Transnational dimensions of race in America.

AuthorLewis, Hope
PositionSymposium: Defining Race

--"Out of many, one people." (1)

Jamaica, the nation from which my parents and grandmothers migrated to the United States, includes a motto on its national coat of arms that is at once inspiring and yet disturbingly ironic: "Out of many ... one people." (2) The emblem itself depicts only two of the "many" an indigenous man and woman from the people who were wiped out by the ravages of colonial invasion and the diseases to which they were exposed by European explorers.

The motto seems intended to reflect the fact that Jamaica, like much of the Caribbean, is a crucible of hybridity. (3) The vast majority of the island's people are of West African descent. Yet the particulars of the island's colonial history, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, indentured servitude, plantation economies, and global migration mean that Europeans, South Asians, and East Asians also have long been represented in smaller numbers or mixed-race populations. Religious traditions reflect a range of influences including West African animism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Rastafarianism, Judaism, and Islam.

The motto, "out of many, one people," therefore, can be "read" in different ways--as an expression of cross-cultural solidarity and nationalism, as an assertive embrace of hybridity, or even as an assimilationist claim. But the absence of the indigenous peoples who first inhabited the island from the "many" presents an uncomfortable and telling reality. It resonates of the literal eradication of a population in a context where racial and cultural difference provided a convenient excuse for European colonial powers to grab ever-more land, gold, labor, and goods.

I was struck, therefore, by the potentially positive and negative echoes of the Jamaican national motto I heard in U.S. President Barack Obama's now famous Philadelphia speech on race relations--"A More Perfect Union." After linking his own hybrid ancestry and experiences to the broader diversity and complexity of the United States, he asserted that "out of many ... we are one." He then elaborated by describing the experience of being Black in America as "at once unique and universal." (4)

In the United States, racial identity can be seen as one element in a melting pot (one of many individual components that melt down into something new and broadly "American"). It could be viewed as a salad ingredient (one which retains its individual flavor, adding to a complex new American whole). Or racial identity can be viewed as well as an unwelcome addition to the dinner, to be discarded entirely in a post-racial society. It is just such contradictions and tensions in our encounter with race in general, and "Blackness" in particular, that I explore in this essay.

DEFINING RACE: DO WE KNOW IT WHEN WE SEE IT?

Defining "race" presents problems that make the international community uncomfortable. (5) Such a project further exposes the privileges assigned to dominant racial groups and the costs imposed on subordinated groups; the horrendous legacy of pseudo-scientific theories that supported slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, more recent genocides, and other efforts to determine life chances by racial category. (6) Formal racial and ethnic categorization also raises the perceived threat to national sovereignty and stability posed by internal or cross-border racial solidarity. (7) Defining race, as such, therefore, was to become a politically and scientifically unviable enterprise in the period following the founding of the United Nations. (8) "Race" was left to the realm of concepts in which international actors are supposed to "know it when they see it."

Apparently, it was easier for the international community to define "racial discrimination" instead, as it does in Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD): (9)

[T]he term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens. Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as affecting in any way the legal provisions of States Parties concerning nationality, citizenship or naturalization, provided that such provisions do not discriminate against any particular nationality. This symposium and the globe-shaking election of the first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama, (10) create a unique opportunity to explore some of those definitional problems.

Simultaneously, the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (11) presents a special moment at which to explore the implications of race for the powerful paradigm of international human rights discourse. At such a moment, we can well ask whether and how race still matters as a high priority on the international human rights agenda.

Sixty years ago, the formal human rights movement was founded on the recognition that genocide, slavery, and other forms of racial discrimination were central to the conflagrations of the early and mid-twentieth century. (12) If, therefore, a sustainable international peace and security system was to be created, it was necessary to address racism and racial conflict directly as a source of political and economic instability and civil unrest. (13)

In the six decades that followed, the U.N. adopted a legally-binding treaty--the ICERD--and included non-discrimination and equality provisions in every major human rights treaty. (14) In fact, ICERD was the first of the core international human rights treaties to be adopted by the U.N. General Assembly. (15) It was adopted in 1965, one year before the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (16)

This essay asserts that race, a key concept in international human rights law and policy from the beginning, should still be high on today's global priority list. However, to remain a useful concept in our increasingly complex world, race must be defined and explored as a transnational and multidimensional social construct. (17) I reflect specifically here on the complex nature of "Blackness."

I suggest that international human rights law should engage intra-racial diversity among Blacks along cultural, gender, political, economic, and ethnic lines. Because "Blackness" itself is a product of popular social consciousness, I draw here on popular accounts of U.S. Black migration and stories about the Presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Such stories reveal in stark relief how problematic an oversimplified approach to defining the borders of Blackness can be. Anecdotes can have limited application in comparison with broad-based social scientific data. But evocative stories nevertheless can help make previously marginalized experiences and perceptions more visible. Once visible, such instructive stories and sources can then become a more legitimate focus of further legal and interdisciplinary research.

Underlying my discussion is the background belief that intraracial political and cultural strategies and analyses that are crosscultural and multidimensional (18) remain relevant and helpful in the contemporary global economy. Such approaches, however, need not be inappropriately exclusionary or essentialist. Rather, they can contribute to cross-cultural engagement and enrich our ability to protect and fulfill human rights.

  1. WHY BLACKNESS?

    I choose to focus on the transnational and multiple dimensions of "Blackness," not because I believe that recent African-descent constructed in historical and contemporary opposition to "whiteness" or European descent constitutes the entire range of racial meaning. Many Critical Race theorists, including some of the outstanding scholars at this symposium, have already challenged and complicated an oversimplified Black-White paradigm quite effectively. (19)

    Rather, my long-term project is to examine the implications of "Black diversity" (20) or multidimensionality within Blackness. The richness and depth of Black engagement with transnational contexts in pre- and post-TransAtlantic slavery is being explored by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but much remains to be done. (21) Specifically, I hope to examine more deeply in future work the implications of the complexity of Blackness for international human rights strategies as tools in the struggle for global social justice.

  2. DEFINING BLACKNESS IN MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS

    The candidacy of then U.S. Senator Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States was a particularly telling example of the problems associated with defining Blackness, including the transnational implications. (22) During the campaign, (23) I, like many commentators, engaged in the obvious debates about identity politics. (24)

    Some U.S. observers questioned whether a man born in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas (an anthropologist and women's economic development advocate) and a Black Kenyan immigrant (an intellectual and political activist) and who was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii (25) by his mother, Indonesian step-father, and white American grandparents (26) could be "Black enough" or at least "African-American enough" (27) to represent the interests of the majority of African-Americans.

    Interestingly, Obama's mixed race and cultural background did not pose as significant a challenge for non-U.S. observers. His status as "Black" was largely unquestioned in media reports outside the United States and was seen as a key symbol of racial progress and of the...

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