Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellis Cose was a longtime columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, the former chairman of the editorial board of the New York Daily News, and is the creator and director of Renewing American Democracy, an initiative of the University of Southern California, Northwestern, and Long Island University. He began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, and columnist and chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today. Cose has appeared on the Today show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC World News, Good Morning America, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of California, among others, and has won numerous journalism awards. Cose is the author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America, Bone to Pick, The Envy of the World, the bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class, and several other books.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Is a truly race-netrual society possible? Can the United States wipe the slate clean and surmount the racism of its past? Or is color blindness just another name for denial? In this penetrating and provocative book, Ellis Cose probes the depths of the American mind and exposes the contradictions, fears, hopes and illusions embedded in our complicated perceptions of race. Looking beyond the platitudes and pronouncements that tend to distort reality rather than illuminate it, Cose offers a visionary analysis of the steps we must take if we are serious about finding a true resolution to the thorny problem of race in America.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Color-Blind

Perennial

Can a new race surmount old prejudices?

Americans are accustomed to infinite shades of ebony, but the South African journalist Mzimkulu Malunga found the notion hilarious. So he named one celebrity after another--Tina Turner, Vanessa Williams, Mariah Carey--tickled at the thought that anyone might consider them all black. The impromptu racial-identity game soon had the small group in Soweto in stitches. It seemed an appropriately absurd end to an evening spent, for the most part, in more serious conversation in a country whose governing principle once had been: "Tell me your race, and I'll tell you your place." As his guests finished a dinner of beer, beans, beef, and a grits-like delicacy called pap, Malunga, business editor of The Sowetan, finally shrugged as if to say: Race is a strange and flexible concept, with an endless capacity to confound.

That evening took me back to an encounter, some years earlier, on a bus several miles outside Caracas, Venezuela. Upon learning I was from the United States, the dark-skinned woman beside me had peppered me with questions. Did I find Venezuelans to be prejudiced? Was there racism in the United States? Were Canadians less biased than their neighbors to the south? Finally, she focused on her son, seated directly in front of us. He was the color of caramel and about seven years old. His father, she told me, was "white," and the son, despite his dusky appearance and faintly African features, had decided that he was white, too. At first, the idea struck me as ridiculous, but, by and by, I found myself thinking, "Why the hell not?" By any logical calculus, he was probably more "white" than "black" (not that, in most of Latin America, he would be considered either). And from the perspective of a child who was old enough to know that whiteness means status but too young to realize how whiteness is defined, wanting to be white was just as natural as wanting to be a quarterback instead of a cheerleader. I wondered, however, if the boy had been American, whether he would have thought he had the option to choose his color. For most of us, race is simply accepted as a given and on faith, no more subject to questioning than the reality of our existence.

Even before the civil rights movement erupted and Jim Crow died, racial definitions in the United States were somewhat different from those in South Africa (and Latin America), and specific policies varied as well. But these countries shared the conceit that the concept of race was reasonably precise and that it told us something important. In fact, those assumptions never really made sense.

Earlier in this century, for instance, Italians, Jews, and Rumanians were widely considered to be of different (and inferior) racial stock compared to the English, Germans, and Swedes. Just a few decades later, those groups were fully accepted into the community of whites. In an essay entitled, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" Karen Brodkin Sacks asked, "Did Jews and other Euroethnics become white because they became middle class? That is, did money whiten? Or did being incorporated in an expanded version of whiteness open up the economic doors to middle-class status?" The answer, she concluded, is both. The question, nonetheless, illustrates the absurdity of the premise that racial classifications are fixed.

That supposition, at long last, is under serious challenge--from intellectuals who doubt that the concept of race has much meaning; from immigrants who have a different and more elastic view of racial classifications; and, perhaps most interestingly, from those who refuse to consider themselves members of any currently accepted racial category but refer to themselves as multiracial and demand the recognition of a new melded race.

Success in that endeavor, some advocates believe, would be a huge step in the direction of a color-blind society, for by embracing those who are multiracial, the United States would be recognizing, if only implicitly, that the ugly racial lines etched in the nation's soul will, sooner or later, disappear. Alternatively, goes the argument, the nation's failure torecognize formally the existence of multiracial Americans would be a tragedy, not only for mixed-race people but for American society, and would perhaps be a fatal blow to the dream of racial harmony and egalitarianism.

In 1992, in Bethesda, Maryland, several hundred multiracialists came together for the "first national gathering of the multiracial community," as described by Bijan Gilanshah, in the December 1993 issue of the journal Law and Inequality. The "Loving Conference" was named in honor of the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, which outlawed antimiscegenation statutes in 1967. But the meeting was not simply a celebration of the right to reproduce across racial lines; it would mark--or so its organizers hoped--the public launching of a new and potent political movement.

At stake, in Gilanshah's eyes, was nothing less than the prevention of "cultural genocide." Instead of leaving mixed-race people in a vulnerable and nebulous state of official nowhereness, the government, he thought, was obliged to give them full recognition "as a distinct, powerful social unit with idiosyncratic cultural, social and legal interests." Much the same point was made by Charles Byrd, who organized a rally at the Washington Mall in July 1996 to allow mixed-raced Americans, like himself, an opportunity to collectively and "proudly affirm a self-determined identity" while attempting to persuade the federal government to sanction the multiracial category.

Multiracial people with a heritage that is, to some degree, black have a special interest in how mixed-race people are to be defined. "In physical as well as cultural terms every Negro is a little bit colored and a little bit white," observed Martin Luther King, Jr. in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Yet it is only the "colored" part that has generally been acknowledged. Unlike Americans of other races, blacks have largely been defined by the so-called one-drop rule: the presumption that even a small percentage of black ancestry effectively cancels out any other racial stock. It is a rule that some biracial people believe compels them either to deny a big part of who they are or to explain constantly to a rigid, "monoracial" world why they reject a patently illogical designation. Why, they ask, should they renounce the ancestry of a nonblack parent or grandparent? What's the point, they ask, in forcing people into narrow boxes that cannot possibly accommodate America's growing racial diversity?--particularly when the black box is fundamentally different from the others, carries the full baggage of slavery, and defies all common sense. As Lawrence Hirschfeld, author of Race in the Making, observed: "The absurdity of the biological reading of the one-drop rule is obvious. . . . How reasonable is it to say that a white woman can give birth to a Black baby, but a Black woman can't give birth to a white baby?"

Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other, which profiles several children of black-white interracial unions, extracted the following comment from one of the persons she interviewed: "A lot of Blacks get upset...