Just because race is a social and not a scientific construct does not mean that it can be simply dismissed as an outdated fiction. The lived reality of “race” (uninterrupted for centuries) is that our lives are all shaped by whether we are perceived as white or non-white – and, particularly in America, whether we are visibly black – and how we are free to operate in society as a result of that public classification.
Race might not be “real”, but that doesn’t make it non-functional.
So when Meryl Streep told an Egyptian reporter at the Berlin International Film Festival last week “We’re all Africans, really”, in response to a question about the festival’s all-white jury panel, I bristled. When Steven Spielberg responded to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy a few days after that by telling The Hollywood Reporter: “Look, I have two black children, you know? I’ve been colorblind my entire life”, I was actually aghast.
And then when Bill Clinton – who was once unofficially deemed America’s “first black president” – told an audience in Memphis at a campaign event for his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, “We are all mixed-raced people”, I felt almost apoplectic.
No matter the context, each serves as glaring demonstrations of how to deny the social power of race.
While it might sound forward-thinking to promote a racially unified front by suggesting that we’re all of African descent, or that one does not see color (although how Spielberg can acknowledge that his children are black but not see color is perplexing), these tropes are at best just another way of ignoring racial inequality.
At worst, they represent one major factor in what fuels the already well-oiled machine of systemic racism in America: white liberals of a certain age using their political and social platforms to erase black people and their unique contributions.
Theirs is a self-indulgent reinterpretation of the one-drop rule; it’s yet another way in which white people are entrusted with the arbitrary assignment of race, which was never afforded to black people. The one-drop rule once served exclusively to identify anyone with any known African ancestry as black, and therefore subhuman; now, it’s being used to excuse the absence of actual black people from historically white spaces and to allow white people to congratulate themselves on their open-mindedness.
But white people were not openly volunteering how mixed we all are when that meant being hunted down and killed by the KKK. White people were not boasting of African heritage when that meant being lynched. And white people were certainly not claiming colorblindness when they bought and sold the folks who picked their cotton and built their industries.
Yes, we have made progress since violations of the one-drop rule were still punishable by law. But we have not made enough progress to allow well-educated white actors, directors and politicians to minimize or deny the importance of how race functions in society. To imply that, after 400 years of black people being lynched, shot, maimed, dehumanized, raped, incarcerated, underpaid and disempowered, it turns out that race isn’t all that important in progress towards racial equality or harmony. To do so because somebody white and famous feels excluded or needs to get out of a tight spot with the media is on a par with those who respond to the Black Lives Matter movement by shouting “all lives matter”: it’s the willful dismissal of the effects of racism in favor of a non-existent “universality”.
And let’s not pretend that systemic racism is not what allows people like Streep, Spielberg and Clinton the freedom and agency to make such lazy and dismissive remarks in the first place. Whether willful or ignorant, people are not connecting the dots here, either in their personal and public lives, because they don’t have to. They can be blind to the effects of the social construct of race because they perceive themselves as race-less, and they believe that it’s a boon to offer the same to us.
But white liberals in positions of power – especially those from the Baby Boomer generation and who participated in or witnessed the civil rights movement – could be uniquely qualified to both address and understand racism. But it would require unprecedented levels of honesty and self-awareness, words not often associated with politics or Hollywood.
Streep, Spielberg and Clinton are not uniquely evil in their insularity: in fact, they have all in some way or another publicly allied themselves with black culture. Streep notably produced Sarah Jones’s critically acclaimed stage show Bridge and Tunnel, and has been a longtime supporter of actress Viola Davis; Spielberg, apart from adopting two black children, directed the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and the slave film Amistad; and Clinton, in addition to the aforementioned “black president” moniker, asked black poet Maya Angelou to deliver a poem at his inauguration.
I am not suspicious of their motives – although it does make me question a person’s integrity when they cannot or do not recognize how certain comments and behavior are perpetuating racism. But I do wonder why it is that they (and many others) seemingly believe that the best way to achieve equality is to erase blackness rather than force all white people to acknowledge that it makes us no less human than they are – that race is a social construct, but blackness is not.
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