A Cultural Perspective on Race in the U.S

A Cultural Perspective on Race in the United States

As Tanz and Kitwana argue, the realm of culture is where we most actively engage questions of race today. A major problem this presents is that we generally do not have much understanding about how culture works. We are, of course, experts about our own culture, but that does not mean we are cognizant of the basic dynamics that drive and inform cultural processes, just as being able to drive a car does not make one an expert at repairing cars. Th e purpose of this book is to make plain the cultural dynamics shaping the way Americans interpret the signifi cance of race in the public sphere.

From a cultural perspective, one of the most perplexing aspects of this year’s worth of stories becomes intelligible. Th ese incidents reveal how Americans’ conventional understandings of race are both rapidly changing and just as quickly being cemented in new forms that take on an air of obviousness. Th is is partly how culture works—it power- fully shapes people’s behaviors and beliefs, yet is continually changing and being reconfi gured. Culture is a subtle but powerful accumulation of stories, rituals, and solutions to common problems. Culture operates through collections of events and images that form shared and accepted ways of looking at the world, establishing conventions that aim to con- tain the meaningfulness of something like race. Anthropologists char- acterize these conventions as “interpretive repertoires.”³¹ While such repertoires are generally shared, they can also clash with competing col-

22 A Year of Race Stories

lections of experiences, images, and storylines. Typically, there are ten- sions and confl icts in any culture, particularly over meanings attached to common stories—whites and blacks, for instance, often have drasti- cally diff erent views of major news events, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or O. J. Simpson’s arrest in 2007. But these groups share a recogni- tion that these stories touch on key ideals in American culture, such as equality and justice.³²

Th ese shifting expectations and perceptions about race may seem confusing or even contradictory. But that is the essence of culture: it combines all manner of contradictory elements and then provides peo- ple with the conceptual means for navigating these contradictions. We often talk about culture as if it represents a clearly defi ned set of values and meanings, but it is nothing so coherent or rational. Th e basic fact of culture is that it combines both shared perspectives and intense con- fl icts: people sometimes agree only about what it is they are fi ghting over. We deal with this complex condition through the central activ- ity examined here in this book—telling stories and using meaningful language centered around compelling images. We sometimes fi nd our “national conversation” on race confusing or frustrating because we do not realize how much it depends on cultural dynamics that have little to do with race specifi cally, but which are fundamental to how we make sense of the world.

When anthropologists talk about culture, we typically do so in two distinct manners. Th e fi rst concerns general aspects of culture, such as decorum and etiquette, that one can fi nd in any social setting; the second involves a particular group’s cultural dynamics. In this book, I address these two diff erent aspects of culture by fi rst examining gen- eral matters of cultural form, then considering how they manifest dis- tinctly in American culture.³³ Th e concept of cultural forms captures how this conversation is principally conducted through mediums of language that are hardly transparent and that each involve particular textures and torsions. Th ough we ably and expertly manipulate these cultural forms we have little awareness of how they, in turn, condition our sensibilities imperceptibly. Th e question of cultural form provides the principal organizing frame for this book. I do discuss these stories in roughly chronological order, but this arrangement also makes it easy to

A Year of Race Stories 23

illustrate four basic cultural forms shaping these episodes. Each story is structured by a fundamental rhetorical form—remarks, narratives, ar- guments, and apologies.

Don Imus’s situation refl ects the privileged status we give remarks in our society to reveal when or whether race matters.³⁴ Th e intensity of how these remarks were debated shows that Americans are quite prac- ticed at working with this particular linguistic form. Regardless of the specifi c answers we arrive at in such debates, what remains constant is our ready assumption that selected words or statements are an exem- plary basis for evaluating whether or how race matters. Th e situation in Jena, in turn, highlights the fundamental role of narrative in establish- ing whether we recognize an incident as racial.³⁵ In contrast to remarks, which are fairly easily grasped as an “atom” of social life and individual sentiment, narratives are more complex and mutable cultural forms. But they are crucial to our recognition of racial matters in that, by connect- ing a set of events as an interrelated sequence of actions and reactions, they establish a series that can be construed as animated by racial mo- tives or sentiments. Events in Jena show how we rely on certain narra- tive conventions to see “race” as an animating force in a series of events. But the story of the “Jena 6” also represents the way narrative frames can clash and be contrastingly deployed, either challenging or rearrang- ing the presumably given order of events.

Beyond remarks and narratives, we also rely on and are moved by arguments and forms of persuasion that lead us to conclude race indeed is present and active in some public setting or exchange.³⁶ In the Janu- ary Democratic primary contests, both the Clinton and Obama cam- paigns accused the other of “playing the race card.” At the same time, both camps affi rmed the notion that race had no place in their political debates. Journalists almost gleefully reported that race had been “in- jected” into the campaign in comments made by one side or the other, but they were at a loss in judging the competing arguments made by each candidate regarding which one was being truly racial. Over those four midwinter weeks a polemical contest unfolded in which both Clin- ton and Obama tried to persuade the larger public following these bat- tles that race was an invidious and improper feature of their opponent’s arguments or assertions. Th ese eff orts at persuasion refl ect a nuanced

24 A Year of Race Stories

kind of cultural work that is critical to convincing people that a certain politician’s views or positions are in fact race based.

Th en there is the crucial matter of what happens after the racial basis of a remark, a narrative, or an argument has been established—the public ritual of apologizing for a breach of racial etiquette.³⁷ Somewhat in contrast to these other elements of cultural form, the topic of apolo- gies opens up an evaluation of how well this “conversation” works and where or how it breaks down. In examining this particular cultural form—along with yet more diffi cult questions of how to frame racial comments pertaining to social problems, such as the diff erential mortal- ity rates between whites and blacks that Tanner referenced—I look at apologies as off ering a basis for some general refl ections about how these discussions might be diff erently engaged and pursued.

In presenting this general perspective on cultural form, I also ex- amine how American culture has developed a distinctive take on race. Th e dominant trend in race scholarship today is towards specialized lines of inquiry that examine whiteness and blackness, for instance, as dis- tinct racial formations or constructs. A case in point is my own research, which has been on the subject of whiteness.³⁸ But my work has also led me to recognize that there are cultural dynamics that crosscut racial lines and identities. Th ese dynamics, importantly, involve more than race, which is why we often fail to notice their relevance to judgments about racial matters. My focus here is on the way that a key pair of cat- egorical identities in American culture—individual and group—shape the ways we recognize and talk about situations as racial.³⁹ Americans invest the “individual” with enormous reverence and are somewhat am- bivalent about its opposite term, “group.” As each of the following chap- ters show, our perceptions of whether we are talking about individuals or groups is fundamental to how we decide whether race matters in a particular remark, story, or argument. Th e interpretive work of deciding to regard another person primarily as an individual or as a member of a group is key to understanding how race operates in the United States, even though these categories ostensibly do not reference race at all.

Additionally, the progression of stories here also suggests that Americans are becoming increasingly conscious of social conventions

A Year of Race Stories 25

concerning racial speech. Th e Imus incident—with its varied disputes over racial double-standards for speaking roles in the United States—re- fl ects this heightened attention to these conventions, sparked, perhaps, by the fact that they are growing unstable. Th is is evident, too, in the way conventions for reporting race stories—established with the rise of the “race beat” during the civil rights movement’s battles in the 1950s and 1960s—proved inadequate in the face of contests over racial mean- ings in Jena.⁴⁰ Th is predicament was further borne out by the befuddle- ment of reporters and candidates in the face of swirling accusations and countercharges about who was “playing the race card” during the Dem- ocratic primaries. Contests today over the “race card” evince a degree of cultural intricacy that proves challenging for journalists and readers alike. In the face of this greater complexity, and lacking greater analyti- cal dexterity with such topics, Americans increasingly fall back on the comfort of social conventions, even as those conventions are becoming unhinged.

Rather than confronting the need for greater precision and speci- fi city in our assessments of how race matters in the public sphere, we tend instead to fi xate on concerns over social decorum and matters of racial etiquette.⁴¹ Th at is, we seem more certain about public ruptures of decorum—distinguishing “inappropriate” from “appropriate” words and actions—than about specifying how and in what ways race matters today. We arguably spend more time debating the social conventions governing race in the public sphere than we devote to understanding when and why race continues to matter so powerfully. A key challenge for Americans confronting racial issues today is to come to grips with this overwhelming investment in decorum and etiquette to contain the excessive meaningfulness of race.

Th is book, then, combines an attention to both general and par- ticular cultural dimensions that form the ever-changing ground rules to our national conversation on race. My goals are to convey how social conventions shape our expectation of what diff erently raced people can say, to detail the ritual aspects of racial incidents, and to examine how our customary ways of narrating news stories and gossip shape our in- terpretation of events as racial or not. Americans are so culture-bound

by certain expectations about what race means that we spend more time worrying about not transgressing racial etiquette than formulating new ways to think and talk about why race matters, in the manner fi rst pro- moted by Lani Guinier. Advancing our conversation about race hinges on fi rst recognizing and then challenging the cultural strictures on the ways we speak about and view race.

Get professional assignment help cheaply

Are you busy and do not have time to handle your assignment? Are you scared that your paper will not make the grade? Do you have responsibilities that may hinder you from turning in your assignment on time? Are you tired and can barely handle your assignment? Are your grades inconsistent?

Whichever your reason may is, it is valid! You can get professional academic help from our service at affordable rates. We have a team of professional academic writers who can handle all your assignments.

Our essay writers are graduates with diplomas, bachelor, masters, Ph.D., and doctorate degrees in various subjects. The minimum requirement to be an essay writer with our essay writing service is to have a college diploma. When assigning your order, we match the paper subject with the area of specialization of the writer.

Why choose our academic writing service?

• Plagiarism free papers
• Timely delivery
• Any deadline
• Skilled, Experienced Native English Writers
• Subject-relevant academic writer
• Adherence to paper instructions
• Ability to tackle bulk assignments
• Reasonable prices
• 24/7 Customer Support
• Get superb grades consistently