I recently read A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I said two weeks ago, it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts each Wednesday for the next while. I put up the first last week — here’s the second, somewhat condensed from the original:
MEAD: This was, I suppose, twenty-five years ago. I was speaking in those days about three things we had to do: appreciate cultural differences, respect political and religious differences, and ignore race. Absolutely ignore race.
BALDWIN: Ignore race. That certainly seemed perfectly sound and true.
MEAD: Yes, but it isn’t anymore. You see, it really isn’t true. This was wrong, because —
BALDWIN: Because race cannot be ignored.
MEAD: Skin color can’t be ignored. It is real.
BALDWIN: It was a great revelation for me when I found myself finally in France among all kinds of very different people — I mean, at least different from anybody I had met in America. And I realized one day that somebody asked me about a friend of mine who, in fact, when I thought about it, is probably North African, but I really did not remember whether he was white or black. It simply had never occurred to me.
Three things jump out at me about this passage.
First, there’s the obvious fact that Baldwin and Mead, speaking forty years ago, regard the idea of racial “colorblindness” as a quaint relic of Jim Crow-era liberalism. It was something that seemed to make sense back in the fifties, they agree, but not anymore. Not in 1970. The fact that we’re still, as a culture, debating this in 2011 is striking.
There’s also Mead’s troubling use of the phrase “skin color” as a synonym for “race.” I know it’s a traditional synecdoche, but it’s weird and unfortunate in this context, because although race is real, it’s not “real” in the sense that skin color is.
Skin color doesn’t determine race — George Hamilton is darker than Colin Powell, after all. What makes race “real” isn’t its physicality, because race is a cultural, rather than a biological, fact. As I noted last week, the one-drop rule was created for social and economic reasons. Genetics didn’t, and don’t, enter into it.
Skin color, in other words, can be ignored. We ignore it all the time. I had to Google photos of George Hamilton and Colin Powell to make sure I was right about who was darker — I don’t carry that information around in my head. But I do carry around the knowledge that Hamilton is white and Powell is black. And it’s that knowledge which can’t be suppressed or wished away.
Which brings us to Baldwin’s comment about his own race-blindness in Paris. Earlier in the book, Mead had paraphrased his insight that “there are no ‘Negroes’ outside of America,” and it seems that this is what’s operating here. The racial categories carries with him are American racial categories, and French racial structures, differing as they do from the American, don’t resonate for him in the same way. And so although it may seem like a contradiction for Baldwin to say in one breath that “race cannot be ignored” and in the next that it had “never occurred to” him whether a friend was French or French North African, it’s actually completely consistent.
Skin color can be ignored. Race cannot.
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January 4, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Kevin T. Keith (@KTKeith)
Good points.
It seems to me, though, that Mead’s use of the term “skin color” was of its time in the same way as both speakers’ belief in “race blindness”. That is, that people of that time would not have perceived race and skin color (or, a syndrome of physical appearance including skin color) as being as distinct as we do today. I suspect “skin color” was synechdochal not for “race” as a social construct, but for (perceived) ethnic heritage – so that George Hamilton and Colin Powell would not have been accepted in 1970 as counter-examples to the race/skin color identity, in that each is clearly perceptible as a member of their ethnic group by way of their overall physical appearance, denoted as “skin color” even though their literal skin colors do not track with the stereotypes. As we now understand ethnic heritage to be vastly complicated in its own right, historically and genetically, the denigration of race as constructed makes more sense, and the fact that (literal) skin color does not track with race reinforces the new perspective. But I don’t think that’s what Mead and Baldwin were likely saying in 1970.
From a similar perspective, I don’t know if Baldwin’s comment has to be understood as a distinction between American and European socially-constructed categories. When I read the quote it first struck me as simply a commentary on the sense of freedom many black ex-pats reported feeling overseas: not that American-style racial categories didn’t exist, but that they didn’t carry such a crushing burden of denigration, and weren’t the central determining factor in one’s place in society. The comment resonates with the veneration of “race blindness” they both at one time endorsed (the Paris reference is not dated, but it’s worth nothing that Baldwin first began living in Paris in the late 40s – the same time period that he and Mead assign to their belief in race blindness). Baldwin seems to me to be saying that he found that in Paris he truly could be race-blind in the (perhaps naive) way they meant, even though that ideal came to seem problematic later. No doubt even the desire for such an ideal would look very different in an American or European context, but I don’t think he’s saying that it was literally meaningless in one place but not the other.