JOHN MCWHORTER OP-ED: Our Non Post-Racial Climate

The linguistics professor and moderate-liberal Democratic pundit responds to news about U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama's genealogy as part of a New York Times expert panel: "If America now appreciates the mixing of races in our history, it isn’t clear to me just what the appreciation consists of. One idea might be that if we appreciate, or acknowledge, the racial mixture in the past, then it will help eradicate racist feelings in the present. Surely, however, no one truly believes this could happen to any significant degree. The notion has a noble ring to it, but who supposes that a white person who harbors anti-black sentiment would change his mind upon being informed that slave masters often impregnated their female slaves? Or that genetically he probably has a bit of 'black' in him from such interactions in the past? Another thing that keeps us from appreciating such stories is that they are so often painful or embarrassing, involving coercion and illegitimacy. There is a story of this kind in my own family background, which my older relatives were reluctant to dwell on in conversation. To us now, it would seem like a complex tale of interaction between the races in the old South. To my grandfather, however, it was not a New Yorker think-piece story, but the beginning of a tough childhood he was happy to have escaped. Of course there were less unsavory kinds of racial mixture in the past. I just finished reading Marcus LiBrizzi’s new book 'Lost Atusville' about a small town in Maine founded in the 18th century, where black-white couples were hardly uncommon and occasioned little remark. But ironically, what keeps us from appreciating things like that as relevant to us is that we are as hung up on race in some ways as the people in Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother’s day were."

He continues his commentary: "That is, we still have a kind of one-drop rule. Of late, the category 'biracial' is gaining ever more of a foothold in the national conversation, but not so long ago (i.e. when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s) people with one white parent and one black one were considered 'black' — and black people were as stringent about that as whites, often suspicious of mixed people who stressed that they truly were half-black. A reader comment I get often these days is a white person asking why I refer to Michelle Obama’s husband as black rather than as half-black and half-white. The reason is because he presents himself as black. He talks about the white part of his heritage, of course, but if he had gone out campaigning explicitly talking himself up as 'half-white' (a la Tiger Woods’ 'Cablinasian' notion) a great many black Americans would have felt him as primly distancing himself from black culture, and would never have taken him to heart. The typical comment about blacks disavowing full membership is 'Wait till he gets pulled over by the cops — then see how white he feels.' In our decidedly non-post-racial climate, I doubt we’ll be seeing the fact that white and black people were making babies in the 19th century as something to appreciate — or even acknowledge."