He was a snappy dresser with slicked back hair and a pencil mustache. A crack bandleader, musician and legendary talent scout, he was dubbed the “Godfather of R&B.”
But Johnny Otis’ greatest performance was an audacious act of defiance he orchestrated offstage.
Most people who saw Otis perform during his heyday in the 1950s thought he was a light-skinned black man. He used “we” when talking about black people, married his black high school sweetheart and stayed in substandard “for colored only” hotels with his black bandmates when they toured the South.
Johnny Otis, though, wasn’t his real name. He was born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes to Greek immigrants in Northern California. He grew up in a black neighborhood where he developed such a kinship with black culture that he walked away from his whiteness and became black by choice.
“As a kid I decided that if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black,” he wrote in his 1968 book, “Listen to the Lambs.”
“No number of objections such as ‘You were born white … you can never be black’ on the part of the whites, or ‘You sure are a fool to be colored when you could be white’ from Negroes, can alter the fact that I cannot think of myself as white.
“I do not expect everybody to understand it, but it is a fact. I am black environmentally, psychologically, culturally, emotionally, and intellectually.”
Otis wouldn’t be such a mystery today. He was a pioneer in what people now call “racial fluidity.” It’s the belief that race, like gender, is a choice, not a biological identity you’re assigned at birth. Racially fluid people reject the box they’re put in and craft their own identity.
If picking one’s race seems impossible, consider this example: former President Barack Obama. The nation’s first black president doesn’t fit the conventional definition of black. His father was from Kenya, in east Africa, and his mother was white. At one point, some in the black community said Obama wasn’t really black since he wasn’t a descendent of slaves from West Africa.
Not anymore. Obama said he chose his African-American identity, in part, because of how he’s perceived and because “black was cool.” Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who was born white but now identifies as black, is another example of someone who chose her own racial identity.
Racial fluidity, though, isn’t confined to people in the headlines. The US is entering an era of mass “racial migration” some scholars say: Scores of Americans are leaving old racial categories behind for new ones.
“For a broadening circle of people, ancestry no longer determines identity,” Rogers Brubacker writes in his book “Trans,” which explores the parallels between gender identity and racial identity.
You may be racially fluid and not even know it.
Have you taken a DNA ancestry test that’s caused you to alter your racial identity? Are you a biracial or multiracial person who routinely changes your identity depending on your circumstances? Were your ancestors, say, Latino or Asian immigrants, but you now identify as white? Or maybe the outside world has categorized you as “white,” but that’s not how you define yourself.
Then you might be racially fluid.
This racial migration is supposed to be good news for many people. The more we blur racial lines, some have argued, the more racism will lose its sting. How, for example, could a white man remain hostile to Latino immigrants after he learns his first grandchild is Latino?
Combine racial fluidity with another trend — the US is projected to become a majority-minority country by 2044 — and many envision a Brown New World where there will be such a bewildering gumbo in the nation’s melting pot that a racist would get exhausted trying to hate people who look different.
It’s a tantalizing vision of America’s future, but what if it’s not just a mirage, but a giant con?
What if racial fluidity leads not to less racism, but to more?
That’s the warning being issued by many who study racial fluidity — including some who are racially fluid themselves. They say people are naïve if they believe expanding the menu of racial choices will lead to more tolerance; that racism is deeper and more adaptable than people realize.
A brown-skinned man with a white mother can gush all he wants about his DNA mix, but that won’t stop him from being racially profiled, says Rainier Spencer, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has written extensively about mixed-race identity, including his own.
“If I stand on a corner holding a sign saying, ‘I’m racially fluid,'” says Spencer, “that still doesn’t mean I’m going to get a cab.”
Can interracial love save America?
I am one of those naïve people Spencer talks about.
I am racially fluid. I am the son of a black man and a white Irish woman. Biracial or multiracial people like myself have challenged America’s “either/or” approach to race long before someone coined the term racial fluidity.
I define myself as black. But sometimes I say I’m biracial when describing my family. When asked about my race on forms, I check different boxes depending on my mood. Race has been an inescapable subject for me since I was a kid. It permeated the world I grew up in.
I’m from a West Baltimore neighborhood that’s become a symbol of America’s racial divisions. Race riots erupted there in 2015 after Freddie Gray, a black man, died after police arrested him. The HBO series “The Wire” was set on my street corner. Growing up black in that place could be difficult. Being biracial was even more complicated.
It was a life of racial whiplash.
I experienced racism from my mother’s family. They rejected me and my younger brother at birth for being black. I didn’t meet any of them until I was in college. And they disowned by mother for being with a black man. When my father first tried to date my mother by visiting her home, her father answered the door and called the police, telling them, “I don’t want this nigger trying to see my daughter.”
I also experienced prejudice from blacks. I got into so many fights as a kid for having a white mother that I grew ashamed of her. I told my elementary school teachers that my mother was black. I dreaded the thought of walking with her in public. I just wanted to blend in.
I, too, yearn for a world where race doesn’t matter. I grew up in an era where racial blurring wasn’t cool. Biracial kids were called “mixed-nuts.” People said we were too confused to form a stable sense of self. It was an updated version of the “tragic mulatto” myth — pitiful figures trapped forever in racial limbo.
But then I started hearing people talk about America’s changing racial landscape. Obama was elected. And the tragic mulatto morphed into another stereotype — the magic mulatto. Biracial people like Obama became symbols of a post-racial America, people who would serve as “living bridges between races” as the country moved toward a new era.
That hope still lingers. In a recent New York Times essay marking 50 years since interracial marriage bans were overturned, Sheryll Cashin said people who pursue interracial relationships “are our greatest hope for racial understanding.”
Cashin, a Georgetown law professor, says such relationships chip away at white supremacy because they encourage white Americans to empathize with other races.
“Eventually, a critical mass of white people will accept the loss of the centrality of whiteness,” writes Cashin, author of “Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy.”
“When enough whites can accept being one voice among many in a robust democracy, politics in America could finally become functional.”
Is such a world inevitable? I’m not so sure.
As I delved into the world of racial fluidity, I realized that treating race as a choice invites dangers people rarely consider.
Start with DNA testing. The surging popularity of genetic testing kits has literally placed the concept of racial fluidity into millions of American homes. The home genetic testing market in the US generated $117 million in sales in 2017 and is expected to grow to $611 million by 2026. Companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com market their kits as tools for transcending racial categories, a way of “looking beyond differences, seeing commonalities.”
But these tests can actually reopen racial wounds.
That’s what I discovered when I heard of the odd story of H. Bernard Hall.
What the DNA kits don’t tell you
Hall is tall, lanky and wears dreadlocks. He’s a member of the revered black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi; loves hip-hop; and says when he first read “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois in college, “I thought he was telling my story.”
Hall’s DNA ancestry test, however, told him another story, one he wasn’t prepared to hear.
Hall has a white mother and a black father, but he wanted to get more in touch with his black identity. He decided to participate in a DNA ancestry project at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, where he is an assistant professor of English education.
“I really wanted to get a clearer sense of my Africanness,” he says. “I wanted to know my connections to the African continent.”
Instead, the test virtually annihilated his identity. He was so stunned when he got the results that his reaction was recorded in a New York Times article that spotlighted the DNA project.
“What are you trying to do to me?” Hall said. “You have caused a lot of problems in my family.”
Hall thought the test would show he was half African, half European. Instead it read: 91% European, 5% Middle Eastern, 2% Hispanic, and less than 1% African and Asian.
“It makes you rethink everything,” he told me later. “I was always looking for belonging and affirmation, and I thought finally science was going to affirm what I wanted to know. I thought I had a chance to fill in some of those gaps. It just opened more questions.”
One of Hall’s questions: What would happen if he shifted his racial identity? He had always defined himself as black. It’s why he and his wife, who is also multiracial, insist on calling their two young sons black, not biracial.
“Even if I’m just 1% African, my momma used to tell me, ‘If the cops stop you, they’re not going to ask if your momma is from Ireland,’ ” he says. “Even though I know that race is a social construction, it is as real as oxygen.”
Many people treat taking a DNA ancestry test as an adventure. Some post live videos on YouTube and Facebook announcing the results. Others send invitations to meet with “DNA relatives” who share the same ancestors. It all sounds like so much fun that some call this trend “recreational genomics.”
But there’s another side to DNA testing they don’t talk about in brochures: It can be traumatic. One black woman who live-streamed her DNA results was shocked to learn she was 26% British. She was confused until she realized why: If some white man had not raped a slave, she wouldn’t exist.
Hall’s DNA test evoked another ugly memory from slavery, when lighter “house Negroes” were pitted against darker “field Negroes,” he says. Some multiracial people today still buy into that thinking, that the lighter their skin the better, he says.
Hall saw his DNA results as a potential trap — an excuse to renounce his solidarity with black people and back it up with science. He wouldn’t be the first one to do so. There is a history of racially ambiguous people of color “passing” for white to avoid discrimination.
“That’s the thing about identities,” he says. “When you say what you are, you’re also saying what you aren’t.”
How racial fluidity can be used as a weapon
Saying what race you aren’t can have immense political implications.
Consider the act of “checking the boxes,” or selecting your race on forms. Multiracial people like Hall could opt out of checking the “black box.” But doing so could make it easier for institutions to conceal racism, some civil rights leaders say.
Those check marks are used to enforce voting rights and civil rights laws. They’re used to redraw congressional districts. They are especially important for uncovering covert forms of discrimination in areas such as housing and employment.
Hall, for example, is concerned about police brutality against men of color. After the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Hall posted videos on YouTube talking about the police shooting and his own experiences with law enforcement.
If more multiracial people like him picked “white” on forms, though, it could make it more difficult to monitor racist police practices.
The U.S. Justice Department relied on racial classification statistics in its 2015 report that detailed how the city government in Ferguson, Missouri, systematically violated the constitutional rights of its black residents by treating them more as sources of revenue than citizens to serve and protect.
The following year, a federal appeals court struck down a North Carolina voting rights law it said used racial classification statistics to target blacks with “almost surgical precision.” Recent court battles over Native American voting rights also have hinged on racial classification numbers.
This reliance on racial categories to track discrimination is why civil rights groups fought so fiercely to oppose the creation of a “multiracial” category in the 2000 Census. Some saw it as a back-door maneuver to diminish the political power of racial minorities such as blacks, Asians and Native Americans. (The 2010 US Census offered a “some other race” category, which met with less resistance.)
Spencer, the UNLV scholar, echoes Hall’s argument. He is biracial but checks “black” on forms because he says it makes it easier to fight racism.
“If more people say ‘I’m fluid’ and decide not to check the boxes, then we’ve lost our ability to track discrimination,” says Spencer, author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix.”
Hall sees an even deeper danger to expanding the menu of racial options: its use as a weapon against others.
If more people can opt out of identifying as black, he says, it would reinforce a racial hierarchy that places whiter-looking people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
“The diversification of our population is not going to remove the white supremacy that permeates so many aspects of our life and society,” he says.
You don’t hear any talk about racial hierarchies when you look at those chipper advertisements for 23andMe or Ancestry.com. It almost seems rude to raise these issues when people are rhapsodizing about how science will show us that we’re all one human family.
If this hierarchy sounds abstract to you, it’s not to me. It caused pain in my family.
I first heard about it in a song.
How the Chinese stopped being black
If you’re white, it’s all right
If you’re brown, stick around
But if you’re black,
Get back, get back, get back.
That’s the abbreviated version of a song I heard growing up. It’s called “Black, Brown and White,” and it was written by a black blues singer in the 1940s. I heard people tease one another with the lyrics. But the theme of the song wasn’t so amusing to me. I saw it reflected in a painful incident that one of my older brothers still remembers years later.
I have two older half-brothers who aren’t biracial. They share my father’s dark complexion and kinky hair. One day, when I was a child, my father took me on a walk with one of them. When some strangers approached us and regarded me with curiosity, my father beamed. He introduced me as his son. He said nothing about my older brother; he was invisible.
I love my father, but it’s an open secret in my family that he’s color struck — drawn to whiteness. He’s even admitted as much to me. Throughout his 91 years, he’s gravitated to either white or Anglo-looking Latina women. Even the mother of my older brothers could have passed for white. Perhaps some of it is the allure of the forbidden. He was born during the Great Depression and grew up in an era when a black man could get killed for “reckless eyeballing,” or looking the wrong way at a white woman.
Yet he’s not the only one who is color struck. So are some people who romanticize a world of unlimited racial choices. Here’s an ugly historical truth about racial fluidity: It tends to flow in one direction — toward whiteness.
In books like “How The Irish Became White” and “Working Toward Whiteness,” some scholars have argued that whiteness has expanded to include racial groups that weren’t considered fully white at first. A growing number of children of many Asian and Latino immigrants now identify as white. Some scholars even argue the US will remain a majority white country much longer than people think as more children of minorities identity as white.
Some groups pay for their passage toward whiteness by becoming racist themselves, some scholars say. In their book, “Creating a New Racial Order,” Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild and her co-authors tell the story of a group of Chinese sharecroppers who settled in the Mississippi Delta after the Civil War and became merchants to the black community.
The Chinese successfully changed their legal and social status from “colored” or “like blacks” to “almost whites” by shunning their black neighbors, the authors said.
“They moved to new towns, became small entrepreneurs, broke ties with Chinese who had married ex-slaves, and rejected the children of such marriages,” the authors wrote.
As to why so many racial groups run toward whiteness, they offer a succinct explanation:
“White Americans still hold a disproportionate share of political and economic resources, and they are still the quintessential insiders.”
If anyone claims that expanding America’s menu of racial choices is going to make race relations better, here is my first question:
What if it makes this racial hierarchy worse?
That’s what two California sociologists wondered after discovering something disturbing buried in a banal government study. But they were beaten to the punch 30 years earlier by the heavyweight champion of the world.
What boxing can teach us about racial fluidity
Have you ever heard something you don’t understand, but it lingers because, on some level, it rings true? I had that experience when I heard Larry Holmes deliver a cryptic comment on race and class that took me decades to understand.
He was being interviewed by a white reporter when he said:
“It’s hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once — when I was poor.”
I thought about Holmes’ words when I heard about the strange statistical quirk the Californians stumbled upon.
Their discovery began with a mystery.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics launched a decades-long survey in 1979 to gather information on a sample of 12,686 young men and women. In face-to-face interviews, researchers asked them about education, work, and whether they got sidetracked by prison, divorce or unemployment. At the end of each interview, researchers selected the race of the participants.
That’s when the sociologists, Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. Penner, saw something strange.
As they reviewed the results of the 19-year study, they noticed that the race of about 20% of the participants changed over time. An interviewer would classify a participant white one year, and then several years later classify him as black.
Sometimes the change was temporary — a person would regain her original race after several years — while other racial reassignments lasted into adulthood. This pattern persisted even when the interviews moved from face-to-face to phone conversations in the survey’s final years. This was racial fluidity on warp drive.
What could cause this change in perception?
The sociologists found a pattern. When the social status of an interviewee decreased through an event like losing a job or getting locked up, the researcher was more likely to classify him or her as black. When their status increased by getting a job or a college degree, the interviewer was more likely to classify them as white.
That pattern suggested another troubling side of racial fluidity, one not often talked about: While people may be able to move more freely among different racial categories, the stereotypes stay the same.
This is what Saperstein and Penner suggested in their findings in the American Journal of Sociology.
The pattern in the Labor Department study, they said, showed that having more racial fluidity doesn’t automatically mean race becomes less relevant. It can actually reinforce existing racial stereotypes because race isn’t just an individual’s choice — it’s tied to each person’s social status.
Like Larry Holmes, who said no one doubted his blackness when he was poor, some of the participants in the Labor Department study suddenly became black when they lost a job or got busted for drugs.
There were plenty of people hopscotching across different racial categories in the study, but the meaning of those categories didn’t change: White was still “all right,” and black still meant “get back.”
“Even when people can choose their own race or can move across racial boundaries, that doesn’t mean that race stops mattering,” says Penner, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine. “The hierarchy can maintain itself by reclassifying people but keep the stereotypes in place.”
If the link between race and status remains, Penner and Saperstein can imagine a future in the US where the pattern in the survey is replicated on a grand scale: More people are allowed to move across the color lines, but “such changes may only further cement racial stereotypes for those left behind.”
“The more fluid race is at the individual level, the more entrenched racial inequality will be at the societal level,” they wrote in their paper, “Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States.”
If you think it’s impossible to change someone’s race just because of a change in his social status, Saperstein, a sociologist at Stanford University in California, has one name for you: O.J. Simpson.
Simpson was a Hollywood star and pitchman who was seen by many as someone who had transcended being black. Sometimes this transformation was literal. In the documentary, “O.J. Made in America,” a journalist tells a story about overhearing a white woman at a restaurant say, “Look, there’s O.J. sitting with all those niggers.” A Hertz executive in the documentary said the company decided to use the former NFL running back as a pitchman because “O.J. was colorless.”
Simpson was living proof of the adage: “money whitens.” Then Simpson was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife and another man. He stopped being colorless; crime darkens. The shift was made graphic in one telling moment in 1994, when Time magazine editors placed a mug shot of Simpson on their cover that had been deliberately darkened.
“It was a metaphor,” Saperstein said, “for how far he had fallen.”
The Latin-Americanization of race in the US
If you want to see how more racial fluidity could reinforce racism, you don’t have to look at Simpson or a study, Penner says.
Look at some Latin American countries.
In countries like Brazil and Cuba, mixed-race marriages and people are common. Latin Americans tend to think of themselves not in terms of race but nationality. Racism is often seen as a US problem.
But whiteness is still dominant.
“Racial minorities in Latin American countries tend to be worse off … than racial minorities in Western nations,” leading US sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva wrote in his book, “Racism without Racists.” Discrimination against darker-skinned and indigenous people is not uncommon throughout Latin America, scholars say.
Bonilla-Silva has long warned about the “Latin-Americanization of race” in the United States. He envisions a future of expanded racial identities where people claiming the US has moved beyond race will “drown out” the voices of those darker-skinned people still fighting for racial inequality.
“The apparent blessing of ‘not seeing race’ will become a curse for those struggling for racial justice in years to come,” says Bonilla-Silva, who is president of the American Sociological Association.
That kind of future could look like what’s happening in Brazil, according to a 2017 Foreign Policy article. It details the wide array of racial choices available to Brazilians: The country’s census department offers 136 color categories, and 43% identify as mixed.
“Today, Brazilians see themselves as falling across a spectrum of skin colors with a dizzying assortment of names: burnt white, brown, dark nut, light nut, black, and copper,” the author, Cleuci De Oliveira, writes. “What ultimately binds these definitions together is an awareness that the less ‘black’ a person looks, the better.”
The same habits that long prevented some Latin American countries from confronting their racism could have the same effect in a racially fluid United States, Penner warns.
“You’re changing individuals’ racial identity instead of changing the racial hierarchy,” he says. “The lesson of Latin America is even if we don’t have these categories, there still is this hierarchy.”
Do you still believe the Earth is flat?
If racism is so tenacious and adaptable, what can be done?
I’ve been exploring that question for years. I’ve had more success answering it in my personal life by anchoring my sense of self in another type of identity: faith.
One of my best memories is from college, after I joined an interracial church. A group of youths invited me to a room, ostensibly for a meeting. When I walked in, they surprised me by forming a circle around me and welcoming me with a hearty song. As I looked at the different hues of these smiling people, some of whom would become my closest friends, I overcame some of the suspicion I felt toward white people — and found a new way to define myself.
I also reconciled with my mother’s family through meetings and letters. Reading about my mother’s Irish heritage helped me bridge the difference. When I learned about Irish immigrants’ history of suffering and dealing with racial stereotypes, I realized they had more in common with my father’s family than I’d known. Fortunately, I never had to reconcile with my mother. She never cared what color I was. She just loved me the best she could.
And yet I know, despite my personal history, race is as “real as oxygen.”
I’ve been called a “nigger” and a “biracial ape.” I’ve been racially profiled. I was once pulled off a plane and searched in front of a crowd by muscle-bound security officers. They said I had tripped an alarm. I never heard any alarm. I think I just fit the description.
How will the emergence of a Brown New World handle such encounters?
It can’t unless we change how we talk about race, some say. Forget about being post-racial: working for a future where race no longer matters. Be non-racial: work for a world where race doesn’t exist. We have to abandon categorizing people by their skin color and other physical features altogether. It’s been used far too much to foster hate and exploitation.
“We think people assign race based on skin color, hair type and nose type, and certainly they do,” says Saperstein, the sociologist. “But racial categories were never just physical descriptors. They were always categories that marked claims to superiority or inferiority, who deserved rights and who didn’t. That was why we invented the concept of race.”
To modern ears, it’s hard to believe that “race” is an invention. But the modern framework of race — a hierarchy with white on top and black on the bottom — is a relatively recent fabrication. “Black people,” for example, weren’t invented until around 500 years ago by Europeans to justify slavery and their colonial conquest of much of the world, says Spencer, the UNLV scholar.
“Did slavery or race come first? No one knows, but they certainly go together,” Spencer says.
Of course, people did notice different skin hues in the ancient world. But groups like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and early Christians didn’t exclude or include anyone based on their skin color. They used other criteria to separate themselves, such as culture or language, says Carlos A. Hoyt Jr., author of “The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race.”
“The ancients did not believe in biological racism,” Hoyt says. “The Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in their society. They didn’t make color as the basis for judging a person.”
Hoyt says people should treat the concept of race as a “pollutant” and a “myth” — something that has real consequences but is ultimately the product of misguided thinking.
“It’s a bad idea technically, like the notion that the Earth is flat,” he says. “It’s technically wrong. It’s a mistake.”
Having more racial fluidity isn’t enough, he says. He echoes the sentiment of Audre Lorde, a black poet and activist who said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
“We’d do better to push against the whole edifice of race,” Hoyt says. “It’s not about racial fluidity. It’s about leaving the entire racial worldview.”
That sounds futile for many at a time when virtually every day we’re bombarded with news about racial tension. We tiptoe around words, afraid of saying the wrong thing about race in front of others — especially if they look different from us. Abandoning racial categories almost seems as futile as trying to ignore the law of gravity.
Yet Hoyt says there have been plenty of ideas that were once accepted as unassailable that have now been discarded.
“At one time, slavery was promoted and accepted by many as natural. At one point treating children like property was OK. At one point homosexuality was considered a disease,” Hoyt says. “What’s the alternative? Should we roll over? How’s the racial worldview been working for us?”
Spencer, the UNLV scholar, agrees with Hoyt. Racial fluidity, he says, can’t cure America of its original sin of racism. It can easily, though, degenerate into “a form of self-interested celebration that ends up reinforcing those racial hierarchies.”
“So you say I’m racially ambiguous — you look at me and can’t tell if I’m white or black. Maybe that’s interesting,” he says. “But so what? If I don’t attack the idea of race in general, I’m not accomplishing anything.”
Young people may be the ones to lead that attack.
That’s the hope I hear from people who say their kids just aren’t hung up on race. They grew up seeing a black man in the White House. The authors of “Creating a New Racial Order” are optimistic. They say young people are less driven by racial stereotypes, consider interracial relationships normal and are “the preeminent transformative force” that could create a more just racial order.
One of those people who gives me hope is Isabelle Yeung. At 20, she is part of a mixed-race studies group on Facebook. Her mother is white, and her father is a Chinese native of Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean. She says she is a “bit brown” and different looking, so when people ask her “what are you,” she tells them “it’s complicated.”
“My personal answer of what race I am is, ‘None of these things,’ ” she says. “If society hasn’t got a box to put me in, I’m not going to go and make one. I’m just a person and don’t identify with any race in particular.
“I’m a human. Shouldn’t that be enough definition for all of us?”
It should be, and maybe one day it will. But then my optimism fades just a bit when I think about some other young people. I see the snarling faces of the young white men who carried torchlights while marching in Charlottesville last year. I see the Nazi and Confederate flags they flew. I’m not so sure they’re ready to be non-racial.
And then I think of something the author Naomi Klein said in her recent book “No Is Not Enough,” which examined the 2016 presidential election.
“Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the ‘other,’ ” she wrote.
At least Johnny Otis lived long enough to see another side of America. The bandleader was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. One writer riffing on the “indomitable blackness” of Otis talked about how he was placed on the cover of a Negro Achievements magazine in the 1950s and became a political activist in the black community.
Otis lived long enough to see another racially fluid pioneer get elected to the White House. He died in 2012 at age 90 after being married to Phyllis, his high school sweetheart, for 70 years and raising four children together.
He never apologized for crafting his own racial identity.
“Yes, I chose,” he once told a reporter, “because despite all the hardships, there’s a wonderful richness in black culture that I prefer.”
Maybe we’ll have more people like Otis in the future, playing their own tune instead of copying someone else’s ideas about race. But if that tune still ends up saying, “if you’re white you’re alright” and “if you’re black get back,” all this talk about racial fluidity will be a smokescreen.
We’ll still be singing the same old song.
