Libération recently called Barack Obama “the first Black in the White House”. Just who, exactly, is focused on race around here?
There is no subject on which people so quickly lose their heads and contradict themselves as race. People who vehemently deny the scientific validity of the concept defend with equal vehemence the necessity for positive discrimination in favour of certain races which, presumably, they are able to distinguish one from another. Anti-racists collect statistics about race with a celerity and obsessional intrusiveness that would have put the apartheid regime to shame. The opposite of a racist is not an anti-racist but someone who does not think in racial categories at all.
What intrigues me also is people’s reaction to a white-skinned person blacking-up (such as the young football fan recently). Dressing up as, say, a Hawaiian or a Chinese person is apparently fine in our culture, but blacking the face is somehow racist, and this even applies now to Molly Dancers etc. who have been doing it for hundreds of years, since well before any of their ancestors had ever seen a black-skinned person. I wonder what actually motivates this reaction of ‘it is taboo for a white-skinned person to make themselves look black’? I wonder what the reaction would be if a black-skinned person were to make themselves up to look Caucasian?