The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The media’s metadiscussion explicitly endorsed a definition of Obama’s race that was essentially intersubjective, basing its racial descriptor on a combination of self-identification and ascription by others. Their reasoning, while not to be taken as gospel, explicitly endorsed the use of racial descriptors which were intersubjectively agreed upon. For instance, the Associated Press, whose articles and analysis dominate newspaper discussions of politics and race through both reputation and sheer numbers, endorsed such a view. As Karen Hunter, the Reader Representative at the Hartford Courant, explained in 2008, “Because The Courant relies on the Associated Press for much of its national coverage of the presidential race, the AP plays a key role in how the newspaper presents the candidates.” In accounting for the AP’s decision to use of “black” and “African American” as the proper – and essentially interchangeable – descriptors for Obama, AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Silverman explained, “I would say the answer has to do partly with the way Sen. Obama has defined himself and partly with the way American society defines someone who is biracial.” While Silverman implied a static public definition of black and biracial individuals, and ignored his organization’s own role in creating and shifting these definitions, the AP relied on what it perceived to be the intersubjective consensus in order to determine Obama’s race, rather than any set of facts related to American rules regarding blackness. Nowhere in Silverman’s recapitulation of the AP’s behind-the-scenes discussions does he mention Obama’s parentage, hypodescent, biology, or other American rules of race, although they perhaps form the background of “the way American society defines someone.”

The Washington Post, Hartford Courant, and New York Times editorial boards were among the media to take similar stances. While endorsing and explaining the AP’s use of an intersubjective standard in deciding how to describe Obama, the Hartford Courant stated that,“Obama’s candidacy is a rare and riveting opportunity exactly because it is forcing conversations about issues that have been easier to ignore for centuries.” And in CNN’s “Behind the Scenes” look at it’s coverage of Obama’s race, Jay Carrol somewhat retrospectively summed up the media’s predominate position, writing, “A columnist examining Obama’s background summed up his racial identity into one equation: ‘white + black = black.’ For me, that said it all.” While the piece is entitled “Obama: Black or Biracial?” and Carrol continues with a discussion that claims the answer is complicated, the “accuracy” of the description is treated as an academic exercise attendant to the obvious conclusion based on an assumed social ascription.

Peter Geller, “Making Blackness, Making Policy,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012. 42-43. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9548618.

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

Oxford University Press
2016-02-18
192 Pages
7 Black and white
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199386260

Carlos Hoyt, Jr.

It is written by a person who is intimately familiar with living as an adversely racialized person
It introduces readers to the non-racial worldview
It provides first-person narratives of people commonalty ascribed to the black/African American racial category who eschew racial identification altogether.
It furnishes the concept of racialization as the antidote to normalizing race as a naturally and unavoidable aspect of identity.
It explains essentialism
It reconciles the seeming conflict between race-conscious and color-blind ideologies
It provides a way beyond the problems of race that plague this country

For the vast majority of human existence we did without the idea of race. Since its inception a mere few hundred years ago, and despite the voluminous documentation of the problems associated with living within the racial worldview, we have come to act as if race is something we cannot live without. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race presents a penetrating, provocative, and promising analysis of and alternative to the hegemonic racial worldview. How race came about, how it evolved into a natural-seeming aspect of human identity, and how racialization, as a habit of the mind, can be broken is presented through the unique and corrective framing of race as a time-bound (versus eternal) concept, the lifespan of which is traceable and the demise of which is predictable. The narratives of individuals who do not subscribe to racial identity despite be ascribed to the black/African American racial category are presented as clear and compelling illustrations of how a non-racial identity and worldview is possible and arguably preferable to the status quo. Our view of and approach to race (in theory, pedagogy, and policy) is so firmly ensconced in a sense of it as inescapable and indispensible that we are in effect shackled to the lethal absurdity we seek to escape. Theorist, teachers, policy-makers and anyone who seeks a transformative perspective on race and racial identity will be challenged, enriched, and empowered by this refreshing treatment of one of our most confounding and consequential dilemmas.

Table of Contents

Epigraph
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Preface: Lethal Absurdity De Jour
PART I: UNDERSTANDING RACE
- 1. Simile, Metaphors and Analogs for Race
- 2. Same World, Different Worldviews: Not ALL the Black Kids Sat Together in the Cafeteria
- 3. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Race and Racialization in Five Epochs
PART II: TRANSCENDING RACE
- 4. Who Are The Race Transcenders? Narratives of Non-racial Identity Development
- 5. Race Transcendence, Race Consciousness and Post-race
PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE NONRACIAL WORLDVIEW
- 6. Race Without Reification: Pedagogy, Practice and Policy from a Non-racial Perspective
- 7. Beyond the Panopticon: Liberating the Tragic Essentialist and Promoting Racial Disobedience
Appendixes:
- Appendix A: Pre-interview Background Information Form
- Appendix B: Semi-structured Open-ended Interview Questions and Interview Domains Matrix
References
Index

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2016 at 01:39Z and is filed under Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Philosophy, Social Science, Teaching Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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