Several months ago, a new mayor was elected in London. Boris Johnson, a former Member of Parliament, won the mayoral election against the Labour incumbent, Ken Livingstone, alias Red Ken. Livingstone acquired the cognomen 'Red' in the height of his socialist phase. Ken, another former MP, was as radically ‘red’ as those labour union curios who used to describe themselves as comrades in Nigeria and elsewhere. Although Ken Livingstone still pals around with red-shirted hotheads like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – who seems to be the only leader wearing a red shirt today as Fidel Castro has fallen into desuetude. 

As mayor of London, Ken was also seen as the friend of ethnic minorities, especially people of African origin. He gave appointments to a fair number of them. As late in his term as August 2007, Ken tearfully apologised for London’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

But one of the things that finally sealed the fate of Ken Livingstone was the string of monetary scandals in which some of his senior black assistants were involved. Lee Jasper, Ken’s senior policy adviser on Equality, had to resign in the pitch of the hue-and-cry that would have led to the downfall of Ken himself, months before he was voted out.

Rosemary Emodi, of Nigerian parentage and possibly background, was Lee Jaspers’ assistant and friend. She resigned too when it was discovered that she had lied, when a video evidence showed her having sun-soaked fun with a boyfriend in a holiday park in Nigeria at the time she said she was in the UK.

Anyway, Ken’s black friends had helped him out of office. And in came the conservative Boris Johnson. If anything, Thatcherite conservatism does not pretend to be enamoured of those it sees as the lumpen underclass or perpetual underachievers – such as a large number of blacks some of whom have long been willy-nilly ghettoised in Brixton, London. Boris is the kind of guy the British might call a toff, someone with upper- or upper-middle class privilege, although Boris does often invert the tweedy dapperness of toffs into studied down-dressedness. While one may not describe him as racist, he made a few careless cavalier comments about black people in a couple of the laddish, raffish articles he wrote in the conservative rag, The Spectator.

Months into his election as London mayor, Boris has shown an admirable maverick side. Recently he even suggested an amnesty for illegal immigrants in the UK, something you would expect from someone like Ken Livingstone. Call it the put-on schmoozery of politicians, if you like. But if Boris has really been playing to the gallery, then he has been doing it brilliantly. Now one of the first things he did when elected was to appoint a black deputy mayor (one of two) in charge of youth affairs. Ray Lewis, a naturalised Briton, was Caribbean-born and unalloyedly black-complexioned like anyone of us in the heart of Africa.

Now the implicit reason a black person was appointed as deputy mayor for youths is the violent, often murderous, crimes among black kids. Knives, guns, baseball bats are the ammunitions with which black youths war against one another. 

Before his appointment as deputy mayor, Ray had been something like a ‘community organiser,’ the nonce phrase popularised by Obama. Besides being a former governor of a youth offenders’ institution, he also a part-time pastor. As a deacon in an Anglican parish, Ray was alleged to have duped one of the parishioners of 25,000. He was also alleged to have sexually harassed another younger member of his church – accusations that would not have mattered a whit if Lewis was living in a number of other countries where things like official greed and propositioning a girl were par for the course. Lewis denied everything, but he had to resign anyway.

A few days ago, the Mayor appointed another person, now not substantively as deputy mayor, but as his ambassador of sorts for youth affairs. James Cleverly is a shade or two lighter than Ray Lewis.  He is the sort of guy they’d described as mixed-race here. Sensible political correctness has made the word 'half-caste' unacceptable (it’s a lousy way of describing anyone, anyway). Cleverly has now buckled down to the job of tackling the formidable challenge of straightening out the youths of London, especially black teenage tearaways. 

May I say at this point that the of this premise article is merely hypothetical, it is not meant to be a foursquare take on the issue of race, colour, or shades of colour? The gist is my rather inconsequentialist pondering over whether Boris had decided to choose a lighter-skinned ‘black’ man to do the job of tackling youth crime instead of reduplicating with another wholly black man like the disgraced Lewis. Did colour, or shades of colour, have anything to do with it? To a good many people, its is arguable whether American President, Barrack Obama, is really a black man – or even if he is black, then is he the sort of black person white voters might like to see in the white house, lighter of skin, half-white, a brighter, cuter sight for Caucasian sore eyes?

The dialectic of race and racialism is one hell of a slippery slope, and I often try to steer clear of it. I think we are all guilty of a little racialism - not racism, mind - whatever colour or clime we belong to. And it has always been my view that we should reach beyond the narrow ambits of race and colour when looking at a person. Obama has been described as the ‘post-racial president’ of America, but essentialist thinking, which should not be dismissed out of hand, still asks: Is Obama really representative of the black man? If he had been ‘totally’ black would he have stood any chance of reaching the white house? The man himself does not consider himself a ‘black’ politician anyway – although he’d be hard put to it to deny being an African-American president which could easily be rendered into 'black' or even the shadier ‘Negro.’ Or could he?

Possibly not. For one thing old slave-owners in American south would see someone like Obama as more black than white, even the plantation-owner who might have sired him would assume a sort of detached stance. The antebellum Obama might only be useful as a foreman, the driver of slaves. And there’s the rub (aside from the fact that Obama’s ancestors were never slaves in the US). The light-skinned, mixed-race - formerly ‘half-caste,’ formerly ‘mulatto,’ or ever the whiter ‘quadroon’ - person was placed in a pedestal above the totally black. In order to dismiss him as being in historical cahoots with whites, Obama has been called a House Negro (by Osama bin Laden) and a Magic Negro (by the egregious Rush Limbaugh), epithets of black men - often mixed-race – who were in the good books of their white ‘masters.’

Although in America or Britain, the distinction might have blurred considerably, I remember that when I was a teenager, a mixed-race brother and sister who lived in my town in South West Nigeria were seen as more white than black, and therefore precious and worthy, their otherness well-celebrated. The irony of the whole thing was: these brother and sister would have been neck-deep in the schizothymia of racial colourings at the time because anytime they left our small town for a holiday in the UK – where their white mother lived then – they would have been seen by the white Britons as more black than white, although they were fair-skinned enough to pass as white.

And this brings me to that shameful aspect of race-consciousness. Passing. Now Barack Obama is not white enough to pass as white, but some decades ago someone of his hue might have tried. Those who were described as ‘quarter-cast’ or ‘quadroon’ - horrible words, indeed - would find it easier to pass. But an ‘octoroon’ – yet a nastier handle for anyone – would easily separate himself from whomever black great-grandparent he had, and worm himself into the bland shell of complete whiteness.

I read Henry Louis Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man years ago. Of course, I knew Gates was an Africa-American scholar, but I thought he would include black men from across the globe in the book, particularly from Africa. But then I wasn’t surprised overmuch when I discovered his subjects were only African-Americans. In spite of his interest in a number of African writers, especially Wole Soyinka, Gates’ views on Africa and even Africans have never been completely uncritical. After a visit to Africa years ago, he described the continent and the people who live there as exasperating and tiresome – which is not entirely untrue. And anyway, Africa has its own scholars who should be able to write about different ways of looking at black men from the mother continent.

My disappointment having been doused for not seeing any African in the book, I realised that Thirteen Ways was an enjoyable treat. There are vignettes of African-American men from darker guys like Albert Murray, through Bill T Jones, the gay the dancer-choreographer, to patently ‘coloured’ men like Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell and Anatole Broyard. Of course, Colin Powell was light-skinned enough to cross to the other side of the colour bar in the vintage days of passing - just as Belafonte. They didn’t, but their contemporary and fellow subject, Anatole Broyard, had severed whatever connection he had with blackness and had become a rather respectable white literary critic and writer. Gates’ essay on Broyard’s racial volte-face – the final one in the book – is poignant and pensive, you could only find yourself pitying the proud Broyard.

Phillip Roth fictionalises Broyard’s life in his clever novel, The Human Stain, a book I had decided to read on the loop with watching its film on DVD. Anthony Hopkins’ sustainment of the role of a mixed-race man who decides to totalise his whiteness is far more convincing than I expected – although some film critics were not impressed. Last week, I was watching the early pre-Thriller Michael Jackson with my six-year old daughter, and her searching proboscis had picked something. “Dad, do you mean that was Michael? He was black there.”

“And he is white now,” I quickly, and rather dimly, answered, grubbing for a valve of escape. I did not intend to muddle the mind of my daughter who was until recently the only black girl in her school. The truth is simple, not to say pitiable: Michael Jackson has passed in the most public way that even a child of six cannot but notice. (But then, truly this might as well be due to Michael's self-confessed martyrdom to vitiligo). Also, the black women who say they are ‘toning’ rather than ‘bleaching’ are again making a poor, and rather malodorous, attempt at passing – they often come out as no more than mongrel scarecrows, though, a many-coloured version of Mrs Fiona Shrek in her ogre incarnation.

Let us not ask the old-world question whether being black is better than being white or vice-versa. It is easy to beg the question by a string of ontological puncturings, anyway. Fling your final answer back to when a group of Homo erectus who left Africa for Europe and other places, then you’d see that the argument for black and white might collapse under its own abortional weight. And what about the inbetweens, the many shades of mixed race people? Who - or what - are they? Are they seen as more kin with white people than black - that is if you allow the fissure? Are they better… but better than who? Is the election of Obama in America, the preference of Cleverly to darker Lewis in London, a sign that electorates and politicians in the west do feel more at ease with a mixed-race person than a unmixed (actually, there is no such thing as unmixed) black? A few days ago a British minister declared that mixed-race people are now entering a new lease of life in Britain, unthought-of opportunities are beginning to open up for them, they are now on the make, manifestly more than their blacker brothers and sisters.

Again let me finish with the declaration that the whole of this article is built on a hunch.  

Robot  # 1 | 25.02.2009 02:01

Although in America or Britain, the distinction might have blurred considerably, when I was a teenager I remembered that a mixed-race brother and sister who lived in my town in South West Nigeria were seen as more white than black, and therefore precious and worthy, their otherness well-celebrated. The irony of the whole thing was: these brother and sister would have been neck-deep in the schizothymia of racial colourings at the time because anytime they left our small town for a holiday in the UK – where their white mother lived then – they would have been seen by the white Britons as more black than white, although they were fair-skinned enough to pass as white....Read the full article.

iseoluwa  # 2 | 25.02.2009 07:37

interesting, now i can't really say i'm black and i'm not white either, so what am i? ok i'm human. simple!:hail:

aguabata  # 3 | 25.02.2009 14:42

you need to deal with your blackness, even amongst pure negroids there are very light skinned people. The truth is that an ugly person is better off lighter skinned, somehow the unappealing features are softer. For the records i'm a very dark blackman and slightly better looking than Abati. Even in africa lighter skinned girls are prefered by a larger section of men, what your article does is to confuse racism with the concept of contemporary beauty. If you are talking about racism the shade of your blackness wouldnt save you, but if you are talking about general social acceptance then the colour of your skin is at par to say a beautiful face or a handsome man no matter his/her skin shade.