Specifically, what he said in this entry about this article:
''A well-ordered multiracial society ought to allow its members free entry into and exit from racial categories,'' [Randall] Kennedy contends [in his latest book, INTERRACIAL INTIMACIES: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption], and his exploration of racial passing makes for compulsive reading.
Amazing. The more times I read that quote from Kennedy, the less sense it makes. Possibly because I think in a well-ordered multiracial society, no one would particularly care about racial categories.
It goes without saying that the US is not currently a well-ordered. . . okay, maybe it depends on how you define "well-ordered." If you mean segregated, there are some statistics suggesting that yes, it is, especially in Northern cities.
[A]bandoning his evenhandedness, Kennedy presents a one-dimensional account of the problem posed by half a million children in foster care, many of them black. Repeatedly -- and misleadingly -- he calls them ''parentless children.'' And he advocates their rapid, race-blind redistribution to adoptive homes that would be predominantly white, arguing that this would benefit both the children and American race relations.Kennedy seems untroubled that these children's own parents are overwhelmingly poor and politically powerless, and that the new ones he seeks for them would be more affluent. Absent is any mention of recent cases in which courts found children had been wrongly removed to foster care because their mothers were battered, homeless or ineligible for public assistance. Nowhere is it more apparent that Kennedy's vision of a race-blind society has a blind spot for economic inequality.
Which is the other problem I had with that first quote. There's a long history of black people passing for white because, until fairly recently, our society didn't bother pretending there was equality between racial groups. Comparing that to a white person today deciding he or she would derive all sorts of affirmative action or tribal benefits from claiming to be black or Indian is. . . just a wee bit misguided.
And possibly not what Kennedy intended to say; I'd have to read the book to be sure, and I still haven't got 'round to his previous tome, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.
I've had opportunities to do so.
I haven't taken them.
This can safely be assumed to indicate my complete lack of interest in doing so.
Bonus round: Looking for census information to back up that offhand remark about segregation, up came Color lines are fading in city neighborhoods, from my sister's former employer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Early last month, the Los Angeles Times flew a reporter here to research a story about the high rate of segregation in Milwaukee.The newspaper would have been better off covering its own metro area, considering the results of a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute. Metro Milwaukee ranks 43rd on the UWM study in the level of black-white integration - far ahead of Los Angeles, which ranks 89th out of 100.
Insert griping about restricting this to "black-white". . . here.
Ooooooooh . . I feel it coming on-line . . yes . . rant commencing!!!!
(My husband is the placement officer for a foster-care network, so I know more than my fair share about the issues at hand, here).
OK, so multiracial adoption -- to wit, given the numbers, white families adopting children of color -- will solve all our problems, heh?
AUGH!!!!!
Look: 1) They have already tried this. Very few lily-white parents are willing to adopt brown babies -- as we keep pointing out to the lily-white pro-life maniacs who claim adoption will negate the need for abortion. Thus, adoption is not a numerical solution for the half-million 'parentless children' (whose parents often DO still have certain parental rights). 2) The basic assumption of an interracial adoption program -- and of using it to support 'multiracial tolerance' -- is that once brown persons are properly introduced to white culture, they'll come to love it for the superior option it clearly is and be happier and not so snarly about race issues all the time. This of course assumes that minorities have no culture, or that if they do it is a culture without anything to recommend it. Such assumptions are racism at their worst.
3) In those cases where a minority child is adopted from the foster system into a white family -- and in many places it's still quite possible to do this, but most white folks won't --there is an overwhelming rate of frustration, rage, disgust, and social dislocation among those children, who find that as adults they are supposed to belong to a culture they are unfamiliar with, or suffer as they find it tough to fit in with white culture because they are stiff-armed in the thousands of ways we note here all the time once they're no longer standing next to mommmy or daddy.
And, finally, the bit that REALLY pisses me off, here:
One assumes that if the foster homes are white, and the adoptive homes are white, and so the parents are to be white, it's the lesser of two evils to provide stability, right?
Right only ont eh 'stability count, but profoundly WRONG in that the backbone of any foster care network in any urban setting in America is black families, not white ones. Whites, supposedly so keen to adopt innocent children of color who 'deserve better,' don't even step to the plate as foster parents, much less adoptive ones.
Whooooo. Steam spent.
I now I'm not as knowledgable on this as my husband is, but man that series of assumptions made me angry. I'mm all for multiracial tolerance, but assuming that minorities have no culture of value . . .Augh!
I forget the author at the moment, but i read a book once entitled "Black and white in amreica: a long way to go" (that's how i remember it anyhow). I think it was by a sociologist named coleman... it was done on race in Milwaukee.
Reccomended read if you are into that sorta thing.