Racial Anxiety and the First Dog
During the 2008 election season we witnessed a series of attempts to pin down Barack Obama’s slippery identity. His bi-raciality was met with efforts to cast him as Arab, Muslim, terrorist, not black enough, not American enough, and not trustworthy enough by virtue of an inability to know just what he IS.
In the days immediately following Obama’s election, the media was obsessed with one question: what kind of dog would the Obamas give to Malia and Sasha? Seeming to understand how that question, innocently enough, served as comic relief for the nation’s anxieties about his racial ambiguity, Obama discussed options that he and Michele were considering in his first post-election press conference (see VodPod video, bottom, left column):
Our preference would be to get a shelter dog. But obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me.
As a biracial black man with roots in Africa and North America, whose life and education spanned Polynesia, Indonesia, and the Ivy League, Obama breaks form with presidential pedigree not just because he is not white, but because he embodies hybridity, the antithesis of pedigral logic.
As Donna Haraway examines in her book, “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness“, our obsession with dogs and other pets may say something about how we deal with notions of identity. In the world of dogs, biological metaphors of breeding, purity, mixture, and blood abound.
Haraway argues that, on the one hand, the relationship of our dog cultures to our fears about racial difference and interaction is perhaps more profound than we know. On the other hand, our relationship to dogs represents a unique occasion for inter-species contact and affection.
So, dog-talk (not unlike, say, God-talk), can cut both ways. As we talk about purebreds and mixed breeds and mutts we may at times be projecting racial and cultural anxieties. If that is the case then we should pay greater attention to how we talk about dogs as an index of cultural attitudes about difference and identity.
On the other hand, our relationships to dogs can be healthy and humanizing. One reason for that may be because with dogs we are drawn out of ourselves, pulled into the orbit of another species, and we are disarmed by significant forms of bonding with something completely different from ourselves.
Against the backdrop of distant and recent histories that militated against such possibilities, Obama’s quip that some shelter dogs are ‘mutts like me’ may have been disarming for racially anxious Americans who are in need of a positive experience of bonding with the other.
Stumble It!
that is a good picture!!!