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Are We Really Who We Take Ourselves to Be?
Kellye Whitney, 01-04-2010
President Obama’s election represents a significant shift not only in our self-conception as a nation but in the various ways in which Americans interact with one another.
“The generation that was shaped in the context of the ’60s and ’70s, their political and social consciousness was shaped in a context overdetermined by the realities of racial strife and racial conflict, of a nation grappling with its failure as a genuine multiracial democracy,” said Eddie S. Glaude, William S. Tod professor of religion and African American studies and chair for Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies. “Now we’re seeing the beginnings of a dramatic shift in the ways in which many of us perceive ourselves and the ways in which the nation might grapple with its historical and differing realities with regard to race.”
Princeton decided to expand its African American studies program two and a half years ago. And since 2006, Glaude said there has been significant expansion in the number of faculty as well as in the program’s mission.
“We believe the nation is at a crossroads,” he explained. “How does it talk about difference? How does it think carefully about diversity? Not so much in the sense of managing it, but cherishing it as a value and thinking about it as constitutive of our experiences.”
Glaude said in order to successfully navigate this crossroads, we must create a new vocabulary, a new way of talking about differences in race, ethnicity, class and the like, which can help us turn the corner in our relationships.
Thanks to demographic shifts, soon the nation will be a minority-majority. Glaude said we have to generate a language that will help us talk through that shift that goes beyond the narrow ways we may have talked about diversity in the past, and thereby avoid some of the brush fires that frequently crop up in the wake of Obama’s presidency.
“When you think about this moment, we’re all so excited — at least we were when President Obama was elected — marking this as a kind of post-racial moment, the end of a certain kind of practice in and around race, and of course that’s not true,” Glaude said. “Now, every time something happens, it throws us into a moment of crisis. Every time we have a racial incident, whether it’s a cartoon in the New York Post [or] it’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation is thrown back. Are we really who we take ourselves to be?”
For instance, how can we communicate in different domains such as the political arena when the Congressional Black Caucus challenges Obama? What does that indicate? How should we think about that? Glaude said because we don’t have a language to talk about these moments, every time racial incidents occur we are clueless to describe them or to act in a meaningful way, which brings up the question: Have we really gotten beyond the racial animosity of the ’60s and ’70s?
Glaude couldn’t offer any examples of this language yet, but he said Princeton’s center will act as an intelligence convener, bringing different voices and thought leaders from a wide range of domains in U.S. society together to talk and to generate outcomes that are tangible in their impact and effect.
“Certain kinds of characteristics are passe now, right? [For instance,] this idea that you’re acting bourgeois or you’re acting white — we know the notion of black community is much more complicated than its invocation in the past. How do we talk about that without losing sight of how race continues to overdetermine the life chances of so many of our fellow citizens? Yet many of us have access to mainstream social capital in ways that black America has never seen before. Obama is in many ways a reflection of what’s been going on in black communities throughout the United States, but at the same time we know there are folks who are languishing in ghettos, who are undereducated, who are not insured, who suffer disproportionately from disease and the like.”
Not having a language to acknowledge these facts means there are no tools with which to tackle problems and enable a truly democratic life, Glaude said. Creating this vocabulary and enabling more effective communication and understanding will have implications for the workforce because it will make a distinction between typical discourse on managing diversity and shift the focus to actually valuing it.
“Demographics suggest managing isn’t the way because the workplace, the human capital that’s available for the next generation of innovators and creators, will be drastically different than the previous one,” he said. “How do we value difference? How do we think about diversity as constitutive of who we are, not something that we have to maintain and contain, but something that enables us to reach for new horizons? The way we do that is turn away from managing language to a sense that the workplace is all the better the more it reflects the nation at large. If we’re going to, as a nation, move beyond our current malaise, it requires us in some significant way to maximize all Americans, not just a certain segment.”
