On Reid and Racism

By: Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Joe Biden once remarked that Barack Obama was "clean" and "articulate." He is now Vice President. During the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton invoked Robert Kennedy in a way that implied Barack Obama's assassination was imminent. She is now the Secretary of State. It is foolish to suggest Senator Harry Reid should step down as Senate majority leader because of his 2008 assessment that Barack Obama's election was more likely because he is "light-skinned" and free from "Negro dialect."

If President Obama has demonstrated anything at all, it is that he is unperturbed by the racially awkward outbursts of his fellow Democrats.

Republicans hope that reports of Reid's old gaffe might derail his leadership of the health care reform package. But watching Michael Steele go after Reid is more bizarre than convincing. Steele seems to pride himself on the liberal use of black discursive patterns. It's hard to take seriously the moral outrage of a self-professed "hip-hop Republican" who explains his tenure as GOP chairman saying "brother still here."

President Obama may be unconcerned and the GOP may be transparently race baiting, but Reid's comments did create a legitimate queasiness among many Americans that is worth exploring.

President Obama is a forgiving, beer summit kind of leader, but I am less likely to give Democrats a free pass on issues of racial bias. As I wrote a few months ago here on The Notion, any implication that racism is the sole purview of the Right obscures the continuing and troubling realities of racism within the Democratic Party and progressive political movements.

Still, I remain entirely uninterested in a racial McCarthyism that plays "gotcha politics" with elected officials' public utterances. Yes, public officials should be particularly careful when talking about race to media (on or off the record). The opportunities for misunderstanding, divisiveness and assumption of ill intent are heightened in this area of political discussion.

But let's be honest, if we weeded out every public official guilty of racial insensitivity, the halls of Congress would echo with utter emptiness. The point is not so much public gaffes as it is the creation, support, and maintenance of systemic and structural inequalities. This is why Trent Lott's wistfulness about a Strom Thurmond presidency is in a different class than Reid's comments. Lott was longing for a bygone era when structural barriers and entrenched inequality were the norm. Reid was enthusiastic that the same barriers were lessening and that America was ready, albeit with caveats, for a new racial reality.

Rather than being worked up about Reid's awkward assessment of these barriers, we should be asking whether these structural biases actually make academic and political accomplishments easier for light-skinned African Americans. NC State University historian Blair LM Kelley makes this argument in her piece on Salon.com. She points out skin color bias in the 21st century should alarm us. It shouldn't be a matter of breezy acceptance, as many Sunday morning pundits seemed to suggest. "Accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy."

Reid's assertions about "Negro dialect" also should raise structural justice questions far more important than his offensive use of an antiquated term for black Americans. Because of generations of lower class status and legal barriers to quality education, black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be raised by parents with inadequate literacy skills. But rather than acting as a leveling ground, many public schools only reinforce these disadvantages. These are the same children relegated to schools with fewer expert teachers, larger classroom sizes, fewer educational resources, and fewer literacy support tools.

This is the racism that should worry us: millions of black American children attend and graduate from public schools that leave them utterly unqualified for public office for their entire lives. As adults these children will always be second-class citizens, unable to participate as rule makers rather than simply rule followers in their own country. Not only does this deprive a whole group from full participation in government, it also deprives our country of the skills, talents, and ideas that these citizens might have offered, had we not initially deprived them of the capacity to communicate their ideas effectively in the public realm.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser imagines justice as "a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price for equal respect." Creating that world is an important task for combating racism.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.

Why Reid's words rankle

I can't just shrug at the notion that a light-skinned candidate is more electable in the 21st century

BY BLAIR LM KELLEY

As part of Joan Walsh's "colorful" Twitter stream, I agree with 90 percent of her post. I am glad that Harry Reid has apologized for his off the record comments about President Obama. I agree that it is disingenuous for the Republican Party to suddenly jump in the fray protecting African Americans from racist assaults.

But politics aside—if that is allowed—I was most concerned about the flip way that many commentators dismissed the Reid statement as unimportant. There is a reason why so many people were put off by his statements. I think that his words tap into a very old history shaped around questions of color and respectability and its meaning in American politics.

As historian, this debate makes me think of older arguments about African American citizenship. During Reconstruction there were well-meaning people who debated whether or not the freed slaves were ready for citizenship. Perhaps they needed more time, more education. By the turn of the twentieth century, black citizenship was being systematically destroyed by disfranchisement, lynching, and racial segregation. African Americans had made dramatic gains in education, and yet their opportunities were eroding. Many had banked on respectability as a political tool and were left disappointed.

I know that politics is an ugly game, that we make quick judgments about candidates based on their height, their looks, and their families. I know that black candidates that look and sound more like a racially neutral “norm” are more easily accepted by white voters. But I am concerned that accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy.

When we privilege a certain set of behaviors and let them serve as springboards for some, they are barriers for others. As an educator, I know that polished language opens doors, but I cringe at the idea that they close doors for others. As an African American historian, I find it horrifying that fair-skinned blacks are seen as more acceptable candidates in the 21st century, and it's considered just savvy politics to say so.

I do want us to move on from Reid’s comments. It is crucial to get moving on an important political agenda this year. But I also hope that we as Americans move away from narrow, racialized notions about whose voice is valuable and deserves to be heard.

Blair LM Kelley is an associate professor of History at North Carolina State University. Her book "Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson" will be published by UNC Press this spring.

Is Harlem No Longer Black?

By: Les Payne

The Negro invasion must be vigilantly fought, fought until it is permanently checked, or the invaders will slowly but surely drive the whites out of Harlem.

Harlem Home News, July 1911

Along the boulevards of Harlem these days, hands are wringing over the shifting demographics of the two races that still matter in this republic.

“No Longer Majority Black; Harlem is in Transition” teased the headline from the New York Times. A profound and accelerating shift has gripped the neighborhood that for nearly a century has been synonymous with black urban America. The hometown paper then conceded, without apology, that this reported loss of Harlem’s black majority trumpeted in Tuesday paper actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked. Others are not so sure it has occurred even now. You can’t get agreement on the boundaries of Harlem, so it’s nearly impossible to gauge the shift, said Randy Daniels, the former New York Secretary of State, who lived in the hamlet for some two decades.

Harlem, of course, has not always been black. The virtually all-white hamlet first took on color in 1900 as Negroes from the Lower West Side moved north. After a show of resistance, backed by churches, newspapers and the stout-hearted, the mostly German inhabitants packed in their singing clubs, zithers,and Weinstuben and headed for the hills.

By the onset of the Harlem Renaissance in 1930, the hamlet was a brown new bag.

As designated by previous occupants, this New Harlem was still bordered on the South by 110th Street, north by 155th Street, on the east by the river, and on the west by St. Nicholas Avenue and Morningside Drive. As the population exploded, however, the borders of this black Promised Land crept across Morningside and St. Nicholas toward the Hudson, and even north toward Washington Heights.

Beyond the grounding of its real estate, Harlem had become a state of mind. New York was heaven to me, Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography, upon first touching down. And Harlem was seventh heaven! With its jazz, hustle and mesmerizing art and church music, Harlem was identified as any terrain across 110th Street where blacks settled en masse.

Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, made this very point about Harlem’s floating boundaries in a 1966 appearance before Congress. I live on Riverside Drive at 150th Street, he said. It isn’t exactly Harlem, but Harlem has a way of expanding. It goes where Negroes go, or where we go in certain numbers. So, some of us think of it as Harlem, though it is really Washington Heights.

The boundaries still seem to float depending upon who’s chalking the lines.

The Times explained its racial population shift with an accordion-like slide between central and greater Harlem. The larger unit where blacks supposedly dropped to 41 percent in 2008—was described as running river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street. Long-time dwellers disagree.

Instead, they say, the boundaries of Harlem traditionally start at 110th Street and run to 155th, river to river, minus the terrain east of 5th Avenue, running from 96th Street roughly to 125th Street. This multi-block parcel has long been considered East Harlem, and occupied over the years by Spanish and other ethnic whites with never much of a black presence.

By adding East Harlem as a component of the shift, the Times appears to pad its non-black population ledgers and thus distort the overall demographics. Further, the paper’s description of central Harlem, which reportedly dropped from 98 percent black in 1950 to 62 percent in 2008, is confusing to long-time residents.

Born in Harlem Hospital and reared on its mean streets, Sherman Edmiston was perplexed by the Times’ boundaries that would, among other markers, exclude from central Harlem the Essie Green Art Gallery that he owns and manages at 419 Convent Avenue. The impression the Times gave is that Harlem is becoming predominantly white, Edmiston said. The larger demographics shift is Latino, not white. And if you walk your dogs around the corners up here, you’ll also see a lot of Asians.

The demographic shifting of Harlem, whatever the precise boundary and numbers, is occurring at a time of evolving patterns in other boroughs of the city. At less than 40 percent, white Americans, for example, find themselves no longer constituting the majority of the overall population of New York City. This fact has not yet been reflected by the demographics of those running things both public and private.

In the November mayoral election, exit polling showed for the first time in the city’s history that white votes tallied less than 50 percent of the count. Some 46 percent of voters clocked in as whites; with blacks at 23 percent; Hispanics at 21 percent; and Asians at 7 percent. Key questions are raised about the meaning of the demographics shift, not just in Harlem but also in the city and nationwide.

When renting a room, G. K. Chesterton once remarked, one should not simply inquire about the furniture, the linen, or even the rent. One should instead fix the landlady with an unstaring eye and ask: Madam, what is your total view of the universe? The Times gentrification story settled for an inquiry about the linen. Quite beyond mere furniture and linen, that elusive Harlem of the universe remains much more a state of mind.

Harlem, indeed, has not always been black; but, as Yogi Berra might say, it always will be.

Les Payne, a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter, owns a home in Harlem and is writing a biography of Malcolm X.

Who Are You Calling Crazy?

Madness was a recurring theme in American politics last year. I received daily calls, emails, texts, and tweets from folks on the Left declaring "these Republicans are crazy," "the GOP has gone mad," or simply, "this county is nuts." "Wingnuts" became a common way to describe vehement, political opponents on the Right.

Americans have an interesting history of conflating our political disagreements with diagnosis of mental illness. In a terrific new book, psychiatrist and historian Jonathan Metzl tells one of these fascinating stories. Metzl's book, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease is exceptional and unexpected.

The text's central argument is that mental illness is not solely (or even primarily) a biological or medical reality; it is largely a social construct. Madness is often diagnosed in those who do not conform to social norms, especially norms governed by identities like race, gender, and class. Illustrating this point, Metzl reminds readers that in the 1850s, American psychiatrists believed enslaved blacks who ran away from white enslavers were suffering from a mental illness called drapetomania. This illness, psychiatrists maintained, could be cured by excessive whipping.

Lest we snicker at the obviously racist and primitive assumptions of 19th century mental health professionals, Metzl spends the rest of the text tracing the 20th century story of schizophrenia.

At the turn of the 20th century schizophrenia was a diagnosis typically given to middle-class, white women whose behavior was deemed embarrassing, distressing, and inappropriate by their husbands and families. This disease of the double-mind was often attributed to white, intellectual geniuses as well. (Think of the popular book and film A Beautiful Mind) Throughout the first half of the 20th century, medical professionals diagnosed white patients as schizophrenic and typically described these patients as docile, non-threatening, and in need of therapuetic nurturing.

A dramatic change occured in the 1960s. During this era schizophrenia was increasingly diagnosed in "Negro men." As black men were more firmly associated with the disease, psychiatric communities and popular culture came to understand schizophrenia as a disease marked by violence, hostility, aggression, and requiring powerful psychotropic medication.

Metzl draws his book title from a 1968 article in the Archives of General Psychiatry where leading physicians describe "protest psychosis" as a condition where black men develop hostility, aggression, and delusional anti-whiteness after listening to Malcolm X, joining the black Muslims, or engaging in Civil Rights protests.In short, when African Americans experienced anger, distress, and disillusionment when faced with the crushing realities of Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, the medical establishment labeled them crazy and dangerous.

In the 1850s slaves seeking freedom were described as mad. In the 1920s women unwilling to conform to the constraints of domesticity were treated as insane. In the 1970s black people who wanted equality were thought to be nuts.

Metzl writes, "the transition of schizophrenia from a disease of white, feminie docility to one of black, male hostility resulted from a confluence of social and medical forces."

This insight is a powerful intervention at this historic moment. It forces us to reexamine our beliefs about the nature of disease, the process of medical diagnosis, and the influence of the political world on our racial ideas. Implicitly, it also cautions us about the consequences of deploying "madness" as a description of our political adversaries.

Metzl is a practicing psychiatrist. He intimately understands how people with mental illnesses suffer. He is a physician who prescribes medication, and acknowledges the dramatic, positive effects biomedical intervention can have to alleviate that suffering. But he is also a historian and a political theorist, keenly aware that the dramatic changes in definition and diagnoses of mental illness are as political as they are medical.

On nearly all matters of policy and politics I disagree with the birthers, the deathers, the tea baggers, most GOP office holders, a significant number of Southern Democrats, and more than a few members of my own academic department. While I judge them to be stunningly wrong-thinking, I am hesitant about labeling my adversaries "crazy."

Red-faced screaming at town halls, audacious lies about President Obama's citizenship, and incomprehensible obstruction tactics by legislators might be symptomatic of mental instability, and they are clearly indicative of deep human suffering, but the "crazy" label does more to obscure our understanding of our differences than to illuminate them.

Metzl's book is a reminder that diagnosing individuals encourages blindness to the social structures in which these individuals operate. Slavery was the madness, not the escaping slave. Racial inequality is the illness, not the Civil Rights Movement.

We learn more and can more effectively influence social change when we consider the situation of our conservative opponents. Their "craziness" might seem more reasonable when we consider the tactics of fear-mongering and race-baiting that have long characterized American politics. A decade of unaccountable government might explain some of the paranoia. Shouting matches that pass as nightly news are implicated in the lack of civility with which they engage. It may not be our opponents who are insane, but instead the zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to politics, which is truly crazy.

Let's be careful as we diagnosis the problems.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough

I'm Coming Back

Greetings readers,

Lately I have been very busy...and yes, a little lazy. So, as a result I have not been posting on my blog as I should be. Thus, I'm coming back, the new semester is about to start, I'm taking some interesting course--which I'm sure I will blog about. In addition, I assure you that I will blog more..personally and academically as well as re-posting entries from other sources. I feel blogging is crucial to the advancement of my writing and my journey to and through the academy. 2009 wasn't a bad year for me personally, nor was it a great year--however, I regret none of it...I view it as a lessoned learned and will only move forward. Now, 2010, I have made some resolutions and changes to my life--one important one is to become a better boyfriend to my girlfriend. The second, to be more involved with my blog as well as social networking--twitter. The amount of networks I have made via twitter is just amazing, I am so glad to have met so many amazing people with whom I can agree, disagree, and debate with...and still consider them good "citizens." 2009 has taught me a lot about myself; also, it has opened my eyes to some of the things unseen and I'm thankful of that. I hope that you all continue to read my blog and I will continue to post, again, that is one of my resolutions for the new year.

Peace & Love,

LaCharles