It amuses me to no end to think that Obama might become the first Asian American President. Crazy, you say? Well, you're in good company.
But since Obama is up in the polls and the other guy's numbers are in free fall (and I just can't bear to think about the economy), I thought this might be a good time to indulge . . .
(This is a picture of Patel Anhoni, who was a delegate at the DNC and who contributes to a nice blog, where there also happened to be an entry that touches on this topic.)
In 1998, in the midst of a sex scandal consuming the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Toni Morrison published a beautifully written essay in The New Yorker. This essay is most remembered for a point that Morrison gradually builds toward, engaging along the way in a polemic against the media and more generally against a society that has become too thoroughly mediated for her liking. Revulsion against adultery, and specifically against Clinton’s adultery, finally turns out to be dread about something perhaps more primordial, at least in the United States. Morrison writes, arriving at her peroration,
Years ago,in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first rumors: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.
What proof does Morrison provide to support this extraordinary, and now understandably famous, claim? Here’s what she writes:
Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing. McDonald’s-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.
To put this another way, being black is not founded on biology but on tropes, what the venerated literary scholar M. H. Abrams calls a figure of thought "in which words or phrases are used in a way that effects a conspicuous change in what we take to be their standard meaning." While there is nothing intrinsically black about being a single parent, being born poor, being working class, or even being a saxophone player, taken together they have become a conventional composite of what it means to be black. This is not to say that such tropes describe every black person, or even a majority of black people. We’re talking specifically here about mediation, or the ways in which we reduce the world around us into patterns, themes, and motifs (I’m borrowing some of these adjectives from the wikipedia entry on tropes) that make a thoroughly confusing world a little easier to understand. In a bit of circular reasoning, then, what Morrison basically argues in her essay is that because black people are often characterized as being all of these things, those who are all of these things might therefore also be thought of as being black. Furthermore, in an era when media representations explicitly manipulate and trade upon tropes of various kinds, it follows for Morrison that tropes about race specifically have begun to become detached from biology.
If we accept this argument for a moment, can we ask what "tropes" qualify someone to be called an Asian American? This question is interesting to consider, for a listing of such tropes suggests that at least one "Asian American" is playing a central but mostly stealth role in the current presidential election (indeed, stealthy in the way those of Asian ancestry were once, and perhaps still are, thought to be).
The following is a list of common tropes about Asian Americnas—and let me emphasize again that these are tropes. They are well-educated, often at the most elite colleges and universities in the country. They aren’t born rich but lead very comfortable lives, usually being professionals of some kind (doctors, engineers, and so on). They have exotic, often hard to pronounce names. They are hard-working and family focused. They play the violin or the piano (maybe an acoustic guitar if they are hip and/or Christian). They eat healthy foods, like tofu. They aren’t very good at sports, especially basketball (Yao Ming is more Chinese than Chinese American).
(Yao Ming's shoes)
Except for the basketball part, this sounds a lot like Barack Obama. He attended Occidental College and finished his BA at Columbia before getting a law degree from Harvard. He’s very rich, but rich in the same way that an upper-middle class professional couple are. That is, Barack and Michelle Obama used to make—before Obama’s two memoirs became best-sellers—high six-figure incomes. They’re not super rich like Cindy McCain, however, whose outfit (including jewelry) on the first night of the Republican National convention most likely cost more than half of what Michelle Obama made in a year as a hospital administrator. He often makes fun of how exotic his name sounds to other Americans’ ears, most famously as the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. At the more recent convention in Colorado, Obama’s campaign went out of its way to highlight how devoted to hard-work and family the party’s nominee is. I have no idea if he plays a musical instrument or not, but a lot has been made about Obama’s preference for arugula over deep fried foods, something which supposedly doesn’t endear him to white working-class voters. Finally, although this isn’t one of the tropes I’ve mentioned, it certainly doesn’t hurt that Obama grew up in Hawai’i, the only state with a majority Asian American population.
(Sen. Obama with his daughter)
Given all the similarities I’ve mentioned here, it’s not surprising that I’m not the first to make note of them. Jeff Yang, in the San Francisco Chronicle, has also been struck by how Obama’s life experiences mesh with those of many Asian Americans. But even while going so far as to claim, tongue-in-cheek, that Obama has remained true throughout his political career to his "Asian American roots," Yang can’t help distancing himself from this claim. This comparison, he concludes,
simply highlights the fact that his diverse heritage uniquely invites those around him to project on him a full spectrum of hopes and dreams.
Unfortunately, this last bit of reasoning only sidesteps the problem of calling Obama an Asian American while overlooking something that might be worth serious consideration. First, this reasoning distracts from the enormous significance of a campaign that might lead to a person of African ancestry becoming the president of the United States. Given this country’s history, this is no small accomplishment. In fact, I find it simply breath-taking. So for some of us to say at this late date that perhaps he’s also something else does steal some of the momentousness of this occasion. Just as in the case of Tiger Woods, it can seem too much as if Asians and Asian Americans merely want to embrace a commonality with someone of African ancestry because he or she has attained a lot of success—only this time, there isn’t even any actual Asian ancestry on which to hang this claim (except maybe through an affiliation with his half-sister, who's half-Asian).
(Sen. Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng)
Before we dismiss this point completely, however, I’d like to suggest that there may be something gained by holding onto it for a little longer. In a bit of pop culture trivia that seems to me revelatory of how much Obama has upset this country’s most established stories about race, the last season of the HBO show The Wire partially focused on the prosecution of a very corrupt Baltimore state senator by the name of Clay Davis. With great oratorical skill, Davis casts himself as a black everyman who is being persecuted—rather than prosecuted—by a malevolent government for doing what he can to help out his largely black constituency. While on the witness stand, he refers to the state’s attorney Rupert Bond, who is also African American, as "prosecutor Obonda." Almost immediately, Davis is celebrating his not-guilty verdict on the courthouse steps in front of numerous cameras and reporters despite the fact that the evidence against him is overwhelming, as the show goes out of its way to emphasize. What makes this intentional slip-up so powerful is its apparent recognition that Obama isn’t somehow black like Davis is.
(obviously not a real bumper sticker)
Indeed, a lot of Obama’s political success so far can be attributed to his being not like the fictional character Clay Davis, and the urban politics a figure like Davis evokes. Obama doesn’t easily take offense. He tries actively to embrace a colorbind narrative, at once a highly conservative move and a disarming one. As a result, since he’s already told us we should throw out that deck, it’s difficult to accuse him of playing the "race card." His biography is interestingly original, with international connections, small-town middle American roots, and an upbringing in one of only two noncontiguous states (the irony here is that John McCain’s running mate is governor of the other noncontiguous state, making this election in some ways a competition between the favorite son and favorite daughter of the last two states to join the union).
By comparing—without actually conflating—Obama with Asian Americans, maybe we can get a better sense of how he has been able to distance himself from the kind of entanglements that the show The Wire has so lovingly brought to light. He keeps his cool at all time, refuses to speak the language of grievance, and does what he can to avoid being seen as an angry black man. At the same time, such distance has also opened him up to other kinds of criticism—overeducated, lacking emotion or gut, jumping ahead of his turn, vaguely foreign-seeming, not patriotic enough—that have put many Asian Americans in the awkward position of saying "no thank you" to what are some very nice compliments.