Within just a few weeks, the U.S. Census Bureau will begin mailing out questionnaires to every household in America soliciting personal — and, we’re assured, confidential — information about us and our loved ones. While most items have become more or less standard over the past few decades, the 2000 census will contain a new twist to an old query that could fundamentally alter the way America views itself. For the first time, Americans can check as many boxes about race as there are racially distinct branches in their family tree.
Since the 1960s, data on race and ethnicity have been used extensively in civil rights monitoring and enforcement, covering areas such as employment, voting rights, housing and mortgage lending, health care services, and educational opportunities. In the 1970s, the federal government standardized racial and ethnic categories in order to streamline civil rights monitoring. Henceforth, Americans would have to identify themselves as American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black or white. In the one adjoining category on ethnicity, they could also choose to select whether they were of Hispanic or non-Hispanic origin.
But the logic and strength of the mutually exclusive racial categories were not destined to survive long in a diversifying nation. In the early 1990s, these standard classifications came under fire from a growing number of Americans who believed that the bare-bones options on the census questionnaire did not reflect the new demographic reality wrought by two decades of high immigration and increasing intermarriage rates.
On the 1990 census, a mixed-race American was forced to either identify himself with one ancestry or put an X by the ignoble and anonymous “other” category. As a result, advocacy groups for racially mixed Americans called for a “multiracial” category on the 2000 census, an idea uniformly opposed by traditional civil rights organizations that feared the new classification would diminish their constituencies as well as complicate the task of monitoring discrimination.
Caught in a political tug-of-war, the Clinton administration stumbled on a compromise in the fall of 1997. The Office of Management and Budget, which incidentally was headed at the time by Franklin Raines, an African-American with a white wife and mixed children, directed that federal forms, including the 2000 census questionnaire, must now tell respondents to “select one or more” racial categories to identify themselves. By choosing multiple categories, respondents could indicate a multiracial identity.
At the time, few could have predicted that this small, politically expedient yet significant change in the questionnaire’s fine print would make much of a difference in this country’s stagnant racial dialogue. But on the eve of the 2000 census, demographers, statisticians, and bureaucrats around the country are still not sure how they will process and present the data that is due on the president’s desk by the end of the year.
While it is clear that the new multiple race option will give us a more accurate and complex view of America’s racial landscape, it is also certain to create a great deal of confusion — and perhaps conflict — for years to come. The NAACP as well as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund are urging any of their constituents who may be part white to identify themselves as simply black or Asian on the census. Other civil rights organizations are already pressuring the government to “reassign” multiracial Americans back into the traditional racial categories, to resist dilution of any individual non-white racial group.
Although the census has never been able to formally count the multiracial, surveys and estimates do show that the number of racially mixed Americans has skyrocketed over the past quarter century. In 1970, there were an estimated 321,000 interracial unions in the United States. By 1990 that number had increased to 1.5 million. Surveys also indicate that the number of children in interracial families grew from less than one-half million in 1970 to roughly 2 million 20 years later. And these numbers don’t include intermarriages involving Latinos, because Hispanic is an ethnic and not a racial category.
If Hispanics are taken into account, an estimated 7 percent of contemporary Americans could be considered multiracial/multiethnic. And a recent analysis of birth records by the Public Policy Institute of California indicated that 15 percent of all births in the Golden State are multiracial or multiethnic.
In the nation’s most demographically diverse state, 53 percent of multiethnic births are to Latino/white couples. At 15 percent, Asian-white children are the second most common combination, followed by black-white (9 percent), Hispanic-black (7 percent), and Hispanic-Asian (6 percent) children.
While categories and classifications have evolved over time, the census has been collecting some sort of data on race and ethnicity ever since it was first undertaken in 1790. America’s ever-changing ethnic composition and shifting political moods long have been reflected in the very questions the census poses. In 1850, a growing national awareness of immigration led census takers to ask respondents’ place of birth as well as that of their parents.
Forty years later, a heightened interest in miscegenation spurred census officials to track the mixed ancestry of the people we today label as African-Americans. A person was considered black only if he had three-quarters or more black blood, mulatto if he was three-eighths to three-fifths black, and “quadroon” or “octaroon” if he claimed one-quarter or one-eighth African ancestry.
Over the decades, there have been many other changes in the terms we use to identify and classify ethnic groups. Asian Indians, for example, were counted as Hindus in censuses from 1920 to 1940, as white from 1950 to 1970, and as Asians or Pacific Islanders in 1980 and 1990.
But if the new census will more accurately reflect the nation’s reality, no one is clear on how to read the results. “It will be a statistical mess,” says Bill Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. “What we do know is that it’s going to use up a lot of RAM.”
In this year’s census, the racial categories will remain essentially the same as in 1990, with a few exceptions. Black, white and American Indian or Alaskan Native and “other” will all remain unchanged. But the old category of “Asian or Pacific Islander” will be split into one classification for Asians and another for native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Hispanic will continue to be a separate ethnic category.
Although there are only six major categories to select, it is the 63 possible combinations of them that could give statisticians headaches. And that’s not taking into account whether those possible combinations are Hispanic or non-Hispanic. That brings the number of potential racial/ethnic mixtures to a grand total of 126.
“I can’t see having to make 63 charts,” says Jeffrey Beckerman, the head of statistics for the Los Angeles City Planning Department. “But I suppose that somebody might.” Local officials throughout the country are still awaiting word on how the Census Bureau will release the final data. But as of early February census officials in Maryland still haven’t finalized their plans. “We’re still not sure how we’re going to show all the information,” says Arthur Cresce, a bureau demographer. “We’re still working through how to do it.”
“We’re going to have get over the idea that everything adds up to 100 percent,” says Linda Meggers, a demographer for the Georgia Legislature. Racial figures in the United States will soon resemble religious data in Japan, where 186 million people are counted as members of various sects when there are only 121 million souls in the country. In Japan, it is common for people to label themselves as adherents to more than one faith.
We do know that the bureau will release the data in a variety of formats. It will be obliged to present the entire range of combinations, but then there will also be the more abbreviated categories. The most common tables will probably be those showing the six major groupings plus one additional category in which all multiracial Americans are lumped together.
It may also choose to highlight the four major racial combinations, which in all likelihood will be white-black, white-American Indian, white-Asian, and black-American Indian. There will also probably be tables presenting “single-race” Americans alongside constituent combinations, i.e, a black alone category alongside a category for black combinations.
But despite the obvious complications in presenting the data, the real problems will come in the myriad ways people and public agencies will choose to use the numbers. And that’s where the fighting begins.
For instance, it is easy to imagine advocacy groups suing over the number of members of a particular racial group. For example, a pan-Asian organization may choose to combine “single-race” Asians with Asian combinations to create a super Asian category. It is conceivable that a competing activist group, say on behalf of mixed-race Asians, could argue to have the categories tallied differently.
In fact, civil rights groups are already pressuring the federal government to develop a method of “reassigning” multiracial Americans into the traditional racial categories in data that serves civil rights purposes.
The government has discussed various ways this could work, but the final plan of action is still unclear. One option is to automatically assign people who check white and another race to the nonwhite category. Another is to have people who are a mix of two non-white groups assigned to the smaller — and theoretically more vulnerable — category.
Much like their contrary stance in the debate over the self-standing multiracial category, this posturing puts traditional civil rights groups in the odd position of upholding the old, zero-sum racial scheme. Indeed, some black groups, such as the NAACP and the Black Leadership Forum, a national coalition of the leaders of major civil rights organizations, are encouraging people to check just one box this year. The nuances and complexities of the multiracial future may be too threatening to the stark civil-rights era perspective forged in the segregationist past.
“I’m sure everything will end up in court,” says Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University. “Whenever you have something where resources are involved, you can imagine people arguing about it.” Civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, fear that if enough African-Americans choose the multiracial over the single-racial option, they could weaken majority-minority voting districts set up in accord with the Voting Rights Act.
While recent lawsuits and legislation have reduced the role of race and ethnicity in public policy, there are still plenty of race-conscious statutes on the books. Federal policy under legislation like the VRA, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid to bilingual education is based on the percentage of a certain racial group in a given place. Also, lawyers in employment discrimination suits will sometimes try to prove that a firm is biased by comparing the number of blacks in particular jobs with the percentage in the local population. Any such lawsuits could be affected if a large number of African-Americans identify themselves as multiracial.
The counting of multiracial Americans could also affect the data many counties use to monitor the racial makeup of jury pools, as well as complicate the tallying of hate-crime statistics.
Curiously, it’s the keepers of health and vital statistics in states like California who may have the hardest time adapting to our increasingly multiracial reality. “I’ve applied to get a bunch more staff [to process the data],” says Jane McKendry, who heads the Center for Health Statistics for the California Department of Health Service. “But I don’t know if I’ll get them.”
She admits that the department still does not know how it will classify data on mixed-race people. For instance, they have not decided what to do with an infant mortality case involving a self-described “white-black” woman — whether it should be added to white or black infant mortality rates. “Race means a lot of things in health,” says McKendry. Black infant mortality is twice as high as white in many cities, for a complicated tangle of medical, economic, cultural and perhaps biological reasons, and race-targeted strategies have brought down the mortality rate in black sections of Oakland, Calif., Baltimore and Savannah, Ga. Such strategies could be harder to pursue without an accurate count of the black population.
McKendry fears that data on multiracial Americans could get lost in a useless “mishmash” category, and that it will be hard to draw comparisons between pre- and post-2000 data. But she also speculates whether all this confusion could one day cause health professionals to wash their hands of race and concentrate solely on access to care for all Americans — which wouldn’t be a bad thing.
But, truth be told, most demographers do not expect many Americans to avail themselves of the new multiple race option, at least not this first year. In 1998, the Census Bureau ran a dress rehearsal in three sites around the country and the overwhelming majority of respondents ticked off one of the standard categories. In Columbia, S.C., only .08 percent of respondents selected more than one racial category. In Menominee County, Wis., only 1.2 percent of respondents did. But in Sacramento, Calif., 5.4 percent of respondents selected more than one race on the questionnaire.
The dress rehearsal indicates that intermarriage is a largely regional phenomenon. “There are going to be a lot of empty [bubbles] in North Dakota,” says Frey, whose research has shown that the much ballyhooed ethnic diversification of America will mostly occur in the 10 states — California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii — that have become gateways to contemporary immigration.
The confusion about the census seems fitting, because it matches our racial reality much more than four neat little categories. It will also provide a welcome opportunity to reconsider the way we look at race in America. For starters, the multiple-race option undermines the logic of the so-called one-drop rule, the notion that any person with any amount of African-ancestry must be considered black.
While no one is naive enough to think that official recognition of multiracialism means that Americans will suddenly stop seeing race as a question of either/or, this still amounts to a significant first step. For instance, although the vast majority of African-Americans share some white ancestry, it is doubtful that many black Americans will label themselves as multiracial on the 2000 census. But if race is a social construct — as social scientists love to remind us — then it can also be deconstructed. The loosening of strict, mutually exclusive categories begins to allow for a more fluid conception of race.
After the 2000 census, the danger will be the tendency to “reassign” multiracial Americans to the old categories, or create new racial labels to “make sense” of our diversity. The more Americans identify themselves as multiracial, the less the strict categories of race will make sense in the end. But that won’t keep people from trying to parse America up into four or five familiar pieces.
In 1998, for instance, the number of applicants to the University of California who flat-out declined to state their racial/ethnic backgrounds jumped a phenomenal 190 percent in one year. But university admissions officers dug into the students’ SAT records to try to deduce their ethnic backgrounds without their consent.
Over the next few years and perhaps decades, there will be a heightened battle between the old and new ways of seeing race. A victory for multiracialism may not portend a new era in which all Americans are joined in a raucous chorus of “We are the World,” but it would free us to concentrate on what is rapidly becoming this nation’s primary demographic divide: class.
“The government really shapes whole issues of identity,” says Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. “Over time, people will begin to answer [the race question] in more complex ways.” Before the changes in this year’s census, the federal government had essentially refused to properly acknowledge mixed-race Americans, the living and breathing solutions to racial tensions. The establishment of the multiple-race option was a clear recognition of a significant demographic trend.
Does all this mean that America is beginning to shed the remnants of a segregated and sordid racial past? Not necessarily. But at least now we can begin to visualize the melting pot we Americans have claimed to desire for so long.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.
The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.
A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.
What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)
Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.
Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.
Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.
Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.
Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)
Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.
Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.
Further reading
Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories
The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.
Cory Booker’s failed 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark heralded a new type of black politician. Booker was an outsider with Ivy-league credentials who was trying to unseat a veteran urban politician who had made a name for himself during the civil rights movement. Like other “new black politicians,” Booker’s appeal granted him entry to the political world and helped him circumvent long-standing black democratic machines. But what does this process, which has been repeated everywhere from Washington to Alabama, tell us about our country’s changing attitude towards race — and politics?
In her new book, “The New Black Politician,” Andra Gillespie follows the career of Cory Booker, from his start as a lawyer and community organizer through his successful run for mayor and his reelection, in order to illustrate what separates the new generation of black politicians from other black leaders before them. These new black politicians seek to create the same multicultural coalition that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency, but many lose their black support and fade from the political scene.
Salon spoke with Gillespie about racial electability, Cory Booker’s senate prospects, and what black politicians have in common with Will Smith and Tyler Perry.
How have new black politicians used what you call “elite displacement” to win elected office?
It’s a theory that’s transferable to other minorities as well, be they racial or religious — basically, groups that have experienced stereotyping in the past and have been marginalized because of these stereotypes. Elite displacement is what happens when an older generation of politicians who have largely come to power despite the stereotypes levied at them have a new generation of leaders, who are more assimilated into mainstream culture and who don’t necessarily wear the same type of ethnic or racial veneer as their predecessors, now running against them — particularly in cities where the majority is from that same racial group. What I’m interested in is how these young politicians break through. They normally have not been socialized within the institutions in that community. They’re outsiders to that community, and they’re trying to figure out a way to break into politics when all the traditional paths to power have been shut off.
What elite displacement describes is the practice by which these young African-American politicians try to circumvent the black political establishment to reach office for the first time. What they take advantage of is their access to mainstream institutions and culture, and they use that as their calling card. They may not get the support of the older black congressman, the city council, or the local political bosses, but they have access to mainstream media and their friends who have money, and they use that to amass a resource that can overwhelm the existing structure of the black political community.
Part of the reason they get so much interest and their story is so compelling is because people think of these older black politicians in terms of stereotypes. They are viewed as corrupt, ineffective, criminal and incompetent — not quite up for technocratic leadership. And this younger group of politicians, because they bring the right qualifications and pedigree to the table, fit the bill. They fit the archetype of what white audiences want to see black leaders look like, which would be very well-spoken, not talking about race all the time, and having credentials from the right schools, and that gives them a certain cache which makes their story very compelling. It helps them get on television and helps them attract volunteers to come from outside the communities to help them out. In my book, I explore the consequences of this strategy. It’s very hard for young black politicians to develop a deep connection to their constituency. Does their strategy help them build a broader base of support? Does it help them win over some of their critics, who will still hold on to some positions of power? And what does this portend for long-term governance?
One of the things in African-American communities that should be noted is that there are tons of problems. African-American representation of those communities have not ameliorated those problems. In the 40 years of black government in Newark and similar cities, you still see high rates of unemployment, high dropout rates and very paltry health indicators. The idea that putting blacks in power will act as a panacea, will help blacks improve their physical and emotional health standing, is not really true. The subsequent question becomes: Are these new black leaders the magic bullet to gain on the progress of political equality that was achieved in the 1960s?
How are civil rights leaders — the politicians who emerged from the civil rights movements — limited in their ability to govern and seek higher office?
Part of this has to do with the moment that they were elected to office. They were elected because of demographic changes in the communities in which they lived. As early as the 1930s, there was a mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs because of deindustrialization, but it was hastened by the riots in 1967. The white and black middle class left, leaving a city that was predominantly African-American. So the demographics of the city gave the opportunity for a black politician to win elected office. But there were other things that happened. Just because blacks were able to win positions in the city doesn’t necessarily mean that blacks in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were going to be able to win statewide office. There’s no state in the United States that is majority African-American. It creates a very hostile environment for blacks to be able to run for higher office. On top of it, there is evidence to suggest that even when blacks have held positions of power or leadership, they haven’t always been taken seriously. Earlier generations couldn’t do what President Obama has done. You can look at members of Congress who couldn’t even get their hair cut in the capitol, couldn’t eat at the dining hall where all members of congress were allowed to eat. There was still a caste system that wouldn’t even let them dream of being president.
What is a “black political entrepreneur”? Which politicians embody this term?
A black political entrepreneur is a type of young black politician who is most likely to use elite displacement. They are the type of politician who is de-racialized and who doesn’t have demonstrable ties to the black political establishment. They would be the type of person who would not be a child of the civil rights movement and wouldn’t be the mentee of a civil rights politician. We’re not talking about Jesse Jackson Jr. or anyone who inherited their political role. A black political entrepreneur is different from other types of black politicians because they have very progressive political ambitions. They are clearly itching to run for higher office. You can look at them and say, “That’s a senator, or a governor, or maybe even another president.” Black political entrepreneurs are the ones who take the most risks when running for office. They usually try to challenge older black politicians for power when most others would argue that it’s ill-advised. If you contrast Cory Booker with former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. , for instance, Harold Ford Jr. inherited a congressional seat. Black political entrepreneurs challenge strong incumbents for power instead of waiting their turn.
You compare black political entrepreneurs to Will Smith and civil rights politicians to Tyler Perry.
I’m not talking about ambition. I’m talking about crossover appeal, the degree to which people are de-racialized, and where their power comes from. Will Smith built his acting career as someone who started off in hip-hop but never had a hard edge. He was, arguably, on the cornier end of the hip-hop spectrum. When he moved into Hollywood and became an A-list star, everyone knew he was African-American, but he wasn’t cast as a black actor. He was a comedic actor, an action hero. He was somebody who wasn’t threatening and whom everybody loved. And because of that, he was able to build this amazingly successful Hollywood career.
Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is somebody who, if you look at his net worth, has done better than Will Smith, but who has been unabashedly black in terms of self-presentation and the types of projects that he’s chosen. Today, people pay attention to him in Hollywood because he was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood last year. But he’s made that money almost solely in the African-American community. He’s been able to be successful in this niche market, and people take him seriously because he’s made a lot of money, but he’s still on the margins. The fact that he’s based in Atlanta and that he’s regularly panned by movie critics proves he’s not fully mainstream. He needs to be contended and dealt with because you cannot deny his success. There are black people who have problems with how he presents his characters. People think Madea is a stereotype and that his television show is also a stereotype. Will Smith and Tyler Perry are very powerful in their own right, but they get their currency from very different sectors of the American public, and that helps to contribute to their persona.
You provide some examples in the book of where, while vigorously campaigning against the incumbent, new black politicians end up reinforcing some negative stereotypes.
If you look at how the story usually gets framed in the media when the black political entrepreneur runs against the black incumbent, it’s usually cast in stark terms. Good versus Evil. It also gets cast as the anachronistic civil rights warrior going against a fresh person who doesn’t wear race on their sleeve. Given some of the stereotypes that exist of blacks in terms of their intelligence and corruption — and sometimes admittedly, the connection of some of these incumbents to corruption and incompetency — it ends up reinforcing stereotypes of the average black leader. The stereotype is that they should not be trusted, that they can’t lead. New black politicians continually reinforce the stereotype because they keep talking about the incumbents in those terms.
The consequence of this is twofold. In these minority communities — places where the black political entrepreneur is usually not needed — you will see the black constituencies rally around the incumbent because they believe the attacker is racially motivated or that the fight has a classist tinge to it. They are very resistant to having their leaders attacked.
Usually the younger black politician has something very valuable to offer their community. But eventually this notion that “this person is so much better than other black leaders” ends up being constraining for the black political entrepreneur. He or she gets held to incredibly high expectations. It becomes about how fast they can commit to change. And it reinforces the idea of the black political entrepreneur as a “magical black person,” as a black superhero. And the black superhero is the foil to the black villain — instead of transcending stereotypes, we end up reinforcing them. I think the notion of the black political entrepreneur as a black superhero who is going to save inner-city communities from blight and destruction ends up reifying this notion that normal black people are too stupid to run their communities and hold office. This ends up hurting everybody. If the black political entrepreneur can’t turn a community around very quickly, then it ends up looking bad for him, and it ends up reinforcing the idea that black people cannot govern themselves.
Do you see a backlash against black political entrepreneurs happening? I think of Adrian Fenty losing his reelection race for Mayor of D.C.
Absolutely. What’s really interesting about de-racialization theory, which underlies a lot of my work, is the strategy of black politicians reaching out beyond the black community to try to create a multiracial electoral coalition. People have always been concerned about the multiracial coalition falling apart because you can’t help but avoid race. We saw that happen with David Dinkins in New York City. Dealing with the Crown Heights riots and the Big Apple boycott, we see what would be a traditionally democratic voting bloc fall apart over race. One of the underlying assumptions of de-racialization is that black voters support black politicians. That’s a little harder to untangle when you have black-on-black elections where blacks are running against one another. And the assumption is that the two black candidates split the black vote, and the de-racialized new politician makes it up with the non-black vote.
What we’ve seen with Booker’s first mayoral race and Adrian Fenty’s loss is that you can lose enough of the black vote to lose an election. It’s a question of what the sweet spot is. Black political entrepreneurs should be comfortable not winning over some blacks. It’s just a question of how many black votes you lose. In Adrian Fenty’s case, he lost too much of the African-American vote. It then becomes a question of why. It wasn’t because of his technocratic leadership, because by all accounts he was a great leader. He left D.C. in better shape in 2010 than when he received it in 2006. He underestimated the extent to which style would be important and the extent to which people had a problem with Michelle Rhee. Style becomes really important. People don’t think that it should be important, but it is.
Black political entrepreneurs have national political ambitions. You can afford to lose some of the black vote, but if you alienate too much of it, you can lose a statewide election, which is what happened when Artur Davis ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama in 2010. Black political entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, are still very very dependent on black votes. You can’t alienate the black voters, even when you disagree with them, and you can’t come off as disrespecting them or condescending to them. Especially if they would have been sympathetic and voted for you, if only you hadn’t disrespected them.
It strikes me that these politicians are setting themselves up for disappointment by promising so much change and progress during their campaigns.
I don’t know if you’re setting yourself up for failure, but I would warn black political entrepreneurs to tone down on the messianic rhetoric and to try to separate themselves from it, because it puts undue pressure on them. One of the things that I wanted to do in the conclusion of the book is to address the aspiring Cory Booker’s out there. I want them to understand that there are consequences, both positive and negative, for every type of political decision one makes. I’m not here to tell anybody, “No.” If you’re running against somebody who you truly think is incompetent, then you should point that out. But you should definitely be more circumspect in how you criticize them, and you should do it in the most respectful way. Booker learned that between his two campaigns. They toned down the stupid rhetoric a lot between the elections because they realized how much it harmed them.
Another thing I would tell budding Cory Bookers is to really assess the resources they have at their disposal. There are people who want to be black political entrepreneurs but who don’t really have access to the Stanford and Yale and Oxford alumni directories the way Booker does. They might not have friends in high places. They might not have the same fundraising capacity. It might not make sense to use the elite displacement election strategy if you don’t have the resources. Booker could overcome a lot of the negative externalities that come with elite displacement because he had this very, very deep base in mainstream culture. If other people don’t have that, because they didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, then you might want to cultivate a different sort of persona.
Where does Cory Booker go from here?
This is my observation: At one point, it looked like people were toying around with the idea of running him for governor. But, based on the decision last year to create the Federal PAC, I surmise that now they’re looking more at Frank Lautenberg’s senate seat. I think that’s a great idea. I think Booker would be a great senator. He could have the potential, with some longevity, to have a huge impact on the Senate. He could be Ted Kennedy-esque. As long as New Jersey residents are comfortable with both of their senators not being white (and hopefully no one brings that up or reminds them of it), then that’s actually really cool. If Cory were sitting with me right now and asked me, “Andra, what should I do?” I would tell him to go run for the Senate, without hesitation.
A still from "The Intouchables" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Julio Cortez) 
(Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly) 
