Obama’s race speech.

I have to say, I’m VERY AGONIZED over The Speech. On the one hand, it is among the most perfectly calibrated peaces of US political rhetoric in at least the past 30 years; from the perspective of political strategy, it is (in the words of my old Latin teacher) “breathlessly magnificent,” as well as ruthlessly technically flawless. On the other hand, and for reasons I myself can’t articulate well after a day of trying, it’s not a position with which I can stand. It’s almost perfectly aligned with MLK (like when MLK referred to “this fierce new militancy” in the black community and envisioned “black men and white men, Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic”), so I know I’m supposed to believe it’s right.

But there’s something in the dual-motion of trashing Wright and endorsing the vision that sticks: because I simply can’t buy that Obama really feels that way about Wright’s perspective. I know a number of TUCC members, and what Obama is rejecting is the ethos of many (most?) in the church with whom he has made a home for 20 years; I just can’t imagine what it would take to do that. It would be like me repudiating a central part of Heidi’s (my own pastor’s) whole ethos. Or maybe it’s that I can’t imagine someone who really views race relations in the way he spoke today would really be at home at TUCC for all those years.

On another hand, none of this seeming dissonance should surprise me. Obama is, in this moment, having to modulate his speaking before the white-supremacist elite. He himself referred to this ritual in The Speech, in fact. Who am I to challenge or dissent from what a person of color has to say to be acceptable to the white-supremacist elite in order to be elected leader of the political establishment? The story I’d like told about our country – that, in fact, our nation was founded and perpetuated on multiple racisms and, in fact, our policies DID form AN ultimate (if not proximate) cause for 9/11 – is not the story that can get anyone – of any color – elected to lead the political establishment. Obama’s task is to win the establishment on its own terms, not his own terms and not mine (or yours).

I know that another, deeper reason I struggle to make sense of the story Obama has told today has to do with my own position as a person of color of Asian, not African, descent, part of the yellow 4% that is invisibilized in the discourse of white and black (and brown). I can disavow neither the white grandparents nor the black grandparents I never had, but somehow in that non-white+non-black-nondisavowa

bility I have to find the place where my yellow takes on a fiercely antiracist hue in specifically the US palette. I have to honor the histories of white supremacy that have primarily been defined against the black Other in this country, while not losing hold of the yellow Other against which also white supremacy has been defined AND while not pretending that there really is only one, single “Other of color” into which yellow can imperceptibly shade. Honoring the real history that white-over-black has been the dominant supremacist discourse, while also trying to hold a place against that discourse AS YELLOW, without yellow itself coming to “compete” (or whatever) with black.Above all, I still know no way to live into the vexing problem of the (Foucaultian) non-naturalness of racializing discourses SIMULTANEOUS with the fact that racial identities circulate in very reified, naturalized terms. That is, I want to inhabit a presently-operable racialized identity that renders no essentialized Yellow (White, Black, Brown, Red), but the very terms of the discourse work almost exclusively in essentialized ways, since one can’t assume a position outside the discourse. To be yellow is to not fit easily into bio-power’s structure of racialization in US history, and yet to grope for a point of solidarity that always ends up yielding to the terms defined by that structure. In other words, how do I articulate and practice a racialized identity that honors my own experience of subordination to white supremacy while at the same time does not grant racial identity itself any essential necessity AND at the same does not erase the different, bio-power-configured, equally non-essential experience of subordination to white supremacy of the rest of us “Others of color”?

If this has become incoherent, I’m sorry to have subjected you to it. It’s something I myself really, FUNDAMENTALLY don’t understand yet am ALWAYS trying to. Chalk it up to the endless iteration of a racial subject repeatedly trying to break out of bio-power’s grasp. Even reading it now, I know that there is something so obvious that I just can’t grasp, no matter how hard I’ve tried. But we can only ever try to “become again what we never were.”