Postracial? What does that even mean?
]]>Ms. Stewart's experience in this article reflects what I've seen volunteering at various Obama offices throughout primary states. Young, twerpy campaign staffers just a little too flippant about "that all-black neighborhood, its REALLY ghetto, i need you to do all the hispanic doors..." etc. etc. Canvassing in the Philly projects, me and my homegirl almost got shot at on one block cuz they sent us in a random area, there was no local knowledge on the part of campaign staffers. My African-American friend was 6 months pregnant. Now, we're from Tha Town so not easily rattled... but the naivete mixed with demographic slicing & dicing along racial lines of the Obama-ites just made me feel weird. Plus that whole word "post-racial."
I am curious how this will manifest after the election. Will this victory mean the same to all of us? Should it? Should I just chalk it up to cultural differences and forget about it?
]]>Side story to prove my point: When studying abroad in Italy, another student had his laptop stolen (by a drug dealer he had let into his apartment, but that's a whole other story). When one of his roommates found out that it had been stolen, he started ranting about "what did the guy look like? was he an AFRICAN AMERICAN?"
]]>Examples:
Post-modernism -> Relatavism instead of art & philosophy that critiques, but works within modernism.
Post-feminist -> Anti-feminism instead of third-wave feminism that questions gender binaries and essetialism.
Post-racial -> A regurgitation of liberal kumbaya shit with no real meaning.
Post-human -> Substituted for lolnerd or Haraway's 'cyborg.' No idea as to whether it has an actual, substantial agreed-upon meaning.
YES IZ HAF 2 MUCH COFEE THIS MORNIN AND IZ HAF MANIK SUPEREROTY COMPLECKS
Ben beat me to it. I agree though all post terms should be banned.
Post-Feminist Post-structuralist, Post-Marxist, etc.
While we are on the subject I had a professor tell me that she thought we were living in a post-literate society. I really wanted to ask her "What comes after literacy? Ignorance and Superstition?" for the sake of my grade however I demurred.
Kevdog had it right. All of us really just want to be Post-election, and pre-paring for an Obama Presidency.
]]>Which means we may be slightly more genetically more mixed then we used to be, but we've got our heads on straighter.
]]>I consider myself multicultural. I have a very large, close black family 13 branches at my grandmothers level but went to all white highschool and am a black minority in a majority white industry. My culture shock came in highschool. I used to think all white people were rich. Once we get past the racial we can hopefully enjoy the cultural diversity not just between black and white but within black and white and other cultures as well. There's wisdom in all of them.
In graduate school, I read Thomas Sowell's The Economics of Race (He wrote it before he became a conservative hack I think) and it opened my eyes to the misnomer of white and black culture. Each of the immigrants bring a different history and culture and experience to this experiment. Germans and Scotch Irish have a different idea about the strength of central government. Jamaicans were always the majority. American blacks have always been the minority. Race oversimplifies all this.
I resist the idea that 'post-racial' is meaningless because I feel we've come most of the way that we can go in our society in terms of legislating equality. There are still steps we can take, but there exists a point of diminishing returns, and it's become crystal clear that legislating people's individual choices re: race does nothing except backfire. In this context, I can't help but think that 'post-racial' is the best shot we (the royal we, but focusing on white people) have for escaping the label 'racist'. That's why I'm not willing to give up on it, and I'd like to hear what some of these commenters, or even TNC himself, think should replace "post-racial" as a term for the racial and integrative goals of American society.
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