The Presidential “Race”… our and yours

Trying to write something on José Vasconcelos, but being bogged down in other matters, this site has been neglected for too long. While still wrestling with how to deal with the maddening Vasconcelos, on the one hand a progressive, on the other, a nazi supporter, making sense of his views on “race” is a challenge. Like so many early 20th century intellectuals, he was hung up on “”racial science”, but turned the usual (European and North American) assumptions on their head, arguing that the mixed ethnic heritage of Latin America made the “meztiso”, the standard issue mixed race peoples of Latin Ameica the “master race” in a sense..

While as nonsensical as any other “racial” theories, Jorge Durand — who has been publishing about migration and population changes for decades, looked at Mexico’s own recent election, and the upcoming one in the United States, to discuss the way “race” and identity are viewed differently … or more precisely, in this article translated from “El visor de la raza” in today’s Jornada… at how that affects, or doesn’t… politics. I left a paragraph or two out, mostly because it explicitly deals with Dr. Durand’s own biases in this election (hint, I agree with him that Trump is nuts), but this is my culture site, my politics one being at https://mexfiles.substack.com/.

A few weeks ago, while discussing with an American colleague the candidacy of Kamala Harris, she noted that if Harris wins the election, it would mean the President of the United States will be a black woman, and the President of Mexico a Jewish woman. Apparently Claudia Sheinbaum’s Jewish origin has been widely discussed in the United States. It’s my American friend’s way of seeing the world.and society.

It’s true that in Mexico there were comments in the press about the Ashkenazi origin of the surname Sheinbaum, and two or three gaffs, such as a racist “tweet” byVicente Fox, but we could say that 99 percent of Mexicans were interested in the matter.

However, in the United States (and for my colleague), race remains a vital issue, even more so when it comes to someone who aspires to the presidency. For Donald Trump, this issue is a kind of obsession. So much so that he questioned the nationality of Barack Obama, who was the son of an African father and an American mother. Even when Obama was president, Trump demanded that Obama show his his birth certificate.

Apparently, Trump sees the matter in black and white and considers intermediate types, such as Obama, who is technically “mulatto”: 50 percent white and 50 percent black, itself an inappropriate way of seeing others. According to the traditional, socially accepted criterion in the United States, what defines a black person is a drop of black blood. Strictly speaking, miscegenation is not accepted nor are there criteria or words to define ambiguous cases.

However, the official criteria of the US census accepts a series of nuances and tries, in some way, to sort out a multiracial mess that exists today. The census includes byone “black” or “white” categories for “non-Hispanic white” and “non-Hispanic black”. And in that we are to blame, because Hispanic-Latinos can be black, white, Asian or some multiple combinations.

But, to be clear, a “white Latino” is not “white” nor would mulattoes, sambos, prietos and other Latin variants¹ that should properly be considered as Latinos, even if they are treated as blacks. Apparently, that census box assumes people are “pure” white or “pure” black, with no admixture.

Furthermore, the census has included a new category for those who consider themselves to have two or more races. And it is a box that grows day by day, in 2020, they constituted 10.2 percent.

Kamala Harris parents are immigrants from Jamaica and India, both educated at Berkeley, at a time when this institution was considered radical, and went on to distinguished careers.. Unlike the Obamas (Barack and Michelle), Kamala did not study at a “mainstream” university like Princeton, but to the historically black Howard University. Her blackness comes from having lived with her Indian mother in the black neighborhood of Oakland, and attending a (black) Baptist church. It was a way to integrate, within the racial strictures of the United States.

If Donald Trump was bothered by Barack Obama’s tanned skin and doubted his nationality, the matter has become more complicated with Kamala Harris, as he questions her blackness. He cannot criticize her for being black, so he says she is not authentically black and gets caught up in his mental juggling, saying that she identifies herself as Indian and not as black. Perhaps Trump thinks this will win over some black men.

The racial and demographic composition of the United States is rapidly changing… a decreasing percentage of “whites”, a stagnant percentage of “black” is stagnant and significantly growing percentages of “Latinos” and “Asians”, along with the percentage of those saying they are of two or more races. To ignore this is to not know the country.

1. Durand is referring to the retro terms (dating to Bourbon colonial attempts to define categories of colonial subjects by ancestry that still hang on among latin americans today. The terms he uses were “gradations” of “black” ancestry…