Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Prologue: the riddle of race

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 45; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0031322x.2011.563141

1461-7331

Emily Bernard,

Race, History, and American Society

ABSTRACT Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard's essay on the case of race in the United States. Keywords: Barack Obamablacknesscolour blindnesspost-racialraceracelessnessracismsocial construction of race Notes 1Barbara J. Fields, ‘Ideology and race in American history’, in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (eds), Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982), 143–77 (146). 2Charles Johnson, ‘The end of the black American narrative’, American Scholar, vol. 77, no. 3, 2008, 32–42. 3Debra J. Dickerson, ‘Colorblind’, Salon (online), 22 January 2007, available at www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2007/01/22/obama (viewed 26 January 2011). 4Larry Neal, quoted in Margo Natalie Crawford, ‘Natural black beauty and black drag’, in Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford (eds), New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2006), 155. 5Larry Neal, quoted in Margo Natalie Crawford, ‘Natural black beauty and black drag’, in Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford (eds), New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2006).