POLITICAL CORRECTNESS by Geoffrey Hughes

Author:Geoffrey Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Color and Loyalty: Issues of Nativism

As we have seen, issues of color and loyalty have a complex history epitomized in the American histories of Oreo and Uncle Tom. These issues form an ironic “Return of the Native,” a theme covered in “The New Black Nativism,” an article by Orlando Patterson, the Harvard sociologist, carrying the subtitle: “Obama’s not black enough? Sad times for a community once proud of its diversity” (Time, February 19, 2007, p. 51). “The sad truth,” wrote Patterson early in the Democratic primary campaign, “is that Obama is being rejected because many Black Americans don’t consider him one of their own and may even feel threatened by what he embodies.” Patterson noted that the defining characteristic of black American identity has been any person born in America of African ancestry, however remote. Blacks exploited “the infamous one-drop rule” imposed by white racists to claim a diverse heritage. Many of the black civil rights icons were actually descendants of Caribbean immigrants: they include W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier. Patterson continued:

In recent years, however, this tradition has been eroded by a thickened form of black identity that, sadly, mirrors some of the worst aspects of American white identity and racism. A streak of nativism rears its ugly head. To be a black American in this view, one’s ancestors must have been not simply slaves, but American slaves. Furthermore, there is the growing tendency to define blackness in negative terms – it is to be not white in upbringing, kinship or manner, not to be too at ease in the intimate ways of white Americans.

Patterson argued that Obama’s credentials as a black American are sufficient in terms of lineage, marriage, and community service in the ghettos, but they are compromised by “the fact that he is the son of an immigrant and that he was brought up mainly by middle-class whites whose culture is second nature to him.” Patterson also wrote of “a growing pattern of self-segregation among the black middle class.” Richard Rodriguez observed similarly that “the era that began with the dream of integration ended up with scorn for assimilation” (quoted in Schlesinger, 1992, p. 112). The subsequent election victory of Obama has, of course, changed the whole dynamic of race and politics in the US.

Patterson’s analysis of current “self-segregation” reminds us that segregation is partly a naturally process. In 1552 Bishop Latimer noted that “the Anabaptists segregated themselves from other men,” in the manner of the Amish in America. The Latin root of both congregation and segregation, namely grex, gregis, meaning “a flock,” translates into the proverb “birds of a feather flock together.” Segregation was a neutral term for centuries: the negative denotation arose principally from the administered forms of apartheid in South Africa and segregation in America.

Segregation can take more subtle forms than legalized separation. The Times Literary Supplement (January 19, 2007) carried an illuminating item under the title of “Racial Segregation in the Literary World: An Update.

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