes paid by U.S. officials. For $5000 anyone turned in anyone, as the President claimed a victory in the war on terror.

       Here Durkheim again has the last word: “It would therefore seem impossible that these dilettantes’ games could long succeed in holding back the masses if we know how to act. But also, what a humiliation it would be if reason, dealing with so weak an opponent, should end by being worsted, even if only for a time.”

Georg Simmel and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

     Sociology sometimes forgets the wisdom of its founders. In many universities courses in theory are taught like an obligation to endure ancient history rather than a wonderful chance to experience the living insights of great minds. This is especially true of Simmel’s, The Philosophy of Money. It is, admittedly, excruciatingly hard to read. But, manage to get through the book, and you are left with crucial insights into the nature, logic and meaning of twenty-first century life.

      Simmel said that Marx was wrong. Labor had little to do with economic value. In reality economic value derived from a comparison between two or more objects. Alone a watch, a house or a share of stock was of “little practical importance” to the economy. Economic value existed only when the demand for something was compared with the demand for other things. People therefore created economic value because when they bought and sold anything the exchange (my money for your stock) was always rooted in an “objective measurement of subjective valuations”. In The Philosophy of Money, it is the demand for the object that creates value; without demand the object is as valuable as a remaindered novel or a movie nobody wishes to see.

         Since demand always represented subjective evaluations of the objects being compared, Simmel stressed “the lively interaction which is the substance of economic value”.   Ups and downs –fluctuations forever! - were built into any economic system because valuations changed in relation to an indefinite number of variables. In April of 2008 the rising price of oil is linked to, for example, the political situation in Nigeria. If the rebels destroy more pipelines, that limits supply and, based on that comparison, I can get more for my oil today than yesterday. Or, if it is not Nigeria, I can wonder about investments in Russia. Since the government takes 80% of anything over $27 a barrel, will private investors furnish the funds needed by Russia’s oil industry. And, if not, will my stock of oil be worth even more in six months or a year?

     Money fit into this equation for two reasons. First money was “interchangeability personified”; you could use it to buy and sell anything on earth. Clothes and pigs, diamonds and cement, computers and antiques: You name the object and money was the perfect means to facilitate and conclude the transaction. Thus, Simmel stressed “that if money was a specific object, it could never balance every single object or be the bridge between disparate objects”; but, since money is nothing but the relation between economic values themselves (e.g., oil before and after violence in Nigeria), money served as the perfect go-between.  It was such a miraculous means that it could even be exchanged for itself! Convert dollars into Euros based on a comparison of subjective valuations and money literally made money.

     Simmel saw money’s uses but he despised its importance in his world. Simmel argued that money, the perfect means, had somehow been converted into the ultimate end of many people’s lives. “The inner polarity of the essence of money lies in its being the absolute means and thereby becoming psychologically the absolute purpose for most people….”  This was bad enough. But Simmel spotlighted a great “irony of history”.  Since god was dead or dying for many people in the early twentieth century, “precisely that value that is exclusively a means and nothing else” takes the place of religious and other ultimate values.  Money actually functioned like the concept of god because money as the ultimate means served as “the unifying point of innumerable sequences of purposes.”  Forget heaven or hell. Get enough money and you could have anything on earth.

    Throughout the book, Simmel alludes to capitalism but he never specifically examines its nature and logic. However, if we agree that two of capitalism’s hallmarks are the M-C-M dialectic and the endless accumulation of wealth, then capitalists must, by definition, ceaselessly use their money to create commodities that acquire value –and produce demand- when they are compared to other objects.  Especially in 2008, capitalists are inescapably exposed to the competitive efforts of others, so they must forever invent new ways to make money. With cell phones, it might be the features offered by a BlackBerry. And, with financial services, it might be the returns offered by the creation and marketing of subprime mortgage securities.

   It is really quite inventive. I take bonds -rooted in questionable mortgages- merge them into a new security called a collateralized debt obligation, and have it labeled triple A by the “best” rating agencies. Compared to other securities, I offer a higher rate of return and, as long as the subjective evaluation of the securities keeps them in demand, I can, along with Bear Stearns, leverage myself to the tune of 33 dollars to one.

   But, suppose you disagree with the conventional wisdom. You think the securities are overvalued. Well, you buy another inventive way to create economic value; you buy credit default swaps. They offer the buyer an “insurance policy” against the securities going bad. So, since you think the housing bubble will explode, you buy an army of the default swaps and the more misery there is in America’s housing market, the greater the value of the swaps you own. One hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion in 2007 betting that more and more Americans would lose their house, or at least, be unable to pay what they owed.

       Simmel knew how to assess this bonanza. Indeed, he was at his best when he stressed that money’s “quality consists exclusively in its quantity”. When it comes to money “we do not ask what and how but how much.” Thus, at least on Wall Street, Mr. Paulson receives a mountain of accolades because he earned more in one year than anyone else. He won the grand prize by betting on desolation and he has extraordinary power because it is “quantity” – and nothing else- that determines the importance of money, namely its power as a means.”

    To Simmel “the complete heartlessness of money is reflected in our social culture.” He was appalled in 1899 and we have even more reason to be appalled in 2008. With financiers in the lead, capitalism is now the dominant economic system in the world. It spreads its demands into every society on earth and creates a “soullessness” predicted and perceived by Georg Simmel. As Mr. Paulson put it to the Wall Street Journal in January of 2008, “in betting on it ((the housing market) to crumble, I’ve never been involved in a trade that had such unlimited upside with a very limited downside.”

    It is a systemic “heartlessness” that eagerly profits from the misery of millions.

Righting History: The Myth of the Melting Pot

         It’s a remarkable contradiction. The melting pot metaphor assumes positive significance for American society in the very period (i.e., 1900-1924) that the nation is zealously excluding almost everyone on earth.

    Israel Zangwill’s play opened on Broadway in 1909 and it quickly provided a metaphor that glorified America. The main character, a Russian immigrant, celebrates his new home by pointing to the Statue of Liberty; with her magnificent torch she exemplifies a nation whose glory rests on welcoming “all nations who come to labor and look forward.” Meanwhile, in one case after another, the U.S. courts get rid of anyone who is not white. Chinese and Japanese, Indians and Africans, Syrians and Moroccans: America was an equal opportunity excluder of anyone who did not fit into the white category.

  In 1924, when the melting pot myth is well on its way to becoming a part of the nation’s conventional wisdom, Congress passes the most exclusionary legislation in U.S. history. The quota for so called Asians was a resounding zero. An entire continent is labeled nonwhite as politicians pass legislation with these results: Between 1924 and 1965, close to 65% of America’s legal immigrants came from three nations, England, Ireland, and Germany.

     The idea was to replenish the nation’s supply of good seed immigrants. With a fresh whitewashing of the genetic pool, America could eliminate whatever contamination occurred as a result of contact with people as incapable of assimilation as the Chinese and the Japanese. So, even when China became a U.S. ally during World War II, the number of allowable legal immigrants was increased from zero to 100 persons a year.

    Despite the realities of history, the melting pot myth lives on, right into the twenty-first century. It must be challenged because it is horrendous history; and because of what happens when immigrants melt into the American mainstream. As David R. Roetinger reminds us in Working toward Whiteness ethnic groups like the Italians, Portuguese and Greeks were initially suspect. They were, as Zangwill called Sicilians, “dark whites” and it took more than two generations for their full assimilation into the white majority.

     That could happen again. After 1965, the United States dramatically changed its immigration laws. Thanks to years of lobbying by, among others, Chinese and Japanese Americans, the United States opened its doors to the entire world. Everyone was welcome but, as the Kennedy staff privately assured Congress, few Asians or Indians would ever accept America’s invitation. Thus, we could claim to be prejudice free without having to ever worry about intimate contact with most of the people on earth.

   Despite the assurances Congress received, the world came. And America had no idea what to do with millions of Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Indian and Arab Americans. The black/white dichotomy remained the essential tool for positive or negative classification but, somehow, it did not fit for many of the nation’s post 1965 immigrants. Thus, Indians were often darker than African Americans but they never received the black designation. White was also out of the question so many immigrants remained, with Peter Pan, in “never never land”. They were none of the above and simultaneously, people of color or nonwhite.

   My concern is what may happen if we do not take advantage of our present situation. However painfully, none of the above immigrants remind us what actually happened in U.S. society; and, in addition, they explode our way of thinking about race and ethnicity. For example, many Jamaicans did not know they were black until they arrived at JFK. So, perhaps the problem is ours rather than theirs; indeed, if Jamaicans –and many other West Indians- learned to make ethnicity rather than skin color a national axis of identity, why can’t we?

   Real change is possible. But so is a hypocritical repetition of history.  In 2008 California, Mexicans have been known to jokingly bow down before Japanese Americans because they are the “new whites”. Despised for most of our history, Japanese Americans are now a “model minority” who could, over time, become as white as the Sicilians. Meanwhile, in the 1990’s Arab Americans argued that they needed a separate minority status. Neither white nor black, they were invisible. But not anymore! In the 2000 Census the Bureau decided that anyone from North Africa is white. At least in the nation’s capitol, Arab Americans are not people of color, but, instead, full blooded white people.

       In time millions of Latinos could follow the Florida Cubans who also receive or embrace the white designator. So, what do we want? Serious change or, in 2050, more whites, more blacks (e.g., the West Indians, the Africans, the Haitians), and more people of color (i.e., Indians and Pakistanis) than ever before.

    My argument is that we must right history, undermine the legitimacy of the white/black dichotomy and then radically reconfigure the society in a manner that fits in with the best traditions of Sociology. As Emile Durkheim stressed, “societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitution.”

The Mantra of Assimilation

       Here’s an interesting argument. It appears in Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut’s, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. The authors contend that assimilation “still represents the master concept in the study of today’s immigrants”; and then, in the same paragraph, they argue that assimilation represents “just one possible alternative” for the many millions of people who immigrated to the U.S. after 1965.

      But why should assimilation be the master concept if it only represents one path chosen by today’s immigrants? And, if there are multiple paths, how do you conceptualize them using the assimilation model? In Legacies the authors actually argue that individuals who do not assimilate engage in “dissonant” acculturation. Synonyms for dissonant include discordant, inharmonious and jarring. So, rather than challenge the validity of the master concept, the authors reaffirm it by defining differences as deviations from the assimilation norm.

      From this perspective, it is the immigrants who are a problem, not the analysts using concepts that have never accurately reflected the world that is actually there. As early as 1940 the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz argued that American sociology’s almost religious devotion to assimilation missed the social changes that immigrants always brought in their wake. Besides the possible loss of the original culture, and the acceptance of a new one, Ortiz argued that immigration always included a third probability. Ortiz called this third possibility transculturation and he used the concept to describe the cultural creativity that always occurs when two or more ethnic groups interact for significant periods.

         Rather than accept and embrace the host culture, Ortiz said that immigrants could be imaginative forces in the reconfiguration of the host culture. Living in Cuba, he often keyed on Santería, the made in the Caribbean religion that artfully combines, among others, Nigerian and Christian versions of God. On a recent visit to Cuba, I even saw, spot lighted by Wal-Mart Christmas lights, a blond haired Barbie added to the Santería pantheon. For Ortiz this was normal; let cultures interact for significant periods and people will often produce social change rather than an acceptance of the conventional wisdom.

    The mantra of assimilation points us backwards, to the culture that is, rather than to the culture that is being reconfigured right before our eyes. Consider the identity Chicano, a made in America label that, in its most extreme forms, represents a serious rejection of the host culture. Developed in the late sixties and early seventies, the Chicano identity includes the notion that, before Native Americans, Mexicans inhabited the American Southwest. They have such a natural right title to the land that a still popular textbook for Chicano studies is entitled Occupied America.

    Using the assimilation model, this is dissonant acculturation; but what do the analysts do when the dissonance becomes an institutionalized part of the host culture? I am referring to the Chicano Studies programs that exist in hundreds of universities throughout the United States. The curriculum often includes distinctly anti-American courses that encourage students to understand and criticize the “imperialism” and ugly prejudices of American culture. The Chicano Studies programs are so powerful in some Western and Southwestern universities that they assume more prominence in the curriculum than Latin American, and certainly, Caribbean Studies.

   The theoretical problem for the master concept of assimilation is that, in 2008, the so called “dissonant” response is now (at least in the West and Southwest) an integral part of the cultural mainstream. So, is it a successful assimilation to contemporary American culture if newcomers embrace the anti-American beliefs and values associated with Chicano studies?  Or, does the absurdity of the question not underline the theoretical arguments made by Fernando Ortiz almost seventy years ago.

    There is no one master concept. Immigration always includes at least three possible alternatives –loss of the original culture, assimilation, or transculturation- and the likelihood of one response dominating is relative to a variety of social conditions. For example, in 1916 the United States government helped orchestrate a movement to “swat the hyphen”; you were to be a 100% American or suffer the consequences. In 2008 federal, state and local governments throughout the nation sponsor and foster a multiculturalism that demands as much respect for the immigrant’s culture as it does for the host culture.

     By using assimilation as the master concept Sociology sustains the status quo and offers no way to understand a society in which transculturation is an everyday  phenomenon  This is only a theoretical embarrassment when, as with Chicano Studies, anti-American beliefs are part of the mainstream. But, equally important, the discipline needs to ask another question. What do we stand for? For example, in Arab Detroit, editors Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock present evidence that assimilation includes learning very negative things about African Americans, and, in addition, negative things about your own ethnic group.

    The mainstream often teaches hate. So, rather than broadcast the mantra of assimilation, perhaps we should be stressing that those who reconfigure the host society often have good cause for their complaints and anger. Tranculturation is not only predictable, it may point us to what Durkheim called “our first duty” as sociologists. We need “to fashion a morality for ourselves”, especially when assimilation means learning ugly prejudices and versions of U.S. history that are mythical rather than factual.

What’s An American Fusion?

  Since my blog is titled “An American Fusion”, I want to explain the meaning and intent of the words.

    In 2004 I attended an Intercollegiate Conference of “Multiracial” students. In conversations some of kids told me they were fusions. I had no idea what they meant. So, they explained. The United States lacked positive ways to describe so called multiracial men and women. Mixed, half, exotic, tragic mulatto, hapas, and half breeds were the only labels in town and none offered a sense of self esteem, not to mention an accurate rendering of their humanity.

    The students then explained the fusion concept by using this metaphor. Suppose you took chocolate and vanilla ice cream and whipped them together in a bowl. Could you ever separate the two flavors? Like the ice cream, a fusion of (for example) Chinese and European heritages created a person that was whole rather than half, inextricably fused rather than cut into pieces by the racial prejudices of U.S. culture.

    The students’ creativity was rooted in the need to escape a cultural dichotomy that defines Americans by what divides Americans. You are white or black, white or nonwhite, white or a person of color, or, finally, a minority as compared to the white majority. The dichotomy’s deepest roots lay in slavery and it is such a powerful (and ugly) distinction that it actually makes the multiracial student invisible. A November, 2005 study from the Seattle based Mavin Foundation discovered that only 27% of 298 universities even allowed students to choose a “mixed heritage on admissions forms”. Moreover, even when they did so, 60% of the universities recoded the students, and made them white or black.

     The kids hated being erased and one response was to declare a personal declaration of independence. I am a fusion, I am proud of all my heritages and I refuse to feed into the ugliness of a culture that uses skin color and race to poisonously divide the nation and its three hundred million inhabitants.

  Rooted in the students’ insights, I think it is possible to use the word fusion as a core national identity. For example, if anyone asks me if I am white, black, or a person of color, I answer that I am a fusion, a person who believes it is impossible to create a colorblind society if we continue to use skin color when we describe one another; and when we describe the many millions of post 1965 immigrants who are exceedingly confused by the way Americans think. For example, is it a successful assimilation if millions of Mexicans decide they are white; and millions of South Asians decide they are black?

    My aim is to find a way to define three hundred million people in a manner that unites rather than divides us. Like Ms. for the women’s movement the fusion identity says that I adamantly refuse to echo the conventional wisdom. I want my grandchildren to live in a society where the significance of skin color is at best marginal; and I mean to root that future society in the beliefs and values embedded in the fusion label. Those beliefs and values are:

·         Fusions deny the concept of race. There is one race, the human race, and it is, by definition, a series of ceaseless unions.

·         Fusions deliberately refuse to use skin color as a basic category of identity. Fusions think that it is ridiculous to key on a physical attribute determined by a miniscule percentage of our genes.

·         Fusions believe that, instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences are delightful and diverse manifestations of the underlying and indissoluble unity of six billion people.

·         Fusion is a core identity that happily allows room for other forms of self and group expression. Fusions think of differences in nationality, religion, ethnicity or geography as potential sources of interest rather than as a reason to discriminate or self-segregate.

·         Finally, and this is crucial for political activists, the fusion label offers the possibility of a shared sense of solidarity among, for example, Asians, Chicanos, West Indians, Arabs, Indians and Puerto Ricans. Members of each group will recognize that fusions want to create serious social change by moving beyond the race and color distinctions that so often create barriers to activists interested in uniting their efforts. Under the fusion umbrella there is ample room for all Americans.

     I glued the word American to fusion to make a point about a set of beliefs that many Americans willingly endorse. These include the fundamental equality of all men and women; they include a respect for the inalienable rights of all people to freedom, justice and a fair shot at societal and personal success. And they include a willingness to accept that America is always a work in progress. To use a Marxian analogy, we can reconfigure U.S. culture in a revolutionary manner if we willing to abolish the white/black dichotomy that is a superstructure built on the base of racial thinking.

   Destroy base and superstructure by embracing the label American fusion. Make the conventional wisdom impossible by using the fusion label whenever anyone speaks in colors and we can begin a –in millions of everyday interactions- a conversation that creates a new consensus, one that absolutely refuses to endorse the racial thinking created by the very worst representatives of U.S. history and culture.

Senator Obama’s Father Is Not Black

         I don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful. But Senator Obama’s father is not black. To use the black label is to embrace the one drop rule invented by U.S. slave masters; it is to tell a Kenyan from Africa or a Jamaican from the West Indies, that you can grow up with great pride in your nation of origin but, get off the plane at JFK, and Senator Obama will redefine you by using one of three all-important social identities: white, black, or person of color.

   Senator: How can we ever be colorblind if, following your lead, we still make skin color a crucial social identity? And how can we move into a post racial world if our most prominent “multiracial” American fails to broadcast the good news of science. There is one race, the human race; it originated in Africa and my or the Senator’s affinity to anyone from Kenya is quite clear: In an evolutionary sense we are all Africans.

    The tragedy is that Senator Obama and the other Presidential candidates refuse to take advantage of an unprecedented historical opportunity. Thanks to our most recent immigrants, we now have more than fifty million Americans who do not or will not fit into the white/black dichotomy. Latinos, Asians, South Asians, West Indians and Arabs come from nations that crash our operating system of racial beliefs. We can actually create a colorblind America if we are willing to honestly answer the questions posed by millions of newcomers.

    A Pakistani or an Indian, for example, is often much darker than an African American but we do not call them black. So what are they? Today none of the above receives the check mark because, as Shekhar Deshpande puts it, he is a “nowhere man”. He does not get a color but the dichotomy always influences his life because the degree of tolerance and acceptance that he receives is shaped by his place on the white/black continuum.

        Think too of the obsessively color conscious Census Bureau.  It says that everyone from North Africa is white. Presumably one drop of white blood makes you white, so, using this reverse one drop rule, the Census Bureau  leads us to this conclusion: White people committed the hideous 9/11 attack.

      That’s ridiculous. But, with a new Census on the horizon, none of the candidates use the dilemmas of our “none of the above” immigrants to seriously challenge the operating system that produces these absurdities; in fact, if we listen to Senator Obama we may have one of history’s greatest ironies, a black President who, quite unintentionally, makes white people more important than ever before.

   That is possible because the white/black dichotomy divides the entire world into white people, black people and people of color.  Under this operating system you can be as light as a Chinese person or as bronze as a Mexican but the two groups still get the same designation: Person of color.

        So, if many millions of recent immigrants assimilate into U.S. culture, they dramatically increase our people of color population, and that makes white people more important than ever because whites are the designer original against which everyone else is judged.  In the United States, white is not a color, but blacks and people of color only exist in relation to white people who do not get a color because they are white, which is not a color.

     The incredible power of white people is even more forcefully underlined when we use the synonym for people of color. That synonym is non-white, among the most powerful eight letters in the English language. In 1970, when other African Americans spoke about black power, Albert Murray told us that the word nonwhite contains all the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy and segregation.” He correctly stressed that blacks and people of color are always negatives when measured against the white role model. And he also understood that the deepest roots of segregation lay in the learned need of whites to stay away from blacks and people of color. Why, after all, would a positive want to hang around with a negative?  In real life positives cling to one another so tightly that, in the 2000 Census, only 2.5% of whites indicated a multiracial status, and of those the vast majority fused with Asians, not African Americans.

     Any Presidential candidate who embraces a nonwhite way of thinking echoes the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first. A real change agent would use the experiences of our most recent immigrants to ask some revolutionary questions.

    If very dark skinned Indians and Pakistanis are not black, maybe the problem is our way of thinking, rather than the color of their skins. And, if very light skinned Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans are not white, why not? Can you be too light to be white?

    Senator Obama: A new tomorrow begins by paraphrasing the words of Richard Pryor. There are no blacks in Africa. That is made in America poison and it stops today, or, with you, we walk into the future looking backwards.