Identity: What’s Race Got to Do with It?

picture of bikeIt was bound to happen, and it did, early in the campaign so that measures could be taken.  I refer, of course, to the calls from various entities that Barack Obama is “tryna ac’ white.”  I don’t know exactly what the Obama campaign did to quell this particular complaint, but it seems to have gone away as quickly as it came.

The issue makes one wonder, though.  For example, how would a person go about doing such a thing?  If he or she did so successfully, how would another person tell if he were doing it and if it were intentional?  Apparently, many people see no problem making such judgments.  Also significant, though, is whether a person can be judged too harshly for doing it in the first place.  I mean, lots of white people do it every day, apparently, and it’s hard to condemn a whole race without coming in for some condemnation yourself.

Another question occurs as a natural outgrowth of the conversation:  Assuming that certain behaviors and attitudes still can be recognized as “white” or “black” in 21st century America, why do such racial distinctions still exist after centuries of racial coexistence?  Wouldn’t you think, under normal circumstances, that a certain blending and mellowing would have taken place over the centuries?  Wouldn’t you think that whatever differences existed historically would have by this time become almost imperceptible?  That, clearly, is not the case.  Something must be going on here.  One wonders how intentional this something might be.

So, these lingering racial distinctions must be, at least in part, a conscious thing–something people have purposely maintained, and for a very long time.  Sure, some of it stems, originally anyway, from the fact that whites and blacks came from different continents.  That doesn’t explain the persistence of the differences, however.  People from other continents often assimilate completely in a generation or two.

Despite their origins, the differences between the way whites do a thing and the way blacks do the same thing are usually meaningless.  They simply amount to a stylistic preference for this over that, which doesn’t affect anything outside of itself one way or another.  Other times, however, the differences have all the markings of something done intentionally as a way to reinforce a group’s racial identity.  In the best case, these differences, too, are meaningless outside of that fact.  In the less benign case, when someone chooses to do something one way simply because members of the other race do it another, the purpose can only be to magnify and extend racial distinctions to an unnatural degree, and it’s hard to see that as completely benign.

Some examples might make the point more clearly.  Take ball caps, for example.  Both races wear them, but while whites wear them with the bill straight forward (or backward) and curved so as to shield the eyes from the sun, blacks wear them with the bill at all sorts of angles, and the bill is board flat in all cases.  A black guy with a curved bill worn straight ahead?  Tryna ac’ white, of course.

So what difference does this make?  None at all.  Let people wear caps or not.  Let them curve the bill over their eyes or keep it flat.  Let them twist them around and around their heads like a screw cap for all I care.  None of this makes any difference.  It says, “I’m black,” or “I’m white,” but so do many other preferences and stylistic differences.  All of this might even enrich our culture to some degree or other, and it’s no big deal.

Other times, however, the preference for one way of doing things over another conveys a disadvantage.  An example out of left field might conjure an illustrative image.  Everyone has seen cyclists whizzing by in their colorful jerseys and gleaming helmets.  Their bicycles will be set up for maximum efficiency, with the seat fairly high, the tires fully inflated, and the gears adjusted for a comfortable spin rate.  Indeed, the bicycle represents the most efficient way people have invented for moving people from here to there.  The racial component here is that most of these people will be white.  Blacks ride bikes, too, but simple observation will reveal that they tend to set their bikes up in a quite different way.  The seat will usually be quite low, so the rider’s knees are tucked up under his chin and his toes turn out to the sides; the tires will be big and soft; and the bike will be in one of the lowest gears available so that the rider must pedal furiously just to go five or ten miles per hour.

Who wins the race here?  Well, it is no contest.  Any bicycle, no matter how humble, will perform much better set up in the “white” way.  Why wouldn’t anyone set their bike up this way?  Surely, good examples are everywhere.  The same tools that set the bike up for minimal efficiency are available to set it up correctly.  What is going on here?

It is nothing more or less than a racial distinction that has evolved over time.  One group of people arrived at a very good way to set up a bicycle.  Another group came along and said, “Oh, we couldn’t possibly do it that way.  That’s the “white” way.  We have to come up with something demonstrably different and cling to it fervently despite it’s maladaptive characteristics.”  Or words to that effect.

Were the whites looking for the “white” way to set up a bike?  Logic assures us this is not the case.  The group who determines the proper way of doing something by determining what is opposite from another group’s way will invariably suffer by the effort they make to form the distinction in the first place.  But none of this even matters.  Who cares how someone sets up his or her bike?  Surely, we all can take this as just another in a plethora of cultural differences that vary the humdrum sameness we would otherwise see.

But it often isn’t like that in the wider world, is it?  People who look around at the successful others around them have a choice:  They can try to figure out what behaviors and attitudes bring about that success and emulate them, or they can forge a different, even opposite, path and deal with the uncertain consequences it probably will bring.  They might succeed wildly; more likely they will fail, even when their notions have some small potential for success.  Human nature dictates that rebels and arrogant interlopers have a harder time than others; that’s all there is to it.

A look around at our post-modern world will quickly reveal a related conundrum for black people who have what it takes to succeed in America.  They can hew to some failed, distorted model of values and behavior and take their chances, or they can try to emulate, within the bounds of what they can live with, the methods and attitudes of people who have found the way to succeed in America.

And what if those successful people are white?  Has the black person sold out by emulating them?  Perhaps one could see it that way, but with few exceptions, white America doesn’t demand that everyone do everything in lockstep, exactly the same way in all cases.  There is plenty of room for stylistic and individual differences.  But varying too widely from the proven norm, especially if there is an implication that the variance is meant primarily to insult people in responsible positions, is a formula for failure–a slow, confusing failure, which never makes its causes clear.

Unfortunately, emulating a successful formula will bring ostracism to many black people from their cultural sub-set.  As a result, they will have trouble truly assimilating in the white world, and they will find suspicion and rejection in their own.  This is a really tough choice for anyone to make.

So, does that set of circumstances make this a racist country?  Maybe.  If we are to believe a large body of applied theory, the problem is race.  Those idiosyncratic methods people have adopted in their pursuit of success, even when they have chosen them expressly because they are not the proven norm, would still bring success, we are told, except that racial intolerance keeps us from accepting them and seeing their obvious worth.

I don’t know; do you buy that?  It’s kind of a stretch, isn’t it?  No, that dog won’t hunt, probably because he’s trying to run the field backwards, with his ass to the ground instead of his nose.  What’s he tryna prove, anyway.

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