- Originally published in the Washington Post on 8/5/2004, page A19 [here]
By Vanessa Williams
I am stumped.
Scott L. Malcomson, writing in Sunday's New York Times, declares that
Barack Obama, the Democratic Senate nominee from Illinois, "is not
black in the usual way." To bolster his argument, he cited an article
in the New Republic by Noam Scheiber, who voiced the opinion that
Obama is "not stereotypically African-American."
How is one black "in the usual way"? What does it mean to be "stereotypically African-American"?
Malcomson tried to explain by emphasizing Obama's mixed-race heritage
-- his father is a black Kenyan, his mother a white Kansan. He pointed
out that Obama was raised by his mother and her parents in Hawaii, as
opposed to being brought up in a black household. He argued that
Obama's keynote address at the Democratic National Convention last week
"did not . . . sound the familiar notes of African-American politics."
After noting that Obama identifies himself as a black man, Malcomson
seemed to be trying to prove that the Senate candidate is mistaken
about his own identity. "[W]hile he is black, he is not the direct
product of generations of black life in America: he is not black in the
usual way," Malcomson wrote. I wonder: Is there a "usual way" to be
white?
This week more than 7,000 news media professionals are gathered in
Washington for Unity 2004, a convention of African
American, Asian American, Hispanic and Native American journalists. In
addition to lobbying the industry to diversify its newsrooms, Unity's
core mission includes a challenge to the media to "improve
coverage of people of color by dispelling stereotypes and myths." It
seems we still have much work to do.
In presenting Obama as some new template for black success, Malcomson
offered an analysis as shallow as the one sometimes spouted by
discouraged black teenagers (and roundly criticized by the black middle
class): that to embrace the values and behaviors that lead to
achievement is to "act white." Worse, his reasoning as to why white
voters find Obama attractive is reminiscent of color biases many
thought had long been retired: that society favors those black people
with particular bloodlines, schooling and mannerisms, while seeing the
lot of black Americans through almost-cartoonish generalizations from
the dark days of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
That those stereotypes persist in the 21st century is, in considerable
measure, the fault of the news media. In the late 1960s the Kerner
Commission, convened to study the causes of the decade's racial riots,
criticized the news media for their failure to communicate to white
America "a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of living
in the ghetto . . . a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of
being a Negro . . . a sense of Negro culture, thought, or history."
Newspapers and television outlets responded by descending on charred
inner cities to chronicle the "black experience." The squalid
conditions and gross inequities it found -- dilapidated housing, high
unemployment, disproportionate criminality and substance abuse -- were
a legitimate story. But even then it was an incomplete story.
Nearly 40 years later the news media for the most part continue to
cover black people in America through a narrow prism of extremes. I
call it the first and the worst approach, focusing on black people who
soar to unprecedented heights (Obama was the first black Harvard Law
Review president) or sink to unspeakable lows (see the suspects on your
local television station almost any weeknight at 11).
What of the majority of black people whose activities are not good
enough or bad enough to attract headlines? How often do the news media
include the names, faces and voices of African Americans in stories
that are not about "black" issues, such as affirmative action, or that
don't reveal the latest social epidemic?
The other byproduct of the media's inadequate coverage of African
Americans is its creation of "black leaders," who are called upon to
speak for all black people, regardless of the subject. In many
instances these spokesmen are simply the nearest, loudest and glibbest
people. Some of these quote machines have been speaking for "the black
community" for decades, sounding like broken records on a tinny
Victrola. Is it too difficult or time-consuming for journalists to go
out and find black parents, wage earners and professionals who can
speak for themselves?
Although Malcomson attempted to depict Obama as a brother from another
planet, his life story does not seem all that alien to many black
people. Obama's racial makeup is not all that unusual; many -- perhaps
most -- black Americans have some "other" blood running through their
veins. Like Obama, scores of middle-class black professionals have
mastered the art of peacefully coexisting with -- and excelling among
-- whites. And there are any number of post-civil rights era
politicians, including D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and Rep.
Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), whose centrist political language appeals to
white voters.
Our universities, government offices and professional ranks offer two
reminders for those who trouble to look: that while Obama may be
a particularly attractive "package," the items that make up that
package are not so rare. And for all the mental work avoided by
stereotyping, there is no "usual way" to be black.