Talk of "Transcending Race" is Racist In Itself

Originally posted at Too Sense:

I've written before about Obama's "authenticity" issue vis a vis his "blackness," the way that some people (largely white people) expect a black man to come from a certain background, have a certain personal history, and speak a certain way.

There's a corollary to the "authenticity" problem, namely all of this talk about Obama "transcending race." Why, he's not just black, he transcends race. In other words, he transcends blackness. He's beyond the state of blackness, he's something "better", different in the same way that John Turturro's character in "Do the Right Thing" described Michael Jordan. Voters can be comfortable with Obama because voting for him wouldn't be like voting for one of "those" black guys that everyone is scared of in downtown New York, or on the Southside of Chicago.

Saying that Obama transcends race reaffirms the notion that blackness is a liability, a condition that has to be overcome before one can succeed. Similar statements have been made about Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They aren't Scary Negroes, they're safe. They overcame their disability, like Corky from Life Goes On, running for Class President. In achieving their success, somehow they are perceived as having left blackness behind.

Let me tell you something: you can't get any blacker than having one of your friends blown up at church by some Klan psychopath because civil rights groups have been meeting in that church. Dr. Rice once said the following about that day:

"I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed."

Condoleezza Rice has gone far, she has achieved a position that only one other woman and one other black person have held (and no other black women). But don't think for one minute that she stopped being black when she reached those lofty heights of power.

People like Dr. Rice, General Powell, and Senator Obama do not transcend blackness at all, they affirm blackness, they stand as proof that blackness can be expressed powerfully, eloquently, intellectually. They haven't overcome the "burden" of being black, they have lived up to the potential of being black. To think that they have transcended blackness is to accept all of the racist stereotypes, to go along with the old way of looking at black people.

What needs to be transcended is not blackness. What needs to be transcended is the racist, false assumptions that people have about the nature and meaning of blackness.