The XX Factor: What women really think.

Posting About Post-ness

Lauren, your post about Palin and Obama got me thinking. As I’ve always understood the concept of “post-race,” it isn’t really about being past race. Race isn’t something you can transcend. But it is something you can bend and complicate—especially if you’re as charismatic and talented as Obama is.

I remember first hearing the term “post-black” in 2001, when Thelma Golden curated Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring artists who were, in Golden’s words, “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” That was the same year that Rolling Stone published the article “To Be Gay at Yale,” in which many of my classmates spoke about how their queer identity had become “backgrounded”—i.e., it was still an important part of how they conceived of themselves, but it was no longer necessarily the most important part. They were, in a word, post-gay.

Ever since then I’ve found the phrase “post-race” to be a useful one, personally. I’m a biracial woman who’s very attached to the immigrant communities I grew up in—someone who thinks about race a lot—but my skin color is not always in the forefront of my mind when I interact with the world.

So to me, Obama is absolutely a post-race candidate. He’s the quintessential post-race candidate, even! Here’s a man with roots in Kenya and Indonesia, in Hawaii and South Side Chicago, and though by all accounts his sense of himself has evolved over time (“struggled with his identity”—ick, I hate that phrase), he now seems totally at ease with his complicated self. Being post-race, to me, means wearing yourself a little more lightly.

So is Sarah Palin post-gender? I’m not entirely sure, but my instinct says no. Too much of her public persona seems to rotate between performances rooted in gender roles—the flirt with the high heels or the über-mom, as you point out, or the Ann Coulter-style mean girl or the sexy Puritan, as other Slate writers have noted. Is it the calculatedness I’m responding to? Her eagerness to put on a show for us? I was going to say that it’s because she was chosen for the ticket simply because she’s a woman, but that’s not quite right since she’s obviously proven to be a charismatic, electrifying politician, as well. I confess I’m stumped.