I am susceptible to his stump speech, a Father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas, and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Barack Obama might be the next president and I think and fear it will be determined by our acceptance of the actuality of the miscegenated moment.
This word is rightfully loaded. It was coined by the opposing political party in a spoof pamphlet handed out in 1863 in New York to discredit Abraham Lincoln's administration and the abolitionist movement. Titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, the pamphlet played on fears of intermarriage and race mixing. Miscegenation's roots, so to speak, come from the Latin miscere, "to mix" and genus, meaning, "kind." To mix kinds.
The fear and threat of miscegenation is and was real in America. In 1967, in the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, (Loving being the real name of the white dude Richard who married Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and I am not making in it up, their name was Loving and often truth is more perfect than fiction and the poem sometimes writes itself) the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional. Up until that time, 14 states still had and at times enforced anti-miscegenation laws. In Virginia, the trial judge in the Loving case, Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile, proclaimed that Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents and that separation shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Besides just being an idiot, Judge Bazile was also echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race. Blumenbach, a German doctor, published his thesis, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, in 1776, which is considered a seminal work in the concept of scientific race and racism later used by all sorts of racial purists including the Nazis. Blumenbach developed his idea via phrenology, which uses the size of one's head to determine intellectual capacity, though he recanted his own ideas of race and racial superiority, later in life when he fell in love with an African woman in Switzerland.
Barack Obama is Black and this election is about race. No one is threatening to kill John McCain, other than Father Time. Congress and most elected political officials still look like an ancient photo of an ancient white men's club, and our country, even after the election, regardless of which way it goes, will continue to root itself in the maintenance of white supremacist dominant culture. We still have a long, long way to go at the deconstruction/reconstruction and public/private imagining of non-racist, equitable spaces and selves.
However, I think what frightens and delights us is the mixing of kinds. The fear sends potential militiamen to Palin rallies and galvanizes others to Obama rock concerts. It is a moment of public fetish. Miscegenation was so dangerous you could have killed someone and retained your ability to vote, but if convicted of mixing you'd lose forever this unalienable right.
Mixing is sinister when connected to power. The history of American miscegenation begins with the white master raping of Black women. Ask Thomas Jefferson. America maintains sinister forms of forced mixing via the commodification of Black music and cultural production appropriated time and again by white industry.
There is also a history of mixing that is a poly-cultural, cosmopolitan reality. Jews make bagels and Yiddish in Germany and Eastern Europe, the pasta in Little Italy is Chinese, the Lord of the Rings books and movies are old Icelandic oral-poetic stories that Wagner made Opera out of and Tolkien wrote down. There will be many cultural nationalists, gatekeepers of tradition, and redneck klansman who cringe when I say this, but the myth of origin, originality and racial purity is historical fiction used to separate and segregate people(s) into unfit singular dimensional categorizations. It is used to instill a dangerous, nationalist pride based on false and archaic notions of identity and statehood. Who knows this better than America's white European mutts (i.e. rednecks), the quarter Irish, British, French, and Scandinavian among us?
History and legacy is messy not pure, it is pidgin and Creole, borrowed survival, the diasporic wanderers know this, Blacks and Jews, who constantly invent and reinvent, based on resources at hand. Chitlins, kugel, matzoh, and jazz. The Old Testament jacked Pagan, tribal and Zoroastrian Myths, the New Testament jacked the Old and The Koran riffs on both.
Hip-Hop taught me everything, and it was in 1982 when Afrika Bambaataa and his Soul Sonic force put out Planet Rock and dressed like Indigenous Space Warriors, a South Bronx gang spin on George Clinton and P-Funk, and sampled Kraftwerk, a nerdy white German electro group, that the transparency and honesty of influence, of actual miscegenated roots became our lived cultural moment. This is not a post-race moment. It can become a moment of real talk and honest account.
The mix, mash-up, radical collage is the truth of history, the specificity of which is bloody and brutal, based on white supremacy, misogyny and capitalist nationalism. The logical conclusion to the myth of purity is Fascism, it is what led Nazis to imagine de-humanization, and is what demonizes, ethnicizes and others all other tribes in Kenya and in genocides the planet wide. This is the myth of the pure, the stake we hold, claim and cling to. But in truth, America, we are muddled and confused and cannot properly point to anywhere as first or original, we can only excavate our influences and legacies, embrace and learn from them all; the horrid and humble, the detestable and delightful, the shameful and the stunning. These cursory dualities themselves are not broad enough to hold us all. We are complex and multiple, poly-cultural; we live in the actuality of the miscegenated moment, the mixing of kinds. America is at a crossroads under stadium lights and we can move toward reconciliation and equity, in this moment, we can walk toward and learn from the truth and promise and dare I say hope of our tangled roots.