Feb. 28: UCLA Book Event

A bunch of kind folks at UCLA have organized an opportunity for me to talk about The Shifting Grounds of Race on Thursday, Feb. 28 in the first floor Presentation Room of the Young Research Library from 5 to 7pm. See the flyer below for details.

kurashige-ucla-book-talk.pdf

On the California Primary: The Future is Now

As I wrote at the end of the introduction to The Shifting Grounds of Race, Carey McWilliams, the well-traveled writer/activist and soon to be editor of the Nation magazine, described California of the mid-1940s as “our nation’s racial frontier.” The West Coast’s multiracial constitution posed new problems and challenges, but it also offered America “one more chance, perhaps a last chance, to establish the principle of racial equality.” In this regard, it blessed the residents and observers of Los Angeles and other multiracial population centers with “a ringside seat in the great theatre of the future.”

 

There are two stunning aspects of the California Democratic primary which signal that the future has arrived with dramatic implications for the entire nation:

First, we need to underscore the fact that there’s never been an important election like this where a candidate failed to win African Americans and whites but won overall–as Clinton did in California. Indeed, winning overwhelmingly among blacks and carrying a majority of whites (or perhaps tying), as Obama did, is generally seen as a recipe for a landslide in electoral politics. Once again, California flipped the script. By voting in large numbers for Hillary, Latinos and Asians in California carried her to victory on their backs and quite likely salvaged her entire campaign. The national media has now come around to the idea of Latinos as a “sleeping giant,” and the Clinton strategists deserve credit for their attentiveness to the Latino vote. This is a turning point in U.S. political history: no serious candidate for the Presidency from here on out can ignore the mandate to build a multiracial coalition.

The national media still don’t quite know what to make about Asian Americans. It seems that Hillary got almost or equal the number of Asian votes as Obama got Black votes in California. On CNN’s election night coverage, David Gergen was discussing the significance of Latinos to Hillary’s win in California. When Anderson Cooper interjected that she also registered a sizable win among Asians, Gergen’s tangential response was “well, they’re in play here, too.” Then, Gergen continued with his point about the Latino vote. This was, of course, a misstatement. “In play” for the political pundits analyzing the horse race means that the battle to win a state or a demographic segment of the electorate is highly competitive not lopsided. What Gergen really meant by the “Asians are in play” comment was, “We don’t normally view Asian voters as significant, but here’s one isolated case where they happened to make a difference.” We’ll probably see this type of dismissive attitude toward Asian Americans continue, largely because pundits like Gergen know next to nothing about Asians and much of what they do know is probably wrong and misguided information rooted in stereotypes and half-truths. As the saying goes, better to keep silent and thought a fool then to speak up and remove all doubt. (At the same time, I shudder to think what type of “Asian experts” the mainstream media might eventually drum up.)

Perhaps by 2016 or 2020, when the Asian American population may have well surpassed 20 million persons, the Asian vote will begin to get some “play” from the media. In fact, however, Asian Americans are already having a bigger impact than most observers realize. One report I read in the late in 2007 said that 25 percent of Hillary’s staff in Nevada (I think—I can’t find the original article) was made up of Asian Americans. And we know, sadly because of attention created by campaign funding scandals, that Asians have been big donors to the Democrats since Bill Clinton’s Presidency and likely have funneled their funds heavily to Hillary.

The time has arrived for Latinos and Asians to be taken seriously as “interest groups” and “ethnic blocs” within the Democratic coalition. Jeff Chang’s insightful blog helps us to understand why these “emergent” minority groups were more likely to support Hillary, given her embrace of the traditional political strategy of building a coalition by appealing to the self-interests of multiple constituencies: Latinos, Asians, LGBT, seniors, environmentalists, and of course women as “the largest interest group.” No doubt if she wins the nomination, she will use similar tactics at great lengths to bring Blacks as an “interest group” back into the fold.

This brings me to my second point, which in my mind is even more significant and gets more to my motivation for writing my book. The “colorblind” aspect of Obama’s appeal can mean something very different than the assimilationist definition of “colorblindness” preached by white liberals in the 1950s and the post-civil rights neoconservative appropriation of “colorblindness.” We can see the idealism and naivete of his young supporters chanting “race doesn’t matter” as an opening. Getting “beyond race” today is not about ignoring the problem of racism, but about thinking about America as a multiracial nation that transcends old notions of majority/minority identities and white normativity (which one either promotes or attacks). As I tried to say in my book, culturally and demographically, millions of us already live in a world where that old notion of white majority has been displaced by a multiethnic reality. The question of what a new majority will look like politically is one of the key questions of our time.

The Obama campaign is about transcending the “minority politics” mentality that carves us all up into “interest groups” and pushes the hot buttons that reinforce our sense of victimization and vilify the other side. Mainstream observers focus on Obama’s invocation of “hope” as a rhetorical device, which appeals to the common decency in all of us to both transcend partisanship and support an agenda driven by the discourse of change. No doubt this is part of the appeal he is making, especially as he seeks to fashion himself as someone who can unite voters in both “blue” and “red” states and also “change the way Washington does business.”

But I sense there is something much deeper to both Obama as an individual and his campaign, which has the potential to develop into a movement. Obama has a deep respect for what historian Charles Payne (in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom) has called the “organizing tradition” that sustained the Black freedom struggle in the South. He recognizes the debt we owe the likes of Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and Rosa Parks, but more importantly the lessons we must learn from their struggles. If you are just a “minority leader,” then you’re not really a leader at all. If you are only fighting for your “fair share” of the riches controlled by those in power, you’ll never address the root causes of oppression. Above all is the sense that none of us can be free in America until we change the whole country. Obama speaks in poetry and he is writing a song of redemption.

This is where Obama has the “audacity” to think he is the best person to lead the entire nation, and he wants those whom the traditional Clinton approach would carve into minority interest groups to see ourselves instead as a collective majority. It is here where I want to push back against those of my colleagues in ethnic studies and community activist circles who view Obama’s “colorblind” appeal with suspicion. Some see it as naive, others as betrayal. I respect such contributions to a vital debate. But the “transcending race” argument is not something he just dreamed up with Tom Daschle to formulate a Presidential run. It is rooted in the lessons he learned about movement building from MLK and from his own experience on the South Side of Chicago. (See, for instance, this extraordinary article on his first state senate campaign.) It is about moving beyond the anachronisms of liberal assimilationism and narrow nationalism, as well as the cynicism, narrowness, and dysfunction of urban politics, to build a new movement that will address the structural roots of injustice. And it is based on a deep understanding that only by inspiring those we refer to as the “oppressed” and the “masses” to become the change agents we need them to be, can we overcome the dead end that politics has become for all but those at the very top of the hierarchy.

Yet, as Obama admits, his work is not done. To have built an impressive biracial coalition in the North and South is impressive. So is having won both the Black and white vote in California, which really should put to rest the media’s endless drivel about that divide. Yet, we now know that a biracial victory doesn’t cut it anymore, for all that historic act has done is create new challenges. I wonder how Obama’s campaign is processing their drubbing among Latinos and Asians in California. Was it just a lack of time? Is it an idiosyncratic result of the Clintons unique appeal? Was it a failure of execution? Or do they need a better strategy rooted in a deeper understanding of Latino and Asian communities and new people to be a part of the decision making process? My sense is that it is mostly the latter. In the future, I’ll try to say more about what is shaping interethnic attitudes and relations today, especially to counter the mainstream media’s new sophomoric fixation on “Black/Latino tensions.” What should stand out, however, is that we need to know a lot more about interethnic relations and recognize they are not a sideshow.

As I’ve written and rewritten the introduction to my book over the past decade, the idea that the “future is now” seemed like a nice little hook to highlight the significance of my research to scholars and a broader audience. But while I was not in any way shocked by the outcome of the California Democratic primary, I have to admit to being a little caught by surprise that the dynamics which shaped the outcome would have occurred in 2008 rather than 10 or 20 years from now. Books can take a long time to research, write, and produce, and time can catch up or pass you even when you’re writing about history. I’m not predicting what will happen with the rest of the campaign. But it is clear from the California result that from here on out we will see an unprecedented clash between two consciously multiracial organizing strategies. This is a moment when critical ideas and actions will prove decisive.

Welcome

This website will provide information about my new book, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press), which will be released in December 2007. Please go to the publisher’s website to see a description of the book, read the introduction in HTML or PDF format, and purchase a copy.

The Shifting Grounds of Race is part of the Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America series edited by William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordor, and Julian Zelizer.