Acting Your Race

The day after the 2006 Oscars, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan penned a scathing critique of the academy’s choice of best film, Crash, which he described as "a feel-good film about racism." The film, he wrote, "could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed." But that is an accurate description of almost every major Hollywood movie that deals with race; they are designed to appease the white-centric biases of studio executives and the mainstream audience they entertain.

Like its predecessors, Crash offers up a self-serving thesis of race that consists of two propositions: One, racism is a matter of individual prejudice; two, the antidote to racism is, therefore, personal redemption. In other words, we -- not just whites but also blacks, Asians, Arabs, etc. -- are equally guilty of racism, and we each need to move past our bigotry to recognize the common humanity that binds us all. At the heart of this individualist perspective on race is the assertion of sameness: We are all racists; we are all human. Difference is an artificial cultural construct that disguises and distorts our true universal essence.

As various critics have pointed out over and over again, this kind of liberal humanism effectively lets white Americans off the hook and denies the need for radical social change. The failure of movies like Crash to articulate racial inequality, however, points to the more difficult challenge of talking about race, period. We do not know how to see the other as both different and equal, or how to recognize difference without resorting to essentialism. It’s one of the reasons why progressives are more comfortable talking about race in terms of how people are treated than who they are. And that means we end up defining racial identity entirely in terms of power relations: for example, whiteness equals privilege.

Many leading scholars on race have repeatedly argued against the liberal tendency to treat race -- and therefore racial difference -- as a social problem. They instead draw attention to the performative aspect of race, wherein racial identity is not a fixed unchanging essence but a set of mutable and contingent cultural behaviors. As Sarah Susannah Willie writes in her book Acting Black, "By treating race as acquired, like a skill or a behavior, we can begin to see it as something over which individuals have differing degrees of control and varying options for agency, as an aspect of identity that is at least partly performed, continuous, and contingent."

As a woman of color, I find that theorizing race as a performance offers several benefits. One, it helps us recognize the fact that we all "act" our racial and ethnic identities, be it black, white, Chinese, Native American or, in my case, Indian. Two, it also reveals how people of color are forced to perform their identities in particular ways to meet the requirements of a racist culture -- and in doing so, points to the way that racism shapes the most intimate parts of our selves.

Acting black, white

One of the most compelling examples of race-as-performance is currently playing itself out on television. The FX reality show "Black. White." physically transforms an African-American and Caucasian family to look like the other race, and follows them around as they interact with the world in racially charged situations. On the surface, "Black. White." offers a fairly standard view of racism as discrimination -- i.e., how people are treated because of how they look. According to its producers, the aim of the show is to ask: "What is it like to live in someone else’s skin?" But "Black. White." -- intentionally or not -- also raises a far more important question: What does it mean to "act" black or white?