The best universities do not try to run away from recognising people’s identities, or being coy about it, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Cape Town - CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s interview of President Barack Obama for a two-hour documentary titled The Legacy of Barack Obama is instructive. I would like to quote extensively from the documentary because of the parallels with discussions of race in South Africa.
Zakaria starts by asking Obama if he is comfortable the first line of his biography will be that he was “the first African American president of the United States”, despite the fact he is bi-racial.
Obama’s father was a black man from Kenya and his mother a white woman from Kansas. He was brought up by two loving white grandparents, and an Indonesian stepfather.
“Are you comfortable with this characterisation?” Zakaria pressed on. “I am actually,” Obama responded, “the concept of race in America is not just genetic. It’s cultural, it’s the notion of a people who look different than the mainstream suffering terrible oppression but somehow being able to make out of that a music, and a language and a faith and a patriotism.”
As so many black leaders have said since the beginning of time - from WEB Du Bois to Aime Cesaire, to Steve Biko - race is not a biological concept, it is a historical concept. These are the same historical definitions of blackness that some of us have been trying to share with our white colleagues at UCT, as they went about questioning the validity of our self-identification as black people.
No, they would have none of it. We were basing our identities on a false biological concept of race. All of this in order to completely water down any use of race in admissions policies on the same grounds that race was not good science, as if anyone had ever suggested it was.
Ignorance of a historical concept on such a collective scale I have never witnessed before. I was recently invited to one of the best private schools in the United States to talk about Africa.
The school has a unique teaching method. Each grade focuses on a particular theme for the year, such as ancient Greece in fourth grade, ancient China in fifth grade, and Africa in sixth grade. And here we are in our universities with professors and heads of department who question the role of Africa in the historical production of knowledge.
This is not only racist, it’s an embarrassment for any university. And that is the reason I have over the years been calling for more black professors in our universities.
It is not a matter of bean counting, but of improving scholarship in very real ways. The best universities do not try to run away from recognising people’s identities, or being coy about it. They make those identities the basis of epistemological enrichment.
If you don’t believe me then just witness the richness of the conversation between Fareed Zakaria, a Harvard graduate from India, and Barack Obama, a black Harvard graduate from Chicago. That is what we want our students to become. But those identities are an asset only in an environment in which they are appreciated and affirmed, and individual flourishing is coextensive with identity affirmation, not its denial.
In his documentary, Zakaria shows a clip in which Obama is reading from his book. In that particular reading he observes that too often blackness is accepted only when it means “the knowledge of your own powerlessness and your own defeat” as a person.
He then points to the irony of what happens when a black person rejects that self-image and embraces a more assertive one, like the one the president has done in the White House over the past eight years.
“They will have a name for that too, a name that could cage you just as good, like ‘paranoid’, or ‘militant’ or ‘violent’ or ‘nigger’.”
Zakaria closes this particular segment of the documentary by saying: “What began as whispers is now discussed openly. Did race play a role in the brickwall of Republican resistance to Obama?”
Obama’s campaign manager and chief advisor, David Axelrod, offers the following response: “It is indisputable that there was a ferocity to the opposition and a lack of respect for him that was a function of race.”
Indeed, the insults Obama has had to endure have not been experienced by any American president. His successor, Donald Trump, spent years questioning whether he was even born in the United States. That man is now the president-elect of the United States, in what seems like a repudiation of Obama’s legacy.
This is especially odd in the light of Obama’s objective accomplishments for the American economy in particular. But there were those who were determined to undermine him from the beginning.
Just as he was taking his oath, a group of 15 white Republicans gathered in a nearby restaurant to plan how to stop him. In fact, the leader of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, made Obama’s failure his explicit aim.
Any surprise then that 8 years later there was not a single Obama initiative the Republicans supported.
There is one chilling moment when Obama is addressing a joint sitting of Congress when a white Congressman sitting at the front shouts: “You lie!” A silence descends upon the room.
Obama’s first humiliation in office came when he intervened over the arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr as the professor was trying to get into his own house.
The president addressed a news conference in which he said the conduct of the Cambridge police was stupid, which it was - how do you arrest someone in his own house, with all the pictures on the walls. The outrage was so loud Obama was made to apologise to the police officer. As it was put: “The president was sent to the woodshed to be on an equal basis with a random cop, for calling him out for arresting the most famous professor in the world in his own house.”
This, as Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy pointed out, was despite Obama not having said anything about the race of the professor or that of the cop.
And here is the ultimate irony for a president who has spent 8 years trying to avoid talking about race.
His pride and dignity became unbearable to those used to seeing black people in a posture of powerlessness. And they have started throwing words they hoped would cage him: race-obsessed, militant, racist, a nigger. This leaves open the question: when moderates are called radicals, what becomes of the radicals?
* Mangcu is the Harry Oppenheimer Fellow, Hutchins Center, Harvard University, and the Emeka Anyaoku Visiting Chair of Commonwealth Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.