Why Bob Garfield is Right About 'Acceptable Blackness'

Bob Garfield got the innanets goin’ crazy.

In a recent Ad Age column titled “Why Even Hardened Racists Will Vote For Barack Obama”, Garfield suggested that there were plenty of racists who were in the market for someone like Barack Obama, because Obama is ‘acceptably black’ and they could use him as evidence of their non-racist bona fides.

Acceptably black means being nonthreatening to white people inclined to feeling threatened by black people. It means standard English, clean-cut appearance (or, as Joe Biden fumbled, “clean”) and the most Caucasian features possible. These obviously are not objective measures of character or worth; just as obviously, they are measures of what sells to the vast, white audience. Halle Berry and Denzel Washington are acceptably black. Your local news anchors are acceptably black. Tupac was not.

A lot of people, in both Garfield‘s comments section and on other blogs (and seemed to tweak the good folks over at Racialicious, for some reason) were pissed that he would even suggest such a thing). Many of the respondents seemed to be ad industry folks themselves.

But is he wrong? When sports writers used to say without irony that Michael Jordan transcended race, what are they really saying? When voters, politicos and the commentariat said Obama was the herald of a new political postracialism , weren’t they essentially agreeing with Garfield, even if their acknowledgements of ‘acceptable blackness’ were more gingerly phrased?

Indeed, the main thing the new leaders have in common is that they don’t scare white people. Or at least not too many and not too much. This is not an entirely accidental or insignificant fact. For while they do not control the way they are perceived, they do have some influence over how they come across. “In so much of the work I’ve done, I’ve found that you had to put people at ease on the question of race before you could even start to talk about what you were doing,” explains [Massachussetts Governor Deval Patrick]. “I don’t fit a certain expectation that some people have about black men. And I don’t mean that as anything other than an observation about my life.”

One could also argue that stereotypes are their own kind of ‘acceptability’ too, a point which Garfield misses.

If the largest bloc of consumers is white and, implicitly, nonraced, it follows that they would be drawn to nonraced spokespeople — or, in this case, spokespeople for whom the prickly issue of race can be more easily circumvented. People can assign (or not assign) any racial narratives they want to Obama, and as we’ve said before, his campaign isn’t exactly itching to point them in one direction or another.

It’s a tactic straight out of Hollywood’s playbook. Hitch, a superficially innocuous Will Smith romantic comedy from 2005, had to walk a fine racial line: cast a black female romantic lead and it’s a “black movie”; cast a white female lead and you draw attention to Will Smith’s race and open up a really stupid can of worms. This is Hollywood, and since Asian women can’t be considered (since they don’t exist, apparently) and race is viewed on a very problematic black-white continuum, they decided on the beautiful Eva Mendes, who as a Latina clearly represents the middle ground. Ugh.

Hitch went on to make $180 million.