here’s a question you can answer for me. in TEOB it is clear that she is speaking for herself. i understand that black leaders are making claims about obama’s blackness. i don’t buy those arguments, but i understand them.

But when she says “we” is she saying she supports the claims of “black leaders” or is she doing something else?

Because that “we” signifies to me that she is explicitly going against her argument, in as much as the “we” are making different claims about blackness than she is….AND in as much as even identifying with a “we” based on nothing more than skin color goes against her primary claim in the first place.

I had to rub my head too and started to believe that she didn’t understand her own theory. So I decided to stop being lazy and arrange some of the puzzle pieces for us here (I’m assuming the italics tag works).

Her basic premise is that: “Blackness is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, just as overt racism did.”

She explains:

“Blacks, and their supporters, create magazines, inaugurate academic departments, and publish bodies of critical theories devoted to the study and repudiation of ‘whiteness’–as morally, scientifically, and intellectually bogus an invention as ever existed. [...] Whiteness, along with all the other ‘races’ whites created, is no more than the codification of hierarchies of relative oppression and expliotation. ‘Black,’ these ‘whiteness’ specialists tell us, has been arbitrarily formulated as the most depraved and degraded category of all. Yet it is blacks who fight hardest to maintain the tautology, to cram every possible “black” into the leaky lifeboat with them, to define the paramaters of the category most narrowly. [...] Blackness is existential Play-Doh” it’s biology, its ideology, it’s sociology. The End of Blackness (132)

The line about defining the parameters of the category “most narrowly” seems to look like hypocrisy when compared to the Salon piece:

“Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.

But to say that Dickerson is a hypocrite on this account is to miss the entire point of her refreshingly cantankerous writing on the subject; also note the use of “we” in the last five words.

She explains further:

“In addition to blacks’ DuBoisian double consciousness, there are also two black ids. One seeks to transcend race, while the other seeks to make blacks powerful qua blacks so as to defeat whites. These ids struggle to either merge and expand or fully separate into lesser entities. James Baldwin knew that ‘freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.’ Decades later, we know that he meant a notion that was much more radical than freedom from whites. But how do blacks find themsevles when, for centuries, they’ve had to subjugate their will, their personal preferences, and even their thought process to the group’s survival? This subjugation has resulted in contradictions and complexities that can only surprise those with a vested interest in blindness…” The End of Blackness (200)

Compare with:

“Notwithstanding their silence on the subject, blacks at the top are aware (and possibly troubled?) by Obama’s lottery winnings: “black” but not black.”

From here, it is easy to see how Kamiya came up with:

“[...] People whose race or ethnicity defines their identity, or at least makes up a major part of it, are what I think of as quotation-mark people. They are not only mixed-race, they are “mixed-race.” Those whose race or ethnicity has little or nothing to do with their identity, with their sense of themselves, are non-quotation-mark people.”

When Dickerson doesn’t put black in quotation marks, she is referring to “blackness” as she defines it in TeoB, i.e., the blackness which is ripe with contradictions and plagued by the continued subjugation of the will of individuals to group survival (we can discuss later whether or not we should agree with this definition). This is what she means when she says that Obama isn’t black. She means primarily that he lacks this fundamental subjugation of the will–that historical tensing-of-the-bow, as it were–and the inevitable contradictions that come with it.

If Obama represents that which transcends race by virtue of his alienation from the experience of the descendants of West African slaves (and also his distance from the Movement generation, then she seems to mean that Obama isn’t black as “we” use the term, i.e., as defined by the essential folk culture which grew out of (and could only have grown out of) the experience of the descendants of the West African slaves. Indeed, she makes no call for introducing a strict formalism into the discourse of cultural criticism, such that we no longer need childish quotation marks. Instead, she is nobly content to use the definition of black as supplied by the essential folk culture; by doing this, she maintains the deliciously snarky theme of TeoB when she says that Obama isn’t black as far as the black leadership is concerned.