alright, some remarks on trayvon, george, barack, and the post-racial era, if any. the zimmerman case seemed to me somewhere between rodney king and casey anthony: both a discomfiting racial emblem and a 24-hour murder-media circus. i'm not sure, in a way, how seriously to take it. right, a kid is dead. most dead kids don't get months of non-stop coverage and, again, to say that the nsa/snowden thing is a much more important and also morally far clearer case, is to state the obvious, i believe.
obama seemed, as he was making that statement friday, grim and sad. now, one could view the case, or certainly the response to it, as a demonstration that we are very far from a post-racial society, which is true: look at things like income levels, incarceration rates, and so on. but it also shows the reality, which has always been central if less obvious, and which is constantly increasing, of the fluidity of race, its ambiguity, which rests in part on its status as a social construction, more or less shifting as fast as society as a whole. but one thing a post-racial society would be is a society in which everyone's identity is ambiguous, chaotic, or ultimately unspecifiable. that is certainly true of zimmerman and obama, for example.
now, on the one hand, a 'post-racial' society is what almost everyone wants; it would signal the end of 'our long national nightmare' etc. on the other hand: everyone, at least everyone in my generation and its predecessors, has a stake in the racial system they grew up in. these stakes are tremendously complicated, even for white people. so, one such stake is white privilege. another is white fascination with african-american culture and its incalculable contribution to world arts, for example (which is far more significant than the contribution of white americans). a post-racial society could not have given us hip hop, for example, even if hip hop is getting pretty post-racial now.
one problem with white people going around saying that race is over is that it ignores and even seems to double down on unconscious racism; white people would like to believe it's over, thus erasing a burden of guilt, but believing that even helps the structural inequalities to persist or get worse. so, you know, who cares how many black people are in prison or how many black senators there are? there's no such thing as race anyway. but also: any white person who ever sincerely endorsed racial equality was wanting a post-racial society, and probably thought that black folks wanted it too.
no doubt they do, but again only fitfully. african-american culture is an amazingly rich thing; it should be a symbol throughout the world for the transcendence of suffering, or the transformation of oppression into creativity, or the thousands of ways people can survive and resist and transcend subordination. but you can't have that without the subordination, and i think we might with some care point out that a post-racial society could not have this culture in it, really except as a museum. from a certain point of view, 'post-racial' means the end of racialized cultures. you can't have a douglass, a dubois, a booker washington, a king, a malcolm in a post-racial society. a post-racial society in some ways realizes the vision of those people. it also precludes them, makes them into decisively historical figures rather than ones it makes sense to really read and emulate, say.
indeed, you can't have american culture as a whole as we have understood it without race. if race is the great theme/burden of america, as many have asserted, then a post-racial society is a post-american society.
no doubt jesse jackson is right to say that the idea that we live in a post-racial society is wildly premature. on the other hand, think about the stake that jesse has in a racialized society: he has spent his life fighting it, but for that reason among others, his life is inconceivable without it; he has an infinite stake in the system he has fought to overcome. you cannot have the identity of a fighter for racial justice - as jackson or sharpton have regarded themselves through their whole adult lives - in a post-racial society, and frankly i don't think they would acknowledge that we had reached such a point even if we had, and even though that would in some sense be their very own victory. i don't think this is unique: to the extent that race is winding down, we all have something to mourn, for this has been absolutely central to our cultures, our identities, our self-understandings and understandings of others, our social arrangements, our arts, and so on.
actually to lose race as a category really would be lose all kinds of things that have been amazingly great as well as so many horrors. but i do think we'd have to acknowledge the loss if we were actually to get post-racial.
this is not to say that getting to a post-racial condition is equivalent to the assimilation of african-american to white culture or something; everything is getting more complicated and the future will have elements of everything. i think we suffer in part from our attempts to understand the whole thing or get a grip on it; we're always imposing a new simplistic taxonomy or explanation that's false on the ground. let it flow, baby.
