Is There Life After Race?

Kanchan Limaye from the February 1998 issue

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The practice begins to seem downright absurd when, as Njeri describes, blacks who consider themselves "pure" but who are, like her, of mixed blood, focus hostility on the growing number of "multiracial" Americans for trying to secure a public platform of their own. Pulling the strings of tension still tighter are the hostilities between African Americans and new black immigrants, who, Njeri reports, look down on African Americans for their lower level of socioeconomic success. Add to that the pigmentocracy within the African-American community itself, in which lighter-skinned blacks are often preferred and pursued as mates, and one begins to see how endless internecine tensions obscure the larger goal of social justice.

Domination, Njeri concludes, breeds insidious offspring: Oppressed people internalize the values of the oppressor, much like an abused child becoming an abusive parent. Thus their minds become "the last plantation." To complicate things, multiracial proposals like Georgia's Project RACE bill fail to define who is multiracial after the first generation. What happens to, say, the child of a Sioux-Italian-Korean man married to a Sioux-Italian-Korean woman? Must each parent be of a different race for the child to qualify? The whole concept of racial categories--much less inventing still more of them--suddenly seems silly.

As the book draws to a close, Njeri slips into serious depression after a rude Asian-American cabdriver tells her she isn't good enough to live in her upscale L.A. neighborhood. The depression is hastened, she says, by years of writing about topics in which anger and death were the lead characters. Maybe those dark experiences are what goad her to the conclusion that most of America's social problems stem from "the nihilism infecting the American soul." She argues that in a nation fed up with therapeutic jargon, many refuse to acknowledge the connection between larger social disorder and personal pathology. To solve America's social problems, she suggests, we should wed our pragmatic politicking to psychotherapy and religion. As an example, she takes us to St. Paul's church in Brooklyn, where the charismatic Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood bolsters his repertoire of religious activities with counseling services to lift troubled souls out of despair and re-engage those who have given up.

Njeri's racial vision and cultural daring are an important addition to an otherwise repetitive and defensive dialogue. She offers a view of our national identity that eschews both black-white bifurcations and the false promises of a multicultural mosaic. We are, after all, Americans--united by history, culture, and, yes, blood. Njeri says white Americans, particularly those who denounce pluralism for breeding Balkanization, need to step up and "make rhetorical perfume out of the phrase the miscegenated American experience." Njeri needs a nudge, lest she herself fall into the racial trap. Her call should apply not just to white Americans but to all Americans. But even as it stands, her book parts the curtain on the problems of those left out of the standard racial debate and helps set the stage for a new dialogue.

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