Our national incoherence

Slavery, as Walker Percy says, is America’s original sin. The American people are a massa damnata, a “lump of sin,” which must be exorcised regularly. Thus Sen. Harry Reid’s comments from the 2008 presidential campaign, reported on Friday in Marc Ambinder’s Atlantic blog, that Barack Obama is a “ ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’ ” has set off the well-rehearsed routine of public accusation, confession, and forgiveness. In Christian theology, “concupiscence” is the result of original sin; in America, the result is a tongue-tied incoherence. None of us knows how to talk about race. We don’t speak our minds but the moral fashion, because we are deathly afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Sen. Reid’s comments were certainly impolitic, especially when uttered to a reporter, but why were they wrong? Both of his phrases are current in American conversation—at least when used in the publicly sanctioned ways.

Thus the term light-skinned can be used by “whites,” but only to establish that they are on the correct side of the “race question.” Just last month, in the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall pointed out that, “in early previews” of Disney’s new animated film The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s suitor “was noticeably light-skinned, causing pundits on both sides of the race question to doubt Disney’s dedication to diversity.” To avoid trouble, Disney darkened his complexion before the film’s release.

The month before, in the Manchester Guardian, Hadley Freeman faulted Lee Daniels’s film Precious for “its depiction of skin colour. A particularly poignant expression of Precious’ self-loathing is her hatred of her dark skin: she dreams of having ‘a light-skinned boyfriend’ and when she looks in the mirror, she fantasises that she sees a white woman.”

African Americans use the term more pointedly. In a July article on “colorism” in the Washington Post, the law professor Alice M. Thomas was quoted in rhyme: “If you are light, you are all right. If you are brown, you can stick around. If you are black, get back.” Adopting more scholarly tones, the economist Darrick Hamilton observed that, among husband-hunting black women younger than thirty, there is “a premium associated with light-skinned complexion.”

So Sen. Reid’s wrong was to use the expression light-skinned while being “white”? Or to use it in reference to an actual person instead of cartoon characters, erotic fantasies, or generalized marriage preferences? I must admit that the exact nature of his moral offense is unclear to me.

Same goes with the phrase negro dialect. It was common in philological scholarship after 1870, although it was replaced in contemporary linguistics by “black English” after 1969 and “ebonics” by the mid-seventies. It is frankly more unusual in current speech, but shows up occasionally. In his musical “Passing Strange,” for example, the singer and songwriter Mark Stewart (known on stage as Stew) remarks that his mother liked to assume “the Negro dialect” when she scolded her son about his lack of religion. In this way, according to New Yorker drama critic Hilton Als, he “send[s] up the standard American theatrical device of making black performers sound more ‘real’ by substituting ‘de’ for ‘the.’ ”

“Whites” sometimes use the phrase too, and not ironically. In reviewing a novel entitled Orange Laughter for the Washington Post in 2000, Carolyn See complained that it was “populated by familiar figures and stock situations and Negro dialect as heavy as a migraine headache.” Earlier that same year, in his New York Times column “On Language,” William Safire informed his readers that the “earliest recorded uses of uh-huh were in the late 19th century by magazine fiction writers transcribing Negro dialect, more as exclamation than affirmation.”

Americans daily receive a mixed message. On the one hand, we are urged to consider race whenever we compile a reading list or celebrate achievement (Obama is “the first African-American President,” Wayne Embry was “the first African-American general manager in the NBA,” Michael Beach was “the first African-American to play a romantic leading role in a Shakespearean play on the main stage at Juilliard”); on the other hand, we are dissuaded from talking about race by the consequences of talking about it wrongly—and by the utter incoherence of what passes for right and wrong in race talk.

It is time to dispense with race, which does not exist in any event, as a classification of any kind.

Update: Peter Beinart defends Sen. Reid by saying that, except for his use of the word Negro, which was “unplesantly retro,” “everything else about his statement is undeniably correct.”

The problem, then, would seem to be that of a name. Since race does not exist as a scientific category—geneticists have found that skin color is controlled by just one of at least 19,599 protein-coding human genes, reducing it to a genetically insignificant difference between persons—the problem of trying to distinguish and designate a group variously known as Negroes and blacks and African Americans is magnified. There is no easy solution to the problem. What do we call “African Americans” who aren’t, well, from the U.S.? The most elegant solution is to expose the problem as a non-problem. We need to stop talking about race altogether just as we have stopped relying upon phrenology to make judgments about people.