As White As Anybody

"As White as Anybody": Race and the Politics of Counting as Black
Author(s): Kenneth W. Warren

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?
(Autumn, 2000), pp. 709-726
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057632
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"As white as anybody":
Race and the Politics of Counting as Black

Kenneth W. Warren
I
With the Census 2000 questionnaires in the mail during March
of 2000, the word from black format radio to its listener base
was unequivocal: avoid the undercount. Fill out and return your
census forms.1 The Undercount, of course, is the term for the widely
known fact that the US census routinely misses some number of the
nation's citizenry in its attempt to count the nation's population. More to
the point, although the 1980 and 1990 censuses each missed less than two
percent of the population, those not counted tended to be poor, minority
urban dwellers. In 1980 "blacks made up 11.7 percent of the United States
population," but accounted for fifty-three percent of those missed by the
census.2 And despite concerted efforts to redress the problem, the US
Census monitoring board reported that "the 1990 undercount was larger
than the previous census." In 1980 1.2 percent of the population was
missed; in 1990 those missed accounted for 1.8 percent of the population,
or 4.7 million people in all. In addition, the 1990 "results also continued
an alarming trend: those left uncounted were disproportionately from
minority, low-income or urban communities."3 When coupled with esti
mates that as many as six million people, most of them white, were
counted twice, the official nation was presumably whiter and wealthier
than the "real" nation.4 Yet even as radio hosts urged black listeners to
make sure they were counted, they also professed only partial faith in the
efficacy of this strategy. Pointing to what they insisted were disparities
between the official and the actual crowd estimates for such events as the
Million Man March and a more recent rally in Tallahassee, Florida in

support of affirmative action, radio commentators complained that all
official counting of minority populations amounted to undercounting.5
The sense that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get individuals
and the nation as a whole to count as black is both a recent and
longstanding anxiety reflecting uncertainty about the ultimate point of

political representation at all levels. Should we be striving for a nation in
which people "like me"?in whatever way I define those attributes that
New Literary History, 2000, 31: 709-726
710
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
make someone "like me"?will always be present in assemblies that claim

to represent me?6 Or should we seek a nation in which even if there is no
one "like me" in an assembly representing me, I can nonetheless rest
assured that I will be represented responsibly and knowledgeably?

Historically, of course, the latter goal has been undermined by the fact
that for many people the production of assemblies that include no one
"like me" has been for the most part a result of deliberate policies of
exclusion. As Rogers Smith has demonstrated, US law has "long been

shot through with forms of second-class citizenship, denying personal
liberties and opportunities for political participation to most of the adult
population on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and even religion."7
Understandably, then, it has made sense to insist that people like me be
present in any body claiming to represent me.
Yet even in the wake of efforts to make the nation's politics more
inclusive, problems of representation persist. And for those who count
themselves among a numerical minority there is a high likelihood that no
one "like me" will be found in some representative body whose decisions
affect my well-being. And while there may be a number of possible ways to
approach this problem, this essay will take up one particularly vexed
response to the issue of nonrepresentation, namely, the attempt to
transform somebody who is apparently not like me into someone who
is?in other words, the attempt to make available to someone else those
feelings, beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, and so forth that presumably
would enable that person, if only for a time, to act for me, and perhaps
even, like me.8 Behind this attempt lies the idea that while true represen
tation necessarily rests on one's numbers in the general population it also
nonetheless demands more than a knowledge of those numbers.
This simultaneous reliance upon and distrust of official numbers
partially explains the continuing power of what has been called identity
politics in US public life. David Theo Goldberg has described the census
as "a technology that has racialized the social fabric and reflected the
distinctions alive in the general culture." For Goldberg, the census
authorizes "the prevailing language of imposed identity and identifica

tion."9 And in support of Goldberg's view, some of the official literature
of the US Census Bureau does seem to insist both that to know who we
are we must first know how many of us there are, and that consolidating
our identities is the first step in determining what we ought to do. The
census, then, is not simply presented as a tool for ensuring fair

distribution of resources and fair apportionment of representatives to
local, state, and national governments. Rather the Census 2000 website
declares the census to be a national self-portrait and prognosticator:

"The census serves as a vital statistical database that tells us who we are
and where we are going as a nation."10
"AS WHITE AS ANYBODY"
It is far from clear, however, that a census enabling democratic

fairness is the same as a census telling "us who we are." The attributes
that help "the government decide how to distribute funds and assistance
to states and localities" are not necessarily those attributes that individu
als feel best express their identities. Recent decisions about the census
underscore this tension. After agreeing in October of 1999 that individu
als could for the first time in the history of the census check off more
than one race on census forms, the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) announced in March of 2000 that those checking both "white"
and "minority" categories would nonetheless be counted as minorities.
The decision to allow individuals greater flexibility in designating racial
identity was made largely in response to pressure brought to bear by
individuals and groups describing themselves as multiracial. Although
"pure" racial groups have always been a social chimera, the growing
prominence of multiracial spokespersons pointed up graphically that
the older census forms could no longer tell us what we are, that is, a
nation that no longer fits into neat racial categories. However, the OMB
also argued that its subsequent decision to assign biracial Americans

traditional racial identities was necessary to enable the enforcement of
"anti-discrimination and voting rights laws."11 Taken together, the deci
sions arguably stand to create different official nations: one, to be

reported on the national census, reflecting sixty-three possible racial
classifications and another, emanating from local, state, and federal

agencies, reflecting only nine categories for civil rights enforcement.
Depending on how one wants to look at it, the nation, officially, will
either be more diverse than it seems or seem more diverse than it is.
That people identifying themselves as biracially white and black will
be made to "seem" merely black for enforcement purposes has the

apparent irony of making official the "one-drop" rule that has prevailed
for much of the nation's history. And not surprisingly, critics such as
Michael Lind and Orlando Patterson have censured the OMB on

precisely this implication: "We're back to the one drop rule," Lind
complained.12 And if he and Patterson are right, modern citizens are

being returned to the condition of Puddnhead Wilsons Roxy, who, as
Mark Twain's narrator tells us, "was as white as anybody, but the one
sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and
made her a negro."13 At one level of course, the return of today's
Americans to the condition of Roxy is only apparent. The labeling of
Roxy as black in the late nineteenth century differed in intent from the
OMB's year 2000 decision to describe multiracial people as black. Roxy

is made to count as black only as a result of a systemic process to deny
her freedom and equality, while her contemporary counterparts count
as black presumably to facilitate the removal of the vestiges of that
711
712
systemic bias. If being as white as anybody fails to count in both cases,

the reasons for this "failure" make all the difference.
And yet it is not entirely clear what it would mean to be "as white as
anybody." Given that race is a social construction, it might be just as
accurate to describe Roxy as being as black as anybody. But if everybody
is as black or as white as everyone else then maybe the problem is that
nobody is as white or black as she seems.
But as we've seen in light of the recent census debate, the problem of
figuring out how to describe someone like Roxy depends on the ends
one has in mind. For example, Goldberg, who otherwise supports the
practice of allowing people to designate their identities in any way they
please, nonetheless comes back to counting by race "only where it
signals class exploitation and exclusion?past, present, and predictably
future" (RS 58). On this view, what would matter for Roxy is not that she
is as white as anybody but rather that she is treated as if she were not?
which is of course Twain's point, or more accurately, only part of
Twain's point. The larger issue is whether or not justice would be served
if Roxy were indeed treated as if she were as white as anybody. Can it
ever be a good thing to treat everybody as if they were as white as

anybody?
This question is, in many ways, rhetorical. Most creditable voices on

whiteness agree that to treat somebody like Roxy as if she were as white
as anybody would entail treating somebody else as if he were not.

Whiteness is a category premised on inequality. As Charles Mills argues
in The Racial Contract, whiteness "is always the differential privileging of
the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group."14 Even
conservatives like Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom appear
to concur on this point, observing in America in Black and White that "the
concept 'white,' as we have seen, is not meaningful?including as it

does, such disparate groups as Cajuns, Armenians, French Canadians,
and Latvians. And thus, if today 'white' socioeconomic status is by many
measures higher than that of blacks, that is a picture that can and should
change."15 The way to redress the inequality inherent to whiteness would
be to create a world in which it would be impossible for a Roxy or for
anyone else to be as white as anybody.
Yet many of these critics also agree that it should nonetheless remain
possible to be at least as black as somebody. For example, when

Thernstrom and Thernstrom ask rhetorically whether their support of a
racially indivisible nation would require black Americans "to deny all
cultural differences associated with group membership," they answer
emphatically in the negative: "Of course not. Jews haven't; Armenians
haven't; Ukrainians haven't. Many Americans arrange their private lives
so as to spend much of their time with others of the same background.
713
Purging all racial distinctions from our law and our public life would
pose no threat to those who wish to live in a predominately black
neighborhood, attend an all-black church, and otherwise associate
primarily or even exclusively with their fellow African Americans" (540).
Thus, while one may no longer be black, Armenian, or Jewish in any

official sense, one may nonetheless go on being one of these identities
happily, if unofficially so. The heart of the argument of America in Black
and White is that the socioeconomic indicators and the discriminatory
practices that have distinguished white from black have diminished

significantly and will continue to do so if as a nation we do not insist on
government policies that highlight our presumed differences. A nation
no longer defined by white socioeconomic privilege, the United States
would also nonetheless be "a complex mosaic of groups with different
histories and different cultural traits that have led them to concentrate
in different social niches" (541).
Given the apparent consensus that black group identity will persist
even after the dissolution of whiteness, how can we account for the
suspicions mentioned at the beginning of this essay?the suspicions that
it is becoming increasingly difficult for blackness to count in the nation's
political life? There are perhaps many reasons. Most obvious have been
attempts during the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle affirmative action and
other race-sensitive policies. Abigail Thernstrom's opposition to the

racial districting measures employed to support the Voting Rights Act of
1965 would be among these. Thernstrom has specifically opposed the

creation of majority minority districts, and her arguments have contrib
uted substantively to the dismantling of such districts. Then, as men
tioned earlier, the rise of the mixed-race movement, along with the
possibility of selecting one's own race, has for many critics raised the
specter that a significant number of people might count themselves out
of blackness. And finally, the high level of police and gang violence and
the hyper-attentiveness to drug use involving black Americans has

engendered a fear that a policy of genocide has been directed towards
this portion of the population.
The possibility that these recent trends constitute a growing threat to
black numbers is responsible in part for the seemingly contradictory
logic sustained by Census 2000 in making people count as black even as
they are counted as other than black. And yet this contradiction is not
particularly new. In fact, what I intend to draw out for the balance of this
essay is the curious logic by which in order for it to be possible for

anybody to continue to count as black, it has to be possible to transform
somebody who does not count as black into someone who does. What I
have in mind might be phrased as follows: the only way to make "black"
those people whom we are already inclined to see as black would be first
714
to acknowledge the possibility of making black someone (or something)

whom we are not initially inclined to see this way.
II
To say that Ralph Ellison was a Negro (or if you will, black, or African
American) writer would appear to go without saying. To ask when

Ellison became a Negro writer might seem equally strange, although
Ellison, in refuting Irving Howe's contention that Richard Wright had
been Ellison's primary influence, did remark sarcastically, "I had been a
Negro for twenty-two or twenty-three years when I met [Richard]

Wright," as if it might have been possible that had he met Wright earlier
in his life, Ellison would have been a different kind of Negro. The
crucial question, then, might be to ask how Ellison became, and once
becoming, how he remained, a Negro writer? In the contemporary
environment one might add to this question the additional one of
whether or not we ought to continue to count Ellison as a Negro or
black writer.
Ellison is justly remembered for his insistence that intellectual lines of
affiliation do not necessarily follow social norms. His now-famous

response to Howe is worth quoting at some length:
But perhaps you will understand when I say [Richard Wright] did not influence
me if I point out that while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives,
one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors." Wright was, in this sense, a "relative,"
Hemingway an "ancestor." Langston Hughes, whose work I knew in grade school
and whom I knew before I knew Wright, was a "relative"; Eliot, whom I was to
meet only many years later, and Malraux and Dostoevsky and Faulkner, were
"ancestors"?if you please or don't please.16
Of course, claiming a "white" ancestor was not a strategy for making

Ellison himself white. Jerry Watts has observed that in "The World and
the Jug," Ellison "does not shy away from clothing himself in blackness,
a tactic that allows him to affect the air of the knowledgeable native
against the aggressive, ignorant interloper/colonizer."17 Watts is on
point in noting that throughout Ellison's various briefs for his own
individuality as a writer it nonetheless remained important for him to
continue to count as a Negro writer. But Ellison's maneuver here does
more than reiterate the central point of "The World and the Jug," that is,
that racial segregation is not an "opaque steel jug with the Negroes
inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork"
but rather a "transparent, not opaque [jug], and one is allowed not only
to see outside but to read what is going on out there" (CE 163-64). In
addition, Ellison's insistence that he can choose his ancestors becomes a
way of making them, as well as himself, count for blackness: "I under
stand a bit more about myself as a Negro because literature has taught
me something of my identity as a Western man" (CE 164). This process
is most visible in Ellison's treatment of Ernest Hemingway. In an earlier
essay, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity," Hemingway
had exemplified what Ellison describes as American literature's evasion
of blackness: "when I read the early Hemingway I seem to be in the

presence of a Huckleberry Finn who, instead of identifying himself with
humanity and attempting to steal Jim free, chose to write the letter
which sent him back into slavery."18 Yet for the purpose of rebuking
Howe, Hemingway's work had become in Ellison's eyes "imbued with a

spirit beyond the tragic with which I could feel at home, for it was very
close to the feeling of the blues, which are, perhaps, as close as

Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy" (CE 186).19
I have remarked elsewhere on the supremely tactical aspects of
Ellison's essays,20 but what I want to stress here is that Ellison secures his
own identity as a Negro writer by making the previously white Hemingway
as close to a Negro as any American could be. The now-familiar claim,

associated with writers like Ellison, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch,
that America cannot help but be black, is of course part of what informs
Ellison's description of Hemingway in "The World and the Jug." This

argument against racial purity insists that everyone, black and white, is,
to quote Ellison, "'mammy-made' right here at home."21 The cultural
and political task facing the writer is to elicit recognition of that fact.
And yet in this discussion of Hemingway, exposing the unacknowledged
blackness of American culture is only part of the story.
Ellison's reading of Hemingway as being almost a blues artist?which
is to say, almost a Negro writer?is not the same as claiming that

anybody, or more precisely, any American writer, is almost a Negro
writer. Some are. Some are not. In fact, in "The World and the Jug,"
Wright becomes a sociological or a Marxist writer, which means he
comes perilously close to not being a Negro writer. It isn't that Ellison
doubts Wright's Negroness per se. Neither is he particularly interested
in drumming Wright out of the corps of Negro writers. Rather, in
lamenting "How awful that Wright found the facile answers of Marxism
before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms
of American Negro humanity" (CE 167), Ellison faults Wright for lacking
the discernment he should have gained as a Negro and which, had he

gained it, would have enabled him to distinguish clearly between what
methods best lend themselves to revealing the humanity of the Negro.
Wright fails to tell us who the Negro really is.
715
716
A second instance when Ellison secures his identity as a Negro writer

occurs in the 1968 essay "The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner,"
where Ellison defends himself for choosing to attend the 1965 National
Festival for the Arts at the White House, sponsored by President

Johnson. Under normal circumstances Ellison's attendance at an event
like this would have occasioned no controversy. The Kennedy presi
dency had made it no longer an unusual event for a black American to
be invited to the White House. And the appropriateness of Ellison's
being invited to the National Festival was unquestionable. Besides being
the winner of a National Book Award for Invisible Man in 1952, Ellison
was also a charter member of the National Council on the Arts.
But the Johnson administration's prosecution of the war had begun to
galvanize the intellectual left, and the poet Robert Lowell, who had also
been invited to attend the National Festival, had called for the other
invitees to boycott the festival in protest. Ellison, however, chose to
attend?a decision which he justified in several ways. As he tells us in his
essay, the first factor in his decision (a factor incidental to our concerns
here) is that he felt that in the long run the government's decision to
support the arts was of more significance than its efforts to end the war
immediately. His exact words are, "I felt that governmental aid to the
American arts and artists was of a more abiding importance than my

hopes that the Vietnam war would be brought to a swift conclusion."22
Given the enormous human cost that the war occasioned, Ellison's
apparent preference for art over war protest seems at first glance callous
and morally reprehensible. On closer inspection, however, and on a

reading of the essay as whole, we can see that Ellison is not simply
expressing a preference for art over protest. Rather he is saying
something more like the following: "Sure, as much as anyone else I
wanted the war to end quickly. Given, however, the social division of
labor that defines a complex society and that my role as a novelist makes
me more immediately responsible for the condition of the arts in society
than it does for administering the war, it was my duty to be more
immediately concerned with securing for the arts a place in contempo

rary society than with anything else."
Ellison cannot, however, allow his response to rest here because he
still must explain why his view of the matter differs from that of other
artists or writers who were presumably as concerned as he about the

place of art in contemporary society but who did not see fit to attend the
White House Festival. Accordingly, Ellison offers another explanation

(and I should note here that I am not presenting these justifications in
the exact order in which they occur in the essay): he justifies his support
of Johnson in light of the President's role as the architect of the Great
Society programs of the 1960s. Regardless of the moral Tightness or
717
wrongness of the United States's involvement in Vietnam, Ellison gives

priority to "other costly wars of much longer duration right here at
home?the war against poverty and the war for racial equality?and
therefore I cannot so easily ignore the changes that the President has
made in the condition of my people and still consider myself a

responsible intellectual. My sense of priorities is of necessity different"
(CE557). Chiding his fellow liberal, white artists and intellectuals in the
North for what he calls "segregationist tendencies," Ellison insists that
Johnson, unlike these intellectuals, has made a difference in the lives of
black Americans, and that the Civil Rights struggle has as much a claim
on him as a black American as does the antiwar movement.
Having lauded the Johnson administration's Civil Rights record,

Ellison could simply have complained that his fellow intellectuals?if
they had been properly committed to the Civil Rights struggle?should
have joined him in rejecting Lowell's plea for a boycott. But as we see,
instead of arguing that his intellectual colleagues should adopt a course
of action similar to his, Ellison insists that his "sense of priorities is of
necessity different" from that of his fellow white intellectuals. He then
adduces race, region, and history to explain why he cannot see things
Lowell's way, calling our attention to a
personal and group history which had shaped my background and guided my
consciousness, a history and background that marked a basic divergence
between my own experience and that of the dissenting intellectuals. . . . [F]or
historical reasons none has ever been poor in the special ways that Negro
Americans are poor. Some began to write, as did I, during the 1930s, but here
again none came to writing careers from a background so barren of writers as
mine. To these racial and historical differences is added the fact that we spring
from different regions of the land. I had come from a different part of the
country and had been born of parents who were of this land for longer than
many of theirs had been, and I had grown up under conditions far more
explicitly difficult than they. Which outlines another important difference: I had
come from a region adjacent to that from which the President emerged, and
where the American language was spoken?by whites, at least?with an accent
much like that with which he speaks. (CE 554-56)
The strength of the contrast between Ellison and his fellow intellectuals
depends on his being the sole black intellectual on the horizon. If
historical, cultural, and regional factors are what make him different
from his critics, one has to presume that everyone sharing his background
would agree with him on this matter. He is not representing simply the
Ellisonian perspective, but the Negro Oklahoman perspective. It is from
this perspective that Ellison also claims a view of President Johnson

more discerning than the perspective available to a white, liberal New
718
Englander like Lowell. In Ellison's words, "growing up, a Negro Oklaho

man . . . one learned to listen to the individual intonation, to what was
said as well as to how it was said, to content and implication as well as to
style" (CE556). Johnson's accent and style, which Ellison believed to be
sources of difficulty for someone like Lowell, actually provide a point of
contact between the President and Ellison as well as between the
President and those whose point of view Ellison presumes to represent.

Ellison further immerses his individual perspective in that of the group
in his final justification of his support for Johnson by having recourse to
"the hopes, dreams and myths of my people," to which he must "be

true." He elaborates:
So perhaps I am motivated here by an old slave-born myth of Negroes?not the
myth of the "good white man," nor that of the "great white father," but the myth,
secret and questioning, of the flawed white Southerner who while true to his
Southern roots has confronted the injustices of the past and has been redeemed.
Such a man, the myth holds, will do the right thing however great the cost,
whether he likes Negroes or not, and will move with tragic vulnerability toward
the broader ideals of American democracy. (CE 561)
Ellison invokes the myth for two reasons. First, it helps secure his
difference, racially, from white intellectuals. Treating race solely as a
matter of history and experience and not biology, Ellison nonetheless
insists that this history and experience distinguish him from someone
like Lowell. The second operation performed by Ellison's myth is that it
creates two presidents. Ellison's president?the Negroes' president?is

different from Lowell's president. Although despised and distrusted by
Lowell, Lyndon Johnson, via Ellison, gets entrusted with the hopes of the
Negro. In much the same way that Hemingway becomes almost a Negro
writer, Johnson becomes almost a Negro president. Clearly not the

president of choice for leftist intellectuals and artists, Johnson just might
be "the greatest American President for the poor and for Negroes,"
which, according to Ellison is "a very great honor indeed" (CE562). One
does, however, have to be a Negro Oklahoman, or at least a Negro, in

order to see how President Johnson was almost a Negro president.
Yet as high as Ellison allowed his praise for Johnson to ascend, his
essay did maintain an insistence on racial distinction. Johnson may have
been in Ellison's eyes "the greatest American president for the poor and
for Negroes," but he remained a "flawed white Southerner."
We would have to wait until Bill Clinton came on the scene to see how
a "flawed white Southerner" could somehow become, according to

comedian Chris Rock, "the first black president" and moreover, could
do so while overseeing the final stages of the rollback of Johnson's Great
"as white as anybody"
719
Society.23 By what alchemy had the honorific of blackness been bestowed
so cheaply?
By way of answer, one can turn to the events that led Chris Rock to
count a very flawed white Southerner as the first black president,

namely, the Monica Lewinsky affair. As the Kenneth Starr investigation
into the Lewinsky affair intensified during the summer of 1998, polling
data indicated that support for Clinton was higher among blacks than
among whites. A New York Times/CBS News poll published on September
19 of that year indicated differences of approximately thirty percentage
points between black and white respondents when asked, "Do you
approve of the way Bill Clinton is handling his job as President?" The
August results showed that a majority (sixty percent) of whites and an
overwhelming majority (ninety-four percent) of blacks approved of

Clinton's job performance.24
The larger story, however, was that most Americans who were polled
continued to support Clinton even as the details of his affair with
Lewinsky and lies he had told to cover it up became public knowledge.
Accordingly, in an article titled, "In a Typical Community, Typical Folks
Back Clinton," the Times reported that "It is the ordinary people of Stark
County [Ohio], not the political elite, who are behind the groundswell
for the President."25 Interviewing a group that appeared to consist

largely of white Republicans, the article's author, Michael Winerip,
discovered that a majority of the Americans did not believe that Clinton
deserved to be impeached for his offenses. Many labeled the President's
offense a "private" matter and cited the overall health of the economy as
reason to support Clinton (A 11).

Yet despite the across-the-board support for the President, the signifi
cantly higher level of support for Clinton among black Americans

seemed to demand an explanation, and the Times set out to find one.
Not surprisingly it did. So, roughly at the same time that the paper was
reporting that "typical folks" across the country supported Clinton, the
paper also began to report that black people supported Clinton but that
they did so atypically. The Times observed that black respondents

"admired" Clinton on pragmatic grounds and cited his stance on
affirmative action and his judicial and administrative appointments as

examples. But, the paper went on, "their support for him is not simply a
reflection of loyalty and political self interest. It is also the product of
distinct cultural traits born of the black experience in the United States,
including a broad distrust of prosecutors, an instinctive empathy for the
persecuted and spiritual emphasis on forgiveness and redemption."26

The idea that distrust of prosecutors is a "cultural trait" certainly raises
an eyebrow, but the Times can perhaps be forgiven for coming to such a
conclusion if only because, one after another, the black intellectuals and
720
officials who were asked to explain the reported statistical difference

cited reasons that were broadly "cultural." Gregory Jackson, a Detroit
businessman, opined that "African Americans are largely a very religious
people, and forgiveness is part of the culture. It has been a survival

technique. We couldn't survive with all that pent-up hatred, hostility and
fear, so we've had to forgive and move on." In the same vein, Harvard
law professor Christopher Edley observed that "When you have a whole
history of turning to the church for succor in the face of painful

circumstances, you have to believe that faith will not only heal your
wounds, but also reform the master," while the Reverend Joseph Lowery,
retired president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,

intoned, "We've drunk from the bitter cup of persecution and repres
sion, and if ever a president has been persecuted William Jefferson

Clinton has been persecuted" (A 10).
In his comments Lowery strikes the note of black identification with
the President that other respondents took up even when they didn't
turn to black religion as the explanation for the statistical difference.
George Wolfe, producer of the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, suggested
that Clinton had "been able to project, unlike any other President in
recent memory . . . that he is completely and totally comfortable with
black Americans." The President's reputed comfort with black Ameri
cans became almost complete identification when Harvard professor of
psychology Alvin F. Pouissant suggested that "some minorities were so
aware of Mr. Clinton's seeming affinity with black people that they
circulate rumors that he must have had black ancestry" (A 10).
The assumption that the difference in the polls must have a racial/
cultural explanation goes unchallenged throughout these remarks.
Large numbers of blacks and whites support Clinton, but these re
sponses presume that both groups necessarily support him differently.
To make a white President black is to make black Americans black,
which is to say, to make them different from whites even when they
appear to be doing the same things. For Clinton to be like "us," we have
to be more like ourselves, which is to say, like the image of ourselves as
differentiated by our experience. Even if, to the chagrin of conservative
pundits, many white Republican voters appeared willing to forgive

Clinton his sins, their forgiveness was not the same as black forgiveness,
which as we know was somehow distinctively black.
As the blackness of President Clinton began to be reiterated in the

nation's major media, novelist Toni Morrison weighed in to endorse
what she described as a rumor circulating among black men?the rumor
that "white skin notwithstanding, [Clinton] is our first black President."
Morrison continued:

Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's
lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent
household, born poor, working class, saxophone playing, McDonald's-and-junk
food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American
Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body,
his unpoliced sexuality, became the focus of the prosecution, and when he was
metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men
who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: "No matter how smart
you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in
your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our
permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace
and?who knows??maybe sentenced and jailed to boot.27
In Morrison's estimation black men viewed the impeachment drama as

a reiteration of the fact that even if your accomplishments made you as
white as anybody, you could still be made out to be as black as everybody
else. Clinton's impeachment travail figured forth not the mean

spiritedness of US presidential politics but rather the collapsible dis
tance between the aspirations of upwardly mobile blacks and the
impoverished background they wanted and yet did not want to leave
behind.
That Clinton's difficulties confirmed certain "truths" about being

black in American society is further illustrated by Bebe Moore Campbell's
bestselling novel, Brothers and Sisters. Set during the wake of the Los
Angeles uprising, the novel opens with its MBA-degreed protagonist,

Esther Jackson, observing apprehensively as three white police officers
accost two young black boys on the street. From the bank window where
Esther watches the encounter the boys look "like gangbangers." None
theless Esther reacts to the scene instinctively and viscerally, saying to
herself, "Better not touch them.r The words are described as having
"roared through her body" so powerfully that she merges linguistically
with the young men: "The diction in her head was as slurred and
textured as the South Side Chicago neighborhood she'd grown up in."28
And as the plot of Brothers and Sisters unfolds, with Esther and another
black woman being falsely accused of stealing money from the bank,
Campbell drives home the point that vulnerability to public humiliation
is an unavoidable aspect of the black condition.
To find the material ground of Esther Jackson's reaction as well as

Toni Morrison's commentary on black male sensibilities one need look
no farther than the nation's aggressive law enforcement and incarcera
tion offensive of the 1980s and 1990s, which included among its tactics
mandatory sentencing, racial profiling, and a tendency of police,
prosecutors, and judges to regard the rights of the accused as inconve
niences to be circumvented whenever possible. While an impoverished
721
722
urban minority bore the brunt of this offensive, the ease with which
anybody black could be swept up in the policing dragnet brought home
how impossible it was for some people to be treated as if they were as
white as anybody. It was against this backdrop that one could imagine
that an answer had already been given to a question that had hardly
been formulated: did not the mere possibility that you were liable to be
treated as if you were as black as anybody somehow make you represen
tative of black people generally, even if you happened to be a white

President or a black MBA with dreams of getting into lending? On the
basis of that affinity, couldn't you be trusted to act on behalf of others
who were like you?

Of course, the idea that one is best represented by someone who
shares one's interests is central to politics. But the too-ready embrace of
the idea that one's interests derive from one's culture and one's tastes
may point up a weakness in the political order. The idea that a shared
culture operates in the manner of a prior restraint on the activities and
thoughts of political representatives seems particularly attractive when
one is, or feels oneself to be, unable to elect and hold accountable those
in power. If you have little or no capacity within the existing political
order and lack the social and political movements necessary to chal
lenge that order from outside, it is understandable to hope that there
will be someone in power who, though unlike you, will see themselves in
you and your fate as their own.
Turning back to Ellison we can find this logic clearly in evidence in his
posthumously published novel, Juneteenth. Late in that novel the Rever
end Hickman discovers the face of black America reflected in the visage
of Abraham Lincoln. Gazing at the face of Lincoln's statue at the

Lincoln Memorial, Hickman finds himself thinking, "That look, that's
us!" He continues: "Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us. It
wasn't in the dirty dozens about his family and his skin-tone that they tried to ease
him into, but in that look in his eyes and in his struggle against the things which
put it there and saddened his features. It's in that, in being the kind of man he
made himself to be that he's one of us."29 Although Ellison, via Hickman,
alludes to rumors about Lincoln's having black ancestry (anticipating

the Clinton rumors), the identification of Lincoln with black Americans
is presented as primarily a matter of shared experience and condition?

"the peace and perception born of suffering" (282). These conditions,
despite Lincoln's shortcomings in regard to emancipation and racial
equality, count for Hickman as having made Lincoln more black than
white.
Yet even as Hickman venerates the kind of man who "joined us in what
we have been forced to learn about life," he also admits that the appearance

of such a man is a rare occurrence: "It don't happen often, oh no" (281,
282). Indeed the plot of Ellison's unfinished novel turns on this
unlikelihood as Ellison centers his narrative on Hickman's apparently

failed attempt to mold a young man named Bliss, who is as white as
anybody, into an eloquent spokesmen for the plight of the downtrod
den. After apprenticing Bliss as a revivalist preacher, Hickman is cruelly
rewarded by the young man's having run away and grown up to become
a race-baiting US Senator. Reflecting on Bliss's career and Lincoln's

example, the Reverend Hickman remarks ruefully to himself, "And to
think, . . . we had hope to raise ourselves that kind of man" (283).
Because Ellison died before completing his novel, no one can know
exactly how he would have resolved Hickman's dilemma. But his belief
in the possibility of finding "that kind of man"?a belief already

anachronistic even as Ellison struggled to complete the novel?has
apparently lived out its career as tragedy only to have returned as farce
in the claim that the "saxophone playing, McDonald's-and^junk-food

loving boy from Arkansas" had somehow by the fall of 1998 become
"that kind of man."
Clinton had come to power by endorsing the New Liberal agenda

promulgated by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he
chaired on his way to the presidency in the 1980s. According to that
agenda, "the Democrats had become beholden to various 'special
interests,' usually perceived as blacks and other minorities, women, gays,

and lesbians." Consequently, for Democrats "the only way to win at the
presidential level and to govern effectively was to shed their traditional
support for and identification with the poor, the working class, and
minorities and to reach out to disaffected whites and economic elites by
moving to the right on issues such as crime, affirmative action, welfare,
and economic justice."30 In effect, according to the DLC, white male

democrats and the party they belonged to were the Roxy of the political
world?"as white as anybody," but unfortunately viewed as "negro"

because the party's dark and deviant minority had been successful in
out-voting its majority. Clinton had come on the scene to set the matter
right, and in a series of choreographed events that included returning to
Arkansas to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a "mentally

incapacitated" black man,31 he succeeded in giving a Democratic candi
date a "white man's chance" of becoming President of the United States.
That Clinton's personal trials and d?class? tastes managed to secure

his blackness even as he pursued a policy agenda that undermined the
well-being of significant portions of the nation's minority population
underscores the troubling dynamics of the politics I've been describing:
Clinton became black only after having made other people black, that is,
723
724
new literary history
placing the needs and interests of certain portions of the popu
outside the day-to-day responsibilities of the nation's elected repr

tives. Yet even after having refused to represent the interests of
population in setting the Democratic party's agenda, Clinton
nonetheless "represent" the constituency he had spurned by becom
victim rather than a wielder of political power. In fact, the fo
situation might have contributed to the latter. What possibly embo
the House Republicans to pursue their strategy of impeachmen
their correct perception that Clinton's political well-being depende
the white and relatively conservative portion of his constituen

Clinton had made sure that the Democratic party would be se
representing the Reagan Democrats, the constituency that during

1980s had objected strenuously to the identification of the Democr
with blacks, gays, and the like. It was these so-called Reagan Democ
whom impeachment-minded Republicans thought they could mo
against the President.
As we all know, that story ended with the President apparently g
the last laugh. Yet, the fact that the Republicans overplayed their
and miscalculated the level of voter outrage over the Lewinsky aff
should not blind us to one crucial truth: Clinton suffered the slin
arrows of outrageous fortune not because he was our first bl
president, but rather because he so obviously wasn't.

This is not, however, to say that a politically progressive agenda s
be to elect a "real" black president. The specter of Clarence Thoma
a justice on the US Supreme Court reveals the insufficiency of
goal: making people count as black operates weakly and unpredi
in guiding political practice. Neither Thomas's impoverished

nings in Pinpoint, Georgia nor his capacity to express sympath
those "people who have seen their neighborhoods literally destroy
gangs and violence and drugs," as he did in writing his dissen
opinion in Chicago v Morales, has proved to be an obstacle to his ju

activism on behalf of a politically regressive agenda.33 In fact, wheth
are talking about Clinton?who, we might say, really isn't bla
Thomas, who we might say, really is?the political tactic of making

men count as black appears to have operated most forcefully when i
excused actions running counter to the interests of some the
people supposedly represented through the identification.

A politics that relies on getting a sufficient number of American
count as black begs several questions, only the least of which is de
what number would be sufficient. A more telling weakness o
politics?as revealed quite clearly by Ellison's non-exchange with Ro

Lowell over boycotting President Johnson's Festival of the Arts?is
such a politics is insufficiently discursive and argumentative. The u
725

of Ellison's recourse to myth is that only someone sufficiently like Ellison
could understand Ellison; which, as it turns out, is simply another way of
expressing the politics of the census, that is, the more people there are
like me, the greater the likelihood that they already see things my way. If
such is the case, then, my goal should not be to win people over to a
politics but to adduce as many of them as I can as evidence that the
political opinions I am expressing are not merely my own. Politics
becomes little more than a show of numbers.
We need, however, to come back round to an idea of politics that

presumes the utility of discussion and consensus-building rather than
ascription and identity. Crafting a political left that does not merely
reflect existing racial divisions starts with the relatively mundane propo
sition that it is possible to make a persuasive appeal to the given interests
of working and unemployed women and men, regardless of race, in

support of a program for economic justice. This is not to suggest that we
ignore race. Rather, it is to recognize, as Anna Julia Cooper pointed out
in the final decade of the nineteenth century, that a standard justification
for the absence of blacks from certain assemblies was the claim that
blacks had already joined those assemblies "whither their racial proclivi
ties undeniably tend."34 Once this claim becomes an assumption, then
the response is to make no appeal at all?and the lack of any such

appeal is merely politics by the numbers.
The University of Chicago

NOTES
1 The comments attributed to black format radio were heard while listening to The Tom
Joyner Morning Show, WVON, Chicago, 28 February-3 March 2000.
2 House Subcommittee on Census and Population, Problem of Undercount in the 1990

Census: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Census and Population, 100th Congr., 1st sess.,
14 July 1987, p. 2.
3 US Census Monitoring Board, "Census 2000: A National Process Requires a Local

Focus," Report to Congress of the US Census Monitoring Board, Congressional Members,
106th Congr., 1st sess., 1 February 1999, p. 9.
4 Joe Torres, "Census Looks at Sampling vs. Head Count," Hispanic Magazine, 11.3
(March 1998), 12-14.
5 See note 1.
6 I am working here with the concept of "descriptive representation," as defined by

Hannah Pitkin in The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 60-91, and as applied
by Adolph Reed, Jr. to the "regime of race relations management" in the 1970s. See "The
Jug and Its Contents," in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era
(Minneapolis, 1999), p. 4.
7 Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven,
1997), p. 8.
8 Among these attempts one can number Martha C. Nussbaum's argument in Poetic
Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, 1995). In insisting on the
726 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

importance of novels to our political life, Nussbaum points out that novels demand "the
ability to imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes
in circumstance, be oneself or one's loved ones" (p. 5).

9 David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York, 1997), pp.
52, 53; hereafter cited in text as AS.
10 Census 2000. 23 February 2000. <http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial
.html>
11 Stephen A. Holmes, "New Policy on Census Says Those Listed as White and Minority
Will Be Counted as Minority," New York Times, 11 March 2000, final national ed., A7.
12 Stephen A. Holmes, "The Politics of Race and the Census," New York Times, 19 March
1998, final national ed., Week in Review, 3.
13 Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Puddnhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, ed.
Sidney E. Berger (New York, 1980), pp. 8-9.
14 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), p. 11.
15 Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation,
Indivisible (New York, 1997), p. 543; hereafter cited in text.
16 Ralph Ellison, "The World and the Jug (Part II)," in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,
ed. John F. Callahan (New York, 1995), p. 185; individual essays will be identified in notes
and then cited in text as CE.
17 Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro
American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill, 1994), p. 78; hereafter cited in text.
18 Ralph Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity," in Collected
Essays, p. 95.
19 See also Ralph Ellison, "A Ver)' Stern Discipline," in Collected Essays, pp. 748-49.
20 Kenneth W. Warren, "Ralph Ellison and the Reconfiguration of African American

Studies," REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. II, ed. Winfried
Fluck (Tubingen, 1995), p. 154.

21 Ralph Ellison, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," in Collected Essays, p. 108.
22 Ralph Ellison, "The Myth of the Flawed W^hite Southerner," in Collected Essays, p. 554.
23 David Kamp, "The Color of Truth," Vanity Fair, 456 (August 1998), 127.
24 Kevin Sack, "Leaning on the Empathetic, Clinton Talks of Forgiving," New York Times,
29 August 1998, final national ed., A10.
25 Michael Winerip, "An American Place: Two Years Later; Bellwether's Rank and File
Strongly Support Clinton," New York Times, 30 September 1998, final national ed., Al;
hereafter cited in text.
26 Kevin Sack, "Blacks Stand By a President Who 'Has Been There for Us,'" New York
Times, 18 September 1998, final national ed., A10; hereafter cited in text.
27 Toni Morrison, "Talk of the Town," New Yorker, 5 October 1998, p. 32.
28 Bebe Moore Campbell, Brothers and Sisters (New York, 1994), p. 14.
29 Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth: A Novel, ed. John F. Callahan (New York, 1999), p. 280;
hereafter cited in text.
30 Philip A. Klinkner, "Bill Clinton and the New Liberalism," Without Justice for All: The
New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr. (New York, 1999),
pp. 12, 13.
31 See Klinkner, "Bill Clinton and the New Liberalism," p. 16.

32 Klinkner, too, suggests a causal link between Clinton's racial politics and his various
troubles. The illegal fund raising and the heightened political salience of "personal
responsibility," both of which gave Republicans ammunition for their attack, were caused
by Clinton's embrace of the New Liberalism.
33 Chicago v Morales, 177 IL 2d 440, 687 N.E. 2d 53 (1999). Affirmed. Thomas dissenting.
34 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York, 1988), p. 36.

As White As Anybody

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As White As Anybody

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"As White as Anybody": Race and the Politics of Counting as Black

Author(s): Kenneth W. Warren

"As white as anybody":

Race and the Politics of Counting as Black

Million Man March and a more recent rally in Tallahassee, Florida in

and the nation as a whole to count as black is both a recent and

longstanding anxiety reflecting uncertainty about the ultimate point of

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

make someone "like me"?will always be present in assemblies that claim

assured that I will be represented responsibly and knowledgeably?

exclusion. As Rogers Smith has demonstrated, US law has "long been

This simultaneous reliance upon and distrust of official numbers

distinctions alive in the general culture." For Goldberg, the census

authorizes "the prevailing language of imposed identity and identifica

census, then, is not simply presented as a tool for ensuring fair

declares the census to be a national self-portrait and prognosticator:

and where we are going as a nation."10

"AS WHITE AS ANYBODY"

It is far from clear, however, that a census enabling democratic

also argued that its subsequent decision to assign biracial Americans

sions arguably stand to create different official nations: one, to be

classifications and another, emanating from local, state, and federal

be made to "seem" merely black for enforcement purposes has the

Michael Lind and Orlando Patterson have censured the OMB on

complained.12 And if he and Patterson are right, modern citizens are

OMB's year 2000 decision to describe multiracial people as black. Roxy

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

systemic bias. If being as white as anybody fails to count in both cases,

which is of course Twain's point, or more accurately, only part of

ever be a good thing to treat everybody as if they were as white as

This question is, in many ways, rhetorical. Most creditable voices on

as anybody would entail treating somebody else as if he were not.

concept 'white,' as we have seen, is not meaningful?including as it

possible to be at least as black as somebody. For example, when

"AS WHITE AS ANYBODY"

Thus, while one may no longer be black, Armenian, or Jewish in any

practices that have distinguished white from black have diminished

in different social niches" (541).

other race-sensitive policies. Abigail Thernstrom's opposition to the

1965 would be among these. Thernstrom has specifically opposed the

the hyper-attentiveness to drug use involving black Americans has

essay is the curious logic by which in order for it to be possible for

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

to acknowledge the possibility of making black someone (or something)

American) writer would appear to go without saying. To ask when

Negro for twenty-two or twenty-three years when I met [Richard]

Ellison is justly remembered for his insistence that intellectual lines of

affiliation do not necessarily follow social norms. His now-famous

Of course, claiming a "white" ancestor was not a strategy for making

"AS WHITE AS ANYBODY"

had exemplified what Ellison describes as American literature's evasion

of blackness: "when I read the early Hemingway I seem to be in the

Howe, Hemingway's work had become in Ellison's eyes "imbued with a

close to the feeling of the blues, which are, perhaps, as close as

I have remarked elsewhere on the supremely tactical aspects of

as close to a Negro as any American could be. The now-familiar claim,

Ellison's description of Hemingway in "The World and the Jug." This

is to say, almost a Negro writer?is not the same as claiming that

the discernment he should have gained as a Negro and which, had he

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

A second instance when Ellison secures his identity as a Negro writer

Festival for the Arts at the White House, sponsored by President

American arts and artists was of a more abiding importance than my