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The race-conscious state
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The L.A. Times runs a touchy-feely article today about how multiracial families see themselves in a "mixed" Barack Obama.
I appreciate the struggles that blacks and other minority groups in the U.S. have faced, but it's important to realize that most of this hardship is a product of state-sponsored racism, discrimination, and bigotry.
"I totally feel proud that [Obama's] a black man and he's mixed," Maile Winograd said of Obama. "I identified with him so much. What he went through as a biracial person, I went through. And my son must look at Barack and say, 'He looks like me.' That's a good thing. A very good thing."
It's part of human nature to identify personally with people who are similar to us. Like when you feel that inexplicable connection to the random stranger on the highway who has a decal of your favorite sports team on his bumper, or a sticker of your college alma mater running along the bottom of his rear window. Still, there's something disconcerting about people who will vote for someone simply because he looks like them.
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For the parents of multiracial children, Obama's rise has been a vindication of sorts, a presidential rebuttal to a society that has not always been kind to their offspring, labeling them "half-breeds," "tragic mulattoes," "mutts," "mixed nuts," according to Susan Graham, the white mother of two multiracial children and the founder of the California-based Project Race, a 17-year-old nationwide group that advocates for a multiracial classification on all school, employment, census and other forms.
So where's the problem really lie here? With "society" or with an all too racially-conscious state whose existence rests largely on its ability to foment tensions between many different identity groups within that society, and therefore seeks to continually obtain more power to "solve" any number of "crises" for us?
Identifying with Obama is one thing; voting for the man solely because of his racial identity, however, is perverse, and clearly helps to explain how our complete ignorance of policy results in the election of politicians who continually rob us of more and more liberty. Whereas the state sees race in all it does -- those census forms, or school and job applications -- most people, as the election has essentially proven, see America.
Individual racists and bigots are ignorant and disgusting, but alone they can do very little harm to anyone. The state, on the other hand -- comprising armies of attorneys, police, military personnel, weapons, and concentrated power, all of which is claimed forcibly through taxation -- is very dangerous and leaves all sorts of carnage in its wake. Barack Obama is merely a cog in this machine and a representative of the very government that has from the beginning existed at the expense of our rights.
The "government" did not end chattel slavery in America; slavery ended despite the government, as a direct result of the hard work and many personal sacrifices of untold numbers of abolitionists and other individuals who protested this evil. And even today, while we may no longer wear the manacles, we are all slaves to the state in one form or another, as our democratic institution routinely allows the strong to rule the weak -- the majority is legally permitted to assert its will about a minority that stands in opposition.
As long as we live under the decrees of our elected rulers we will never be free, and the racial makeup of the despot who sits atop the throne hardly makes a difference at all.
One boy in the Times's story complains, "I always check 'Other' on my college applications," alluding to the fact that he's unable to find a box that represents his specific heritage. Well, I'm what passes for white in most circles, but I always check "Other," too. Because it's none of the state's damned business what I "am."
The very existence (and requirement) of these forms illustrates the state's commitment to racial division in the first place.
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