The Myth of Majority-Minority America

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-05-26 02:02Z by Steven

The Myth of Majority-Minority America

Slate
2012-05-22

Matthew Yglesias, Business and Economics Correspondent

It’s rare that a Census Bureau press release dominates the front pages, but last week’s headline “Most Children Younger Than 1 Are Minorities, Census Reports” was the thrilling exception. The shortage of white Anglo babies, the press was eager to tell us, was a glimpse of things to come, of America’s future as a majority-minority nation.

I have my doubts. “A minority,” the census release clarified, “is anyone who is not single-race white and not Hispanic.” It’s not that the census is counting the wrong thing. Rather, I suspect an awful lot of these “minority” babies are going to be white when they grow up.

When I filled out my 2010 census form I was, like many Americans with Spanish surnames, a bit puzzled. Prompted to ask if I am “of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” I said that I was. But it seems like a bit of a fraud. My grandfather is José Yglesias, and his parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba. He grew up speaking Spanish at home in the Spanish-dominant community of Ybor City in Tampa, Fla. His books are published (in English) by Arte Público Press as part of their Pioneers of Modern U.S. Hispanic Literature series. It’s right there on the cover. And I am, obviously, a descendant of my own grandfather. So if he’s a pioneer of Hispanic literature, then clearly I am of Hispanic origin.

Back in the real world, though, I’m just another white dude….

…It’s conceivable that 40 years from now nobody will care about race at all. But if they do still care, it will still be the case that—by definition—whiteness is the racial definition of the sociocultural majority. If the only way for that to happen is to recruit large swathes of the Hispanic and fractionally Asian population into whiteness, then surely it will happen. Indeed, while the Census Bureau has always been very clear that some people are white, others black, and yet others Native American or Indian, the federal government has frequently changed its mind about the rest. The first time an additional option showed up was in Census 1870’s addition of a “Chinese” race. By 1890 you were also allowed to be “Japanese,” and “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” categories were implemented for the fractionally black. These mixed-race categories vanished in 1900, but mulatto returned in 1910, and in 1920 “Hindu,” “Korean,” and “Filipino” became races. Mulatto vanished in 1930, and “Mexican” became a race, though people of Mexican ancestry had been living in large parts of the United States since those parts of the country actually belonged to Mexico. In 1940, Mexicans were granted white status—a measure backed up by a 1943 Texas law passed in part as an act of wartime solidarity, in appreciation of Latin American support for the anti-Nazi cause…

…The point of this long-winded recitation is simply that with the important exception of the black/white dichotomy, America has never operated with a stable conception of race. The factoid that 50 percent of our latest baby crop is other than non-Hispanic white is true only relative to the 2000 census scheme. There’s no reason to believe that this particular categorization will continue as bureaucratic practice or social reality…

…Everyone knows that a large share of the black population is in fact partially white, while a smaller—but not entirely trivial—share of the white population is partially black. The future of American whiteness will likely evolve to include a larger share of ancestry from Asia and Latin America, just as in the past it’s expanded to include people from eastern and southern Europe…

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The Real American Love Story: Why America is a lot less white than it looks

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-02-15 05:00Z by Steven

The Real American Love Story: Why America is a lot less white than it looks

Slate
1999-10-05

Brent Staples

The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story—a 10-hour film about an interracial family—spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only 2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly more interracial couples will fall into each other’s arms in the coming years but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage across the color line.

But America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call themselves “African-American.” Outside of recent African immigrants to the United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this country.

Four centuries of race mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white. Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such—and check “white” when they fill out census forms…

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White Weddings: The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Posted in History, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-04 16:57Z by Steven

White Weddings: The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Slate
1999-06-15

David Greenberg, Associate Professor History, Journalism & Media Studies
Rutgers University

Last week, the Alabama Senate voted to repeal the state’s constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage, 32 years after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s similar ban. Hadn’t these archaic laws gone out with Bull Connor? I asked myself as I read the news account. And haven’t we been hearing that America has rediscovered the melting pot, that in another generation or two we’ll all be “cablinasian,” like Tiger Woods?…

…When you think about it, it makes sense that some Alabamians found it hard to jettison overnight a 300-year-old custom. Laws against interracial marriage—and the taboos against black-white sex that they codify—have been the central weapon in the oppression of African-Americans since the dawn of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln’s detractors charged him in the 1864 presidential campaign with promoting the mongrelization of the races (that’s where the coinage “miscegenation,” which now sounds racist, comes from). Enemies of the 20th-century civil rights movement predicted that the repeal of Jim Crow laws would, as one Alabama state senator put it, “open the bedroom doors of our white women to black men.” Fears of black sexuality have been responsible for some of the most notorious incidents of anti-black violence and persecution, from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till.

Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South’s labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions between white and black—and thus between free and slave. Virginia began categorizing a child as free or slave according to the mother’s status (which was easier to determine than the father’s), and so in 1691 the assembly passed a law to make sure that women didn’t bear mixed-race children. The law banned “negroes, mulatto’s and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, [and] their unlawfull accompanying with one another.” Since the society was heavily male, the prohibition on unions between white women and nonwhite men also lessened the white men’s competition for mates. (In contrast, sex between male slave owners and their female slaves–which often meant rape—was common. It typically met with light punishment, if any at all.)…

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Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-03 17:33Z by Steven

Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Slate Magazine
1996-08-22

Eric Liu

The “Negro problem,” wrote Norman Podhoretz in 1963, would not be solved unless color itself disappeared: “and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” Coming after a lengthy confession of his tortured feelings toward blacks—and coming at a time when 19 states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on the books—Podhoretz’s call for a “wholesale merging of the two races” seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely prospect of intermarriage.

Podhoretz’s famous essay was regarded as bizarre at the time, but 33 years later, it seems like prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between 1970 and 1992, the number of mixed-race marriages quadrupled. Black-white unions now represent 12 percent of all marriages involving at least one black, up from 2.6 percent in 1970. Twelve percent of Asian men and 25 percent of Asian women are marrying non-Asians. Fully a quarter of married U.S.-born Latinos in Los Angeles have non-Latino spouses. We are mixing our genes with such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000. This orgy of miscegenation has not yet brought the racial harmony for which Podhoretz longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool…

…Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power of race, however, derives not from its pseudoscientific markings but from its cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed matters so much that the biologists’ protestations fall away like Copernican claims in the age of Ptolemy. So the question, as always, is whether it is possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually reinforce one another…

…One possibility is that all multiracials, over time, will find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less stigmatized than “pure” blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than “pure” whites. Their presence, like that of the “coloreds” in old South Africa, wouldn’t subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the black-white caste system. Again, however, the sheer diversity of the multiracials might militate against this kind of stratification.

Yet this same diversity makes it possible that multiracials will replicate within their ranks the “white-makes-right” mentality that prevails all around them. Thus we might expect a hierarchy of multiracials to take hold, in which a mixed child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such blood. In this scenario, multiracials wouldn’t be a distinct group—they would just be distributed across a continuum of color.

Sociologist Pierre van den Berghe argues that such a continuum is preferable to a simple black-white dichotomy. Brazilians, for instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of tipo, or “type,” behold with disdain our crude bifurcation of race. Yet no amount of baloney-slicing changes the fact that in Brazil, whitening remains the ideal. It is still better for a woman to be a branca (light skin, hair without tight curls, thin lips, narrow nose) than a morena (tan skin, wavy hair, thicker lips, broader nose); and better to be a morena than a mulata (darker skin, tightly curled hair). Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism.

Still another possibility is that whites will do to multiracials what the Democrats or Republicans have traditionally done to third-party movements: absorb their most “desirable” elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It’s quite possible, as Harvard Professor Mary Waters suggests, that the ranks of the white will simply expand to engulf the “lighter” or more “culturally white” of the multiracials. The Asian American experience may offer a precedent: As growing numbers of Asian Americans have entered the mainstream over the last decade, it is increasingly said—sometimes with pride, sometimes with scorn—that they are “becoming white.”…

…These cautionary scenarios demonstrate that our problem is not just “race” in the abstract. Our problem is the idea of the “white race” in particular. Scholar Douglas Besharov may be right when he calls multiracial kids “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” But even as a “multiracial” category blurs the color line, it can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial adoption or mixed marriages or class-climbing, so long as we speak of whiteness as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter…

Read the entire article here.

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