(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
This spring, African-American students at Harvard captured national
media attention with their “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign. The organizers
described their goals, writing, “Our voices often go unheard on this
campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned—this
project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of
standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are
Harvard.”
This year, Harvard admitted a record number of black students, and it
boasts the highest black graduation rate in the Ivy League. The
faculty, facilities and programming budget at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois
Research Institute make it the envy of the American academy. There is an
active, thirty-seven-year-old Black Students Association on campus. The
Hutchins Center houses a hip-hop archive and publishes the
well-regarded
Du Bois Review. The president and first lady of the United States are both graduates of Harvard Law School.
By meaningful measures of resource commitment, academic outcomes and
historical legacy, Harvard could easily claim to be the best campus in
the country for black students. So how should we understand a
student-led effort emerging from a sense of racial alienation?
The I, Too, Am Harvard campaign is driven by a politics of recognition, not resources. In my 2011 book
Sister Citizen,
I show that people from marginal social groups desire recognition for
their group, and they also want recognition of their individuality. Many
African-Americans bristle at the idea of color blindness, because it
makes race irrelevant to identity. At the same time, black people do not
want to be reduced to their racial identity alone. W.E.B. Du Bois
explained the feeling of being reduced to a category, asking, “How does
it feel to be a problem?”
These students are not arguing that Harvard has failed to invest
adequate resources; they are revealing that as black students they are
routinely “misrecognized” and subjected to micro-aggressions, such as
presumptions about having lower intelligence, which diminish their
ability to act as full citizens of the Harvard community. This struggle
is not limited to a single Cambridge campus. It is also at the heart of
an ongoing debate about the meaning of racial politics in the Obama era,
initiated most recently by the April 7 cover story of
New York magazine, “The Color of His Presidency.”
Written by Jonathan Chait, the piece asserts that if you “set out to
write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the
day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has
saturated everything as perhaps never before.” Chait defines this racial
saturation of political life as the effect of the Obama presidency on
debates between white liberals and white conservatives. He points to
dueling paranoias about racism and racial innocence that infuse every
policy conversation and media moment. Chait’s argument is not wholly
inaccurate: he offers evidence that white elites indeed talk more about
race in the Obama era. However, any claim that race as a framework for
political and policy debates emerged in 2008 must necessarily rest on
ignoring black political life. This is nothing new. Gone are black
people from the “day-to-day experience of political life.”
Writing in Slate, Jamelle Bouie argues that Chait’s piece renders
black politics invisible and racial politics “a story of mutual
grievance between Americans on the left and right, with little interest
in the lived experiences of racism from black Americans and other people
of color. It’s a story, in other words, that treats race as an
intellectual exercise—a low-stakes cocktail party argument between white
liberals and white conservatives over their respective racial
innocence.”
In an interview with Chait on my MSNBC show, I later argued that a
story of white racial attitudes is valid, but that it hardly counts as a
robust description of American political life. To tell the story of
race in America, black people must be included as agents, not just as
subjects. Chait indicated that both Bouie and I were missing the point,
and that we were asking him to write about an entirely different topic.
It is difficult to watch a smart, prominent political writer
nonchalantly erase black people from the story of American political
life. It’s even more difficult to read his hopeful assertion that “the
passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three
years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will
likely ease the mutual suspicion.” Maybe Chait is right that with the
end of the Obama years, the primary political framework of black people
will subside into obscurity for white Americans, but that should be
interrogated, not celebrated.
When writers erase blackness from the political discourse, they
violate the right of recognition that black Americans share alongside
our white counterparts. The consequences extend beyond a violation of
democratic norms. Misrecognition has material consequences. The deaths
of
Trayvon Martin
and Jordan Davis are eminent examples. Martin, wearing a hoodie, is
misrecognized as a criminal; Davis, listening to loud hip-hop, as an
assailant. When not seen accurately by their fellow citizens, black
people can pay with their lives.
Perhaps this is what Ta-Nehisi Coates means when he writes in
The Atlantic,
“For black people, this conversation is not an abstract thought
experiment or merely a stimulating debate, after which we may repair to
our lounges and exchange quips over martinis…. These are our lives. When
you are black, no matter how prosperous, the war is right outside your
door—around the corner, a phone call away, at a family reunion.”
I, too, am America.
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