Rock stars of multiracism challenge old black-white lines
p.man...@sbcglobal.net
By ORIN STARN
SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER
March 27, 2007
Separated at birth?
The golf icon, Tiger Woods, and the new political headliner, Barack
Obama, are a Castor and Pollux for our times.
Those mythical Trojan twins occupy the night sky as the constellation
Gemini. Like them, Tiger and Barack burn bright in the postmodern
celebrity galaxy. Their intersecting stories give us a compass for
charting America's changing geography of race, culture and identity.
Both men position themselves across old black-white lines in a new
hybrid model of multiracialism.
In the past, any African ancestry made you "black" by the bizarre,
ineluctable "one drop of blood rule" governing race in America. But
Tiger and Barack have mixed origins, the sons of globalization and
migration. Tiger's black American father met his Thai mother in
Vietnam-war-era Bangkok. He grew up in sunny southern California, like
so many Asian-American kids.
Barack is yet another midnight's child of today's shrinking planet.
His white American mother fell in love with his Kenyan father at a
Hawaiian university.
Both men have also experienced racism's ugliness firsthand. Barack did
pro-bono housing-discrimination work in his lawyering days. Schoolyard
bullies once tied Tiger to a tree, then danced around, shouting the n-
word.
Tiger has said he's proud of being black and calls Charlie Sifford,
the pioneering first black PGA pro, his "honorary grandfather." And
yet, in a telling measure of changing times, Tiger calls himself
"Cablinasian." He coined the neologism to convey his white, black,
Native American and Asian heritage.
The golf champion and his wife, Elin Nordegren, expect their first
child this summer. It will be a tableau right from a Zadie Smith
novel: the Thai grandmother, the black father, the Swedish mother and
their hybrid child.
The more cautious Barack calls himself a "black man of mixed
heritage." He makes the most of it on the campaign trail. In Kansas,
the aspiring president tells heartlanders that he's one of them.
Barack's white maternal grandparents did indeed come straight out of
Wichita. Mixed parentage - or "miscegenation" in that ugly old term -
becomes a matter of pride, even a marketable asset.
Far from being exotic exceptions, Tiger and Barack mirror America
today. Millions of Americans in this age of great migrations have
similar mixed origins. What journalist Richard Rodriguez calls
America's "browning" is making us into a more cross-fertilized,
diverse nation.
But acknowledging multiracialism remains a tricky proposition in a
society that still wants us to pick sides.
Tiger and Barack receive the occasional n-word hate mail. Their desire
to maintain multiple allegiances also raises doubts among African
Americans. Some black activists, after all, opposed including
"multiracial" on the census, fearing it would undermine racial
solidarity. One critic dismisses Tiger as a "show mulatto." And Barack
faces questions about whether he's "truly" African American since his
ancestors were not slaves.
Some wariness is in order. We shouldn't congratulate ourselves
prematurely for racial progress. Tiger and Barack had stable, middle-
class upbringings. It's the lack of that security that puts so many
millions of poor minority kids at a desperate disadvantage.
And consider the complexion of Barack's and Tiger's professions. Tiger
is the lone African American among the 125 golfers on the men's
professional tour (there is none on the women's circuit). Barack is
the only black member of the U.S. Senate. We have a long iron over
water yet to go with race in this society.
That Barack and Tiger want to get beyond the tired old boundaries of
American racial politics is understandable. Aren't we all more than
one thing whether we admit it or not?
And new DNA research only confirms that race itself is a fiction in a
world of impure, mixed bloodlines from history's beginnings.
The "one drop of blood" rule was an invention of a society that wanted
as many people "black" and thus enslaveable as possible. It's
slavery's unhappy curse that so many of us still want to believe that
black and white are somehow culturally and genetically separate
categories, a willed denial of America's overlapping,
multidimensional, intertwined realities past and present.
Does the race-bending of Tiger and Barack augur a change in racial
thinking at last? Maybe, and yet it's never been easy to predict
anything as grand as America's future.
Tiger will be seeking his third major championship in a row next week
at the Masters Tournament. That would be the better bet.
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Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Obama'08
http://barackobama.com/