Karen O and the Future of Whiteness
Via the Democratic Strategist, I was interested to read Alan Abramowitz’s informative article on the demographic shifts undergirding America’s political coalitions. This is a topic also usefully explored by Ruy Teixeira in his recent report on “The New Progressive America”. Naturally, one topic that comes up in both of these discussions is the rising number of non-white—which is to say African-American or Hispanic or Asian—people in the electorate.
This, in turn, reminded me of another issue that also came to mind when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates casually refer to Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O as a “white girl.” In reality she is, as they say, “Half Korean, 100% Rock Star”. Nevertheless, I think there’s a clear sense in which it strikes people as more intuitive to refer to a half-white, half-Korean indie rock star born in Korea and raised by both parents in New Jersey as “white” than it is to refer to a half-white, half-Kenyan President born in Hawaii and raised by his white mom and grandparents as “white.”
All of which is to say that there’s a decent chance that we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between “white” and “non-white” but between “black” and “non-black.” Somewhat along these lines, yesterday I was watching Rick Sanchez on CNN, who I’d always thought of as just another white guy on TV, talking about Bobby Rush’s visit to Cuba and I suddenly realized that Sanchez is a Spanish name and he must be Cuban. Which is to say not “white” at all, but “Hispanic.” Just like, you know, me. But without wanting to put any words in his mouth, I don’t think either of us have a major problem hailing a cab or whatever.
Perhaps the best way to think about this is to recall that many currently “white” ethnic groups—Jews, Italians, Irish, etc.—weren’t always understood as being white. And it seems quite plausible that more and more Asians and Hispanics will, over time, come to attain “white” status. In political terms, meanwhile, once upon a time white Catholics were a core Democratic Party constituency. But over time, things just changed and the GOP coalition expanded from a white Protestant one to a broader white Christian one.
82 Responses to “Karen O and the Future of Whiteness”
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April 10th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
You must not watch CNN much. Sanchez plays the Cuban card all the time.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Sociologist George Yancey makes exactly this case. “White” has always been a flexible category in the US, has expanded to take in Irish, Italians, Jews, etc who weren’t considered white. Yancey argues that it is currently expanding yet again to include Asians and Latinos.: George Yancey. Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide. Boulder: Lynne Rienner P, 2003.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
It is indeed possible that one day, maybe in the distant future, the distinction between one’s supposed position on the conceptual black vs non-black ‘racial’ spectrum might have an effect on the direction of American society, maybe even politics. Possibly. I don’t want to speculate too much.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Sorry, dude. You’re white, just like Sanchez. “White people” are the descendants of Europeans. Some of those descendants ended up in places like the U.S., Canada, and Argentina, where they wiped out the Indians and/or engaged in low-levels of mixed-reproduction. Others ended up in Mexico, Peru, etc., where there was more mixing. Hence you get mestizos. These are the people we’re referring to when we refer to “hispanics,” even if white cubans techinally fit the bill as well (Do we refer to Coptic Egyptian-Americans as “African Ameicans? No.)
None of this changes anything, but the bottom line is there are white people outside of Europe and North America.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
You must not watch CNN much.
This is an unequivocal point in Matt’s favor, if you ask me.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I think whether this happens will depend in part on how immigration fights work out. That said, the Hispanic/Latino groupings may breakdown with Mexican nationality being treated as the other while other Central/South American nationalities are co-opted.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Why didn’t you just name this post “Sailer bait”?
April 10th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Uhm… Did you just show up here? As George Yancy notes via UG’s comment, above, the “divide” has always been between white and black, with previously “non-white” folks clamoring to be included in the “white-or-white-enough” category.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
For an example of another white Cuban, see Castro, Fidel.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
john derbyshire has been arguing for the black vs. nonblack dichotomy for a while. also, i have heard obama supporters in chicago’s south side referring to his sister as “white” (she’s half-indonesian).
April 10th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
There’s the old anecdote about Asians in South Africa: Chinese were considered “colored” while Japanese were considered “white” due to Japan being a favored trading partner.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
For our non-creationist readers, let’s not forget that humans originated in Africa, and that all non-Africans are descended from a small number who emigrated from the continent about 100,000 years ago.
Not relevant to the sociological aspect of the dichotomy Matt raises here, but at least it is scientific fact.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
being “White” applies to Hispanics in general if and only if:
- Nothing else is know about their background (i.e. you don’t know their last names, or don’t hear the accent in their voices).
- They are phenotypically white (i.e. Rick Sanchez isn’t a black Cuban like Celia Cruz).
April 10th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
People wanted to be white during the era of “scientific” racism (which coincided with the most brutal manifestations of Imperialism in the late nineteenth century). “White” was an exclusive club, understood to mean Northern (Protestant) European, who were conceived as occupying the top of the hierarchy with all the others ranged in order below. “Whites” were the ones with the gunboats and the heavy industry to produce them. (By some illogical procedure these nordic “whites” were depicted in Anthropology dioramas as looking exactly like idealized Greek statues from the Classical period, as I can remember from visiting the physical Anthropology section of the Museum of Natural History). Slavs and Celts were not admitted to the superior category (except by the racist anthropologist Crawfurd, a Scotsman, who of course, posited that Scots belonged on the top of the pyramid, with “Anglo-Saxons” below them — of course these are all linguistic and not “racial” categories)
April 10th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
To expand on Jon’s point a bit, the classification “honorary white” was extended to Japanese, South Koreans, Taiwanese, and Nationalist Chinese, but not to Communist Chinese. It was all politics.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“”swarthy” Germans, [Ben] Franklin was quite sure, “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can adopt our Complexion.” — Ben Franklin, worrying about non-white immigrants in Pennsylvania.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Link for the quote above.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
in 1998, the new york times published an article arguing this point but looked at interracial marriage data. The Beige and the Black
April 10th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Ethnic identities depend a lot more on a sense of shared experience than on “objective” differences such as skin color, etc. African-American history is unique in this country, and I think that’s part of the reason the category is fairly rigid (and dark-skinned Hispanics and Caribbeans, and African immigrants, seem reluctant to identify with it).
April 10th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
More like “brown” and “non-brown” because that allows for a bit more self-identification.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Matt-
I don’t know if you get around to these comments, and please understand when I ask this question I don’t mean to inflame, but do you seriously consider yourself hispanic? If you weren’t just being glib then that’s pretty awesome…seriously.
I’ve seen many many many people from many ethnicities try to pass for white and even dated a chick who swore she was white when it was pretty clear, at least to me, she wasn’t.
As a dark skinned black who never stood a chance of passing, I was always disappointed with those who felt some unflinching need to conform to an ersatz social strata. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to willingly delude themselves, but FWIW this comes from someone who never had that choice or the benefits that presumably came with it.
But I’ve never once heard a white person in good faith step away from their whiteness. I must ask, in all seriousness, is this something you’ve come to recently? And what is your perception about how your colleagues SEE you, last name not withstanding?
k1
ryanculver.blogspot.com
April 10th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Nevertheless, I think there’s a clear sense in which it strikes people as more intuitive to refer to a half-white, half-Korean indie rock star born in Korea and raised by both parents in New Jersey as “white” than it is to refer to a half-white, half-Kenyan President born in Hawaii and raised by his white mom and grandparents as “white.”
Wow, what an obnoxious statement to make. My kids are half-white and half-Korean-American and they get stupid, sweeping assumptions about their race all the time. I LOVE having to explain to my 8-year-old daughter why some people call her white. Or Chinese. Really does wonders for her self-image.
Call me crazy, but shouldn’t enlightened liberals like yourself not ascribe any ethnicity to anyone? Judge the content, etc.? Or are you just as lazy as Rush et al?
April 10th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Our neighbors to the South are more complex than many seem to recognize. There are people with largely European ancestors; people with a combination of European and Indian ancestors (often called “Latinos” in CA and the Southwest, where they are very prevalent); people with European and African ancestors (eastern Central America, Caribbean, Brazil); people with varying proportions of European, African and Indian ancestors (nations bordering the Caribbean, Brazil). The proportion on non-European characteristics determines how people are treated, with, as Matt notes, African being the most “other.” I dispute that Asians are seen as “white” in this country (given the history of discrimination in CA, for example) but just “more like us” in terms of values. And then there are the “voluntary” and “involuntary” immigrant issues that in large part seem to determine how difficult it is to integrate into the largert culture.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
And it seems quite plausible that more and more Asians and Hispanics will, over time, come to attain “white” status.
I’m not sure whether to regard this as a progressive trend, but I would note that this probably is a regional, not national trend, one that doesn’t reflect Southern border states that well. In Texas, the reverse has historically been true. Through 1900 hispanics were legally considered white, and largely functioned that way politically; it was only the revival of the Alamo story, in the wake of Birth of a Nation and invigorated KKK activity, etc., that hispanics were redesignated as non-whites (culturally and administratively).
April 10th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I think a better point is to be made about historical experiences rather than simple biological categories. Simply put, black Americans have, subconsciously, an awareness of a history, largely because of slavery and subsequent events, especially the Civil War, that is necessarily defined in apposition to the mainstream establishment, which is understood to be white.
Hispanics and (especially) Asians do not carry this history with them; their identity are not identified as being appositional to the majority culture. Asians especially are more prone to adopt largely white cultural memes (as has been the case with me), and not consider their civic interests to be fundamentally differentiated from whites. Thus you see in the affirmative action debate with Asians and whites on one side, blacks and Mexicans on the other, and the Asians being the most vocal against positive discrimination.
It is perhaps interesting to note that a black people from Africa, especially those in higher social stations, are loth to identify with American blacks, because they do not share similar cultural histories. Same case in Britain, with say the blacks from Nigeria being much more reconciled to majority culture than Jamaicans. A Nigerian prince actually played rugby for the England national team.
So again, I don’t think racism is the main factor in this largely cultural discussion.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Now one of the really interesting things is that some poorer Hispanics, especially those with heavy doses of Amerindian blood, identify more strongly with non-white culture.
On another note, it is perhaps instructive that Cubans and Mexicans in the U.S. have been opposite to each other politically, almost vehemently. And I know very few actually Peninsular Spaniards who would willingly identify with American Mexicans.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The opposition of “white” and “hispanic” doesn’t make any sense. One is a vague racial category and the other one is a vague ethnicity. There are white hispanics, black hispanics, mulatto hispanics, mestizo hispanics, and even a few asian hispanics.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
As others have said, ethnicities are really in the eye of the beholder. Like Karen O, I’m 1/2 Korean and 1/2 Polish, and over the years I’ve had most Asians think I’m white, a few Asians think I’m Asian, and the whites fairly split between assuming I’m white or asian. I’d say it’s only been in the last 6 or 7 years that people have been able to correct guess my mixed background with some regularity. Of course, during the course of all of this, my ethnicity has remained the same – it’s only the perception of others that varies. The label people use to describe me reveals more about their views on race/ethnicity than it says anything about me.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
But I’ve never once heard a white person in good faith step away from their whiteness.
Considering the source, I don’t know if you can say it was “in good faith,” but once on the Jerry Springer show I saw a white family where one member said she hated white people. Second family member: “We’re white.” First family member: “No, we’re French.” Second family member: “What do you think French people are?”
April 10th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
In many countries around the world the social system has worked out over long periods of time in such a manner as that the fairest skinned people tend to dominate the upper echelons of society (top political positions, top businesses, to corporate jobs, top positioning in entertainment, etc, etc, etc), while the darker skinned tend to end up nearer the bottom of the social/economic strata.
In the western hemisphere, this can be explained in large part by slavery, a phenomenon that exists far beyond our own borders. In Brazil, darker skinned people dominate the poorer areas, especially the favelas, while entertainers and politicians could easily pass for being white in the European sense – anywhere from almost nordic pale to mediterranean in appearance. Same thing in Mexico. Both of which have long histories of slavery.
But in places like India, the fairest skinned people tend to occupy the highest echelons of society. Indian tv and movie stars tend to be extremely pale compared to most Indians. This extends to the political class in India as well. Look at Indira Gandhi (though the current PM is fairly dark-skinned).
Of course, India has a strong western influence due to being a part of the British Empire for so long.
Unfortunately, the tendency to discriminate against those with darker skin seems to be deeply ingrained in our culture persisting across huge divides in other cultural aspects and persisting over relatively long periods of time, while strong discrimination based on other features tends to fade over time and vary greatly between different cultures.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
. Look at Indira Gandhi (though the current PM is fairly dark-skinned).
you’re whole comment was well worth making, but let me point out that the complexions of the indian PM’s is more a function of region than anything else it seems. indira gandhi’s family are kashmiris, who are very light skinned (though they had resettled in north india proper). her husband was a parsi, who are also light skinned. and her grandchildren are half-italian. so the gandhi family’s complexion seems a straightforward function of geographical origin than class.
though again, you’re overall point is well taken. though skin color seems to matter more in bollywood than in indian politics at this point, where mass populism is more operative.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
But in places like India, the fairest skinned people tend to occupy the highest echelons of society. Indian tv and movie stars tend to be extremely pale compared to most Indians. This extends to the political class in India as well. Look at Indira Gandhi (though the current PM is fairly dark-skinned).
Of course, India has a strong western influence due to being a part of the British Empire for so long.
============================================================
I wouldn’t blame it on western influence, as it seems to mirror the caste system in India that long predates the arrival of the British
April 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Others say it better above, but Matt’s point that “we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ but between ‘black’ and “non-black” shows that Matt needs to read more US history. Black and white has always been the divide. Not to say that ethnic hatreds by whites against Native Americans and Chinese, and against Irish and Italians (once seen as nonwhite, later white) weren’t powerful but instead that blackness has a unique place in U.S. history that is rooted in slavery and that makes black-or-white a basis for identity that is not easily escaped.
Secondly, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the fulcrum of contemporary culture? What got into the bloggers last week?
April 10th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
In many countries around the world the social system has worked out over long periods of time in such a manner as that the fairest skinned people tend to dominate the upper echelons of society
Probably the long-term result of male preference for lighter-skinned women.
While I’m sure that many hispanics will be classified as white, I don’t expect hispanics in general to be considered as a subcategory of ‘white’ (in the way that Irish or Italians are) any time soon. And if I wanted a simple two-category system, I’d go with (NAM and white/asian) rather than (black and non-black).
April 10th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I’d like to re-iterate what many folks have said before me: Latino is not a racial category. The fact that folks are Spanish-speaking tells you very little about their ancestry or place with the rigid racial hierarchies of their respective Latin American societies. Good gods, if you want to meet some crazy racist people, white Cubans/Argentines/Chileans/Brazilians are a good bet. The fact that the descendants of enslaved Africans and Native Americans also speak Spanish does not make for a common “Latino” identity any more than the fact that Black folks in America speak English makes for a common, non-problematic American identity.
What further baffles me is the laudatory tone of this post. First, do you really want to celebrate the coalescing of all identities into a “thank goodness for not being Black” camp? Really? Is that truly representing evolution? Vijay Prashad has a good take on this when he discusses how Asian-Americans have advanced in this country *at the expense of* Blacks. Same with other immigrant groups.
And the hesitance of Caribbean and African immigrants to identify with us derives more from the class privilege of those who immigrate, and the extent to which they’ve imbibed white supremacy via popular culture, than with the lack of commonality of our experience. Do you really think being enslaved in Georgia and being enslaved in San Juan or Rio de Janeiro or Kingston was all that different?
April 10th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
K1 said: But I’ve never once heard a white person in good faith step away from their whiteness.
Because there’s no intimate, social reason to do so in most parts of the US. In Hawaii, on the other hand…
That’s not to say that all of the haoles are running wild denying their (my) haole-ness. But, depending on one’s social group, you see the signs. No difference from one of my (home grown) interns telling me that as a teen, she wished she had been born Japanese, rather than Chinese.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Do you really think being enslaved in Georgia and being enslaved in San Juan or Rio de Janeiro or Kingston was all that different?
My understanding is that it was much worse in the Caribbean for slave, based on average slave life expectancy.
Emphatically, this comment does not mean to imply that things were good for slaves in the ol’ US of A.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Paul, I understand why this would be sensitive to you, but take it easy. Matt was not saying what you think he was saying. Saying that most Americans find something intuitive—which they do in this case—is not saying that they are correct in that intuition. Far from it.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
But I’ve never once heard a white person in good faith step away from their whiteness.
Talk to my generation. A lot of us would walk away if we could. But there are powerful social and economic incentives to keep on playing ball with the dominant culture.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
The Catholics are no longer a solid Democratic block, but they aren’t a solid Republican one, either. Largely for what you mentioned earlier in the post–the increasing amount of progressive Hispanics, who often are Catholic.
Despite the weird play that Obama/Notre Dame “controversy” is getting in the media, over half of catholics voted for Obama.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1022/exit-poll-analysis-religion
Interestingly enough, Obama nearly won the white Catholic vote, too.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
“All of which is to say that there’s a decent chance that we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between “white” and “non-white” but between “black” and “non-black.””
John Derbyshire has been saying that for years.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
“Perhaps the best way to think about this is to recall that many currently “white” ethnic groups—Jews, Italians, Irish, etc.—weren’t always understood as being white.”
Right.
That’s why there’s that famous scene in Gone With the Wind where Scarlett O’Hara’s last name is revealed, and so, as a nonwhite, she is immediately sold into slavery.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
If Geraldo Rivera goes through with his plan to retire to his home in Israel and run for the Knesset, then Matt will be poised to replace him as the most prominent Spanish-surnamed figure in the English-language media.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
“Right.
That’s why there’s that famous scene in Gone With the Wind where Scarlett O’Hara’s last name is revealed, and so, as a nonwhite, she is immediately sold into slavery.”
Wow.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
It’s silly, really, but I would’ve expected Sailer of all people to be a more charitable reader and understand the “ethnic groups as nonwhite” thing. I’ve always been fond, as someone who by various streams is of more or less 100% Iberian Peninsula descent, of the old canard that “Europe ends at the Pyrenees.”
April 10th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Look, this whole Noel Ignatieff / Whiteness Studies racket about “How the Irish/Italians/Jews became white” is just ethnic one-upsmanship among white people competing for moral status against each other by claiming the mantle of victimhood. It ridiculously trivializes what blacks had to deal with.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
“And it seems quite plausible that more and more Asians and Hispanics will, over time, come to attain “white” status.”
Under our current legal system of race discrimination, why would Hispanics want to be reclassified to a less privileged status? They’d lose their affirmative action benefits.
Matt is groping for terms that make sense of the social structure of the U.S., in which Non-Asian Minorities, due to their perpetual average academic and economic underperformance, qualify for affirmative action while whites and Asians do not.
The emerging acronyms are:
Non-Asian Minority — NAM
Whites and Asians — WAA
April 10th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Of course what various non-approved ethnic minorities who have subsequently become more or less approved went through pales in comparison to the experience of black people in America. I tend to walk away from discussions where people start aggressively comparing the relative suffering-degrees of their forebears. But I also believe it’s pretty clear that someone like my mother, who was born in Portugal, was able to come to the US (and take some social hassle for being an immigrant but) without suffering prejudice focused on her ethnic background, and be consciously or unconsciously slotted as “white” by the “white” Americans she knew, and treated as same. Given what the written record has to say about Germans and Irish in the US, I’m pretty sure she would’ve had a markedly different sort of experience if you moved it back a century or two. And, look, Mr. Sailer, since from what I can gather you are in one way or another a student of the (history of the?) science of race, you’re surely aware that at various points in time the “Caucasoid” category has been taken by scientifically minded folk to include ethnic groups (I’m thinking specifically of Arabs and [subcontinent] Indians) that are often colloquially considered nonwhite both by members of those subgroups and the “white mainstream”. “Whiteness” in the sense relevant to this discussion is a phenomenon of social perception and it’s clear that over time it’s also been a moving target.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“Nevertheless, I think there’s a clear sense in which it strikes people as more intuitive to refer to a half-white, half-Korean indie rock star born in Korea and raised by both parents in New Jersey as “white” than it is to refer to a half-white, half-Kenyan President born in Hawaii and raised by his white mom and grandparents as “white.””
Not really. Look at Tiger Woods. Nike wanted him to define himself as simply black, but he thought that was asking him to choose among his ancestors, so he calls himself black and Thai or, when he’s feeling more genealogically expansive, “Caublinasian.”
Moreover, Obama, unlike Woods, was born and raised in Hawaii, where there’s no color line. Obama could have brought the Hawaiian vagueness about race to the mainland, but, instead, he utterly rejected it. About 30% of the children born in his era were mixed race. Judging from pictures of his fifth and eighth grade classes in the early 1970s, about one third of his classmates were not 100% white. He was viewed by his classmates as “just another mixed kid.” And, of course, has no African-American ancestors, so no slaves. His ancestors, on both the white and African sides, likely include slaveowners and slavetraders.
If anybody could have claimed to be multiracial, it was the Hawaiian Obama.
Yet, he spent the first 40 years of his life, as detailed in his autobiography “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” trying to prove himself black enough to be a black leader.
Why? Well, it’s a complicated question, but one obvious answer is that there are big advantages to being considered nominally black in modern America, as the career of the President of the United States demonstrates.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
“…there’s a decent chance that we’re evolving in a direction where the salient divide isn’t between “white” and “non-white” but between “black” and “non-black.””
This is BS. We are moving towards a situation where it does not matter what race or ethnicity you are. The divide will probably be education.
Apart from that let’s stop this thing about “white”. White really means caucasian, which includes groups of people like
people from the Indian subcontinent (Pakistanis, Bangladeshi and Indians) not only caucasian Europeans. The term Latino or Hispanic doesnot refer to an ethnicity or a race, but to people who share cultures based on the culture of Spain/Portugal from the Caribbean, North America, Central America and South America. These people come in “white” (caucasian), native americans and africans plus people from those regions whose heritage includes one, two or three of those heritages.
People like myself, Latinos whose heritage is European (Spain and France)are not considered “white” (caucasian). The correct term in this case for “white” as used in the US is Anglo, meaning non-Latino white.
Anyway, we have to get over this obsession with melanin, as we are all human and humans as DNA studies have shown, started in Africa.
As for me, call me American.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Luo slave traders? Really? Wow. Might want to look a bit further into actual Kenyan history on that one.
Obama’s own account of his childhood in Hawaii does not square up with the whole “Hawaii is a racial paradise where everyone is ambiguously brown” thing that several folks seem to be putting forth. There most certainly are race lines in Hawaii, then and now.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
So, Cesar, the fact of speaking Spanish makes you less white, somehow? But I’m guessing you would never want to be confused for an indio or moreno like me, right (well, morena). You don’t want to interrogate the white supremacy in Latin America at all? Or the way it allows certain kinds of folks to function in America? Or the violence by Chicanos and Mexicanos against Blacks in L.A.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Obama’s own account of his childhood in Hawaii does not square up with the whole “Hawaii is a racial paradise where everyone is ambiguously brown” thing that several folks seem to be putting forth.
Yes, but Obama’s own account of his childhood in Hawaii (and Indonesia) does not square up with his classmates’ accounts. Lots of reporters made the supreme sacrifice of taking expense-account jaunts to Hawaii to interview Obama’s classmates in depth. The picture that has uniformly emerged is that “Dreams from My Father” is distorted.
Interestingly, what has emerged is that the young Barry Soetoro was subjected to racist violence for being black by Indonesian boys, but that got left out of “Dreams.” It’s just too complicated for Obama’s Black-White worldview in which, as the Rev. Lovejoy might say, there are only three races: Black, White, and … Miscellaneous.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
The correct term in this case for “white” as used in the US is Anglo, meaning non-Latino white.
This one always bugged me. I know this term gets used to mean any non-Latino white people, but really the word means “English” or “English-speaking.” Why should an American of Polish, Italian, or German descent be called English?
April 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Medrawt makes a civil point above, but let me try to put the subject in a more illuminating perspective:
There was virtually never any legal discrimination against American citizens based on European nationality of ancestry. The Irish showed up in big cities and were soon on the police force and the city council. There was plenty of social discrimination based on ancestry, but attempts to view, say, blond WASPs’ dislike for redhaired Irishmen from late 20th Century perspectives dominated by simplistic Obama-like Black and White thinking aren’t very useful. Blacks and other non-Europeans were so far out at the fringe of American society that differences among Europeans loomed much larger in daily life. It’s all relative.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
“The correct term in this case for “white” as used in the US is Anglo, meaning non-Latino white.”
When Richard Riordan was mayor of Los Angeles, he always wondered what his IRA grandfather would have thought of him being constantly referred to as “the Anglo mayor.”
It’s all relative. If aliens had invaded during his term of office, he would have been known as “the Earthling mayor.”
April 10th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Incidentally, I tend to present myself as “Portuguese and Puerto Rican”. If I’m in a situation where I feel the need to commit to a race, I almost always go with white because
(a) I’m more Portuguese than PR (both %-wise and upbringing-wise) and Portugese people, pace Steve Sailor, are currently “white”.
(b) My Puerto Rican ancestors were both pale and racist, so I’m guessing there was very little if any intermarriage on their parts.
Personally I’ve never cared for the term “Hispanic” because I think it’s silly and ultimately insulting to collapse an incredibly diverse cultural and ethnic landscape into a single word that can be Othered from the “white mainstream”, but several years ago I decided that the word seemed to be emotionally/politically important and valuable to a lot of “Hispanic” people and even if it didn’t make sense to me I oughtn’t begrudge other people an identity that was satisfying to them. A lot of the internecine sniping on this thread serves as a nice illustration of how the category (a) is poorly defined, understood, and makes no sense when subjected to logical scrutiny (even less sense than any other racial category we use, since as far as I’ve been able to discern they’re all really dumb) (b) thinly papers over a lot of very real racial tensions inside the Spanish-speaking-ancestry community.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
“And it seems quite plausible that more and more Asians and Hispanics will, over time, come to attain “white” status.”
They’re destroying the traditional meaning of bigotry!
April 10th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
One interesting fact is that the interracial / interethnic marriage rates are dropping for Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. That’s probably mostly because their communities have grown so large that they have less daily interaction with people of the opposite sex from other groups.
For example, in Southern California, East Asians, who were widely dispersed in the 1970s, have been consolidating in a few locations, most notably the San Gabriel Valley.
The most important difference between the San Gabriel Valley and the San Fernando Valley in terms of where Asians go is probably that the San Gabriel Valley has many small independent school districts, so Asians can flock to certain districts, such as Arcadia and San Marino, and make sure that high standards are maintained through their political clout. In contrast, the San Fernando Valley is under the massive Los Angeles Unified School District, in which Asians have little clout, so LAUSD standards are below Asian standards.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
So, if we got rid of affirmative action, which makes emphasizing your racial/ethic background into a money-making racket, and also cut way back on immigration, which isolates nonwhites from whites by making their communities so much larger, then yes, over the generations you would see a substantial absorption of Asians into the white community due to intermarriage.
And you would see some of that process for Hispanics, although at a slower rate because there are so many more Hispanics and they don’t go away to college or to grad school as much as Asians.
But continuing massive immigration, along with the goodies provided by affirmative action, makes these scenarios unlikely.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Of course, interracial marriage brings its own tensions, especially because of the big gender gaps, which you can notice just walking down the street and looking couples walk by.
About 3/4ths of the white-Asian marriages in the U.S. in the 2000 Census were white husband – Asian wife. In white-black marriages, the odds were reversed with about 73% being black husband – white wife. This has led to lots of disgruntlement by black women and Asian men left without a spouse due to interracial marriage.
One seeming logical solution would be for black women and Asian men to marry each other. But that’s extremely rare. Among black-Asian marriages, the husband is black about six times as often as the husband is Asian.
My guess is that this is another reason for Asian-Americans in Southern California consolidating in the San Gabriel Valley. If you have an Asian American son, it’s natural to worry about him losing out in the mating market due to too much competition for Asian women from men of other races. So, it would make sense to move to a highly Asian community, such as the San Gabriel Valley, to improve the odds of his finding a wife and presenting you with grandchildren.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Al #7 says: “She [Karen O] looks white. He [Obama] doesn’t.”
Well, hmmm, to my eye she looks half-white and half-Asian, and he looks half-white and half-black. I’m pretty sure that would be my impression if I didn’t know them and had to guess. I guess I’ve known a lot of half-Asian people in real life, and I’ve seen a lot of half-black dudes as a bball fan. What do you think of Shane Battier, Jason Kidd, Jason Farmar, Deron Williams?
April 10th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
John Derbyshire has been saying that for years.
That’s because he’s a blimpish shitbag throwback to the days of Jolly Old Empire.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Actually, he says it because his wife is Chinese and his kids are half-Chinese.
But, who cares about reality when you get a chance to spout hate?
April 10th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
7, 64, do a google image search for “karen o”. How she does her makeup and hair on any given day seems to affect how asian she looks, but anyone who knows a couple of mixed caucasian-asian people would probably be able to so identify her.
As for Obama not looking white, just a few days ago I was looking at a low-res version of the G20 “class photo” and tried to spot Obama. Looking for “one of the black guys” failed totally. Or look at the morph between Bush and Obama.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
66 – I’m sure TMKF meant to say “pedophile”.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Yeah, Obama looks white and he looks black. It’s almost as if he’s mixed-race or something.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
“White mama, black daddy; black baby.Black mama, white daddy; black baby.” – Public Enemy.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
MY’s analysis seems to assume that people will still want to join the all-white country club. Decades earlier, European immigrants – especially Irish, Italians, Jews and Slavs – wanted to be classified as white as a means to economic mobility and to reduce the potential of bigoted violence against them in their new home. Becoming white was the way to become American. However, over the passed few decades this has stopped being true – rich Cubans are known as Cuban-Americans, rich Indians are known as Indian-Americans, etc. African immigrants also tend to do well (or at least their children do). Other groups, such as Arabs, Argentinean and some Asian groups (when my Indian mom first came here, the government labeled her as white due to the lack of an Asian or an Indian label (leading government bureaucrats to write in Indian when there wasn’t an option or just check White when they were feeling lazy), but I, her half-Indian half-white son, was counted as Asian-American in my university’s student body statistics) have gone from being counted legally and socially as white into other groups. Irish-American, Italian-Americans, American Jews, Polish-Americans, etc. are freer now to define themselves more as such and put less emphasis on “white” as an important component of ethnic self-identity. The monopolization of whiteness as the means of socioeconomic mobility in the US is over.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Steve Sailer,
When you say (or imply) that Asian men are too effeminate to compete for white women, are you including South Asians, or just restricting yourself to East Asians?
In my personal experience, I know a lot of South Asian men who managed to land a white wife or girlfriend. Personally, I would be really insulted if you tried to imply that I was too effeminate to deserve to be with white women.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Indian businessmen successfully petitioned the Reagan Administration in 1982 to be reclassified from Caucasian to Asian (which has previously been all-East Asian) so they could benefit from affirmative action on Small Business Administration loans.
From the scientific standpoint, of course, physical anthropologists scoffed. (Cavalli-Sforza’s 1994 magnum opus The History and Geography of Human Genes listed Indians as averaging three times farther from Chinese than from English genetically). But nobody cared because it was all about money.
Young people like Matt have been so indoctrinated by the educational regime about “white privilege” that they don’t even think about the elephant in the living room: affirmative action.
The logic of the current incentive structure is not complicated: If the government is going to continue to give people jobs and money for identifying themselves as something other than white, then lots of people are going to continue to identify themselves as something other than white.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Hector,
The Census Bureau statistics for Asians are dominated by East Asians, not South Asians. There’s no reason to believe that East Asians and South Asians are terribly similar. They’ve just been grouped together by the government since 1982 because South Asian businessmen saw getting reclassified from Caucasian to Asian as a way to game the Small Business Administration’s minority business development low interest loan program’s affirmative action system.
There is some sketchier Census evidence that South Asian men are more likely to outmarry than South Asian women, but South Asians tend to be notoriously restrictive of their womenfolk’s marital choices (e.g., arranged marriages), so there’s not too much that can be drawn from this so far.
I’ve never said or implied that Asian men of any origin tend to be “more effeminate.” You can read what I said in 1997 in my National Review article “Is Love Colorblind?”
http://www.isteve.com/islovecolorblind.htm
Moreover, while I’m sorry you are offended by something I never said, as you may have noticed I’m more interested in understanding how the world works than in subjecting myself to the “protective stupidity” of worrying about who is going to be offended by the facts.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
“Somewhat along these lines, yesterday I was watching Rick Sanchez on CNN, who I’d always thought of as just another white guy on TV, talking about Bobby Rush’s visit to Cuba and I suddenly realized that Sanchez is a Spanish name and he must be Cuban.”
Matt’s really out of touch. The overall trend is in the exact opposite direction away from Hispanics blurring in with the white population.
(But that’s representative of the Northeastern elite in general. They have no clue what’s happening in America demographically.)
The trend in recent decades has been for Hispanics to become increasingly phenotypically and culturally distinct. I attended an illegal immigrants’ rally in LA in 2006, and the average man there was about 5′4″ and much more Amerindian-looking than the Mexican-Americans I had grown up with. California now has hundreds of thousands of “Hispanics” who don’t even speak Spanish — they speak Mixtec or other Amerindian languages.
April 11th, 2009 at 1:33 am
Sanchez was one of the local news anchors in Miami when I was growing up. I think he grew up in Hialeah, which is a very Cuban suburb of Miami.
One seeming logical solution would be for black women and Asian men to marry each other. But that’s extremely rare.
It’s imperative that a joke about penis size follow this statement.
April 11th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Matt you are a White Jew, so knock it off!
April 11th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Interestingly, both you guys might pass for ‘Anglo’ down here in Texas.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Tea-colored world, sooner or later. And then we won’t have to listen to or read all this.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Cameron Diaz is half-cuban as well.
On that same topic, Charlie Sheen was born Carlos Estévez, with his brother Emilio keeping the family name. Carlos/Charlie took his father’s stage name of Sheen, but Martin Sheen was born Ramon Estévez.
I remember watching an interview with Martin Sheen and he was telling a story about one of his famous sons as a kid and the interviewer asked, “oh, you mean Charlie?” and he jokingly responded, “no, the Hispanic one” (although neither is more or less Hispanic than the other).
Two of my best friends are Cuban, and although they both are fair skinned and blue-eyed, the one with the Spanish first and surname is referred as being Hispanic by many people, but the actor who adopted a non-Spanish stage name has never once been called Hispanic by anyone. But, its important to realize that Hispanics can be of any race. There are white hispanics, black hispanics, and all shades in between.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Although I think this thread is just about dead, I’ll throw an extra 2 cents in with anecdotes from the LA and Hawaii …ah, er, “pot”.
- ‘Way back in the ’80’s, my wife and I drove down to Huntington Park, which had become a core of the new LA Latino shopping area, while in search of different music stores. I can safely say there wasn’t another Anglo in sight, yet the Latina high school age clerks in la tienda música spoke English like they were born to it.
- Hawaii plantation owners hired quite a few Portuguese from the Azores back in the day. Nowadays, they count as “local”, thanks to the plantation owners having culled them out from the haoles and thrown them in with the Polynesians and Asians in the company housing.
April 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am
There is no Hispanic “race”. The term “Hispanic” is the name of a language group that has come to be identified with Amerindians, Creoles, or Mestizos.
A friend of ours (from Paris) is part-Norman French and part Polynesian. When she went to enroll her child in NYC public school they asked, would you mind if we classify you as “hispanic”?
April 11th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
When you include other races as “white” you deny their rights to due process as a distinct class. Hernandez v. Texas, (1954.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
How are you. Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
I am from Qatar and too poorly know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Getmeticket is your one stop resource for flights, airfare, and cheap airline tickets to meet all your travel needs.”
Thanks
. Wendy.