Kelefa Sanneh wades through Rich Benjamin’s, Searching for Whitopia; Nell Irvin Painter’s, The History of White People; David Roediger’s, How Race Survived U.S. History and Christian Lander’s, Stuff White People Like [website] to wonder in a New Yorker essay, Is white the new black? This conclusion should make you want to read the entire article:
Yes, whiteness is a social construct, and not (as race scientists used to think) a biological essence—but then so, too, is every collective identity. It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be.
Demographers predict that, sometime before the middle of this century, non-Hispanic white people will cease to be a majority in America. This doesn’t mean that there will be a white “minority”—whites will continue to be the country’s most populous racial group for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t mean that white is the new black—the two races have never been symmetrical, and never will be. And it doesn’t mean that whiteness is innocent of history—you can’t tell the story of whiteness (or, for that matter, blackness) without talking about racism. But, if the old race theory was brutally reductive, there is something reductive, too, about the idea that whiteness, for all its paradoxes, isn’t real. The history of human culture is the history of forgeries that become genuine, categories that people make and cannot simply unmake. So we should probably stop thinking of whiteness as an error, and start thinking of it, instead, as a work in progress. Historians have sometimes framed the treacherous history of whiteness as the slow death of an idea. Perhaps it’s time we start viewing it, instead, as the slow birth of a people.
While on the topic, Cato’s Gene Healy says that demography is destiny for the GOP, which doesn’t bode well for them in the century ahead. But:
[H]ere’s an interesting fact: Recent Census Bureau figures predict that the working-age population will be 55 percent minority by midcentury. It may be hard to imagine the Tea Party movement becoming a Rainbow Coalition. But it’s even harder to believe that minority voters will enjoy paying for the (mostly white) baby boomers’ retirement and health care while they’re working to support their own families.
The looming entitlement crisis may scramble existing political coalitions, with traditional GOP constituencies becoming even more resistant to cuts, while Democratic ones begin to resist paying the freight.
Adam Serwer answers:
We won’t be colorblind, but our understanding of who represents a racial “other” will be very different, and I think it’s likely that it will be more tied to class than ever before. As a result, I don’t think a browner America will have a problem with “paying for the mostly white baby boomers’ retirement and health care” because there won’t be as many cultural barriers to identifying with those retiring baby boomers as Healy seems to think there are today.
At the same time, it is also possible that “traditional Democratic constituencies” may be more friendly to small-government ideas than they are now, but that won’t be because of racial rivalry — it will be because that rivalry has diminished.
That via Matthew Yglesias, who adds:
it’s probably mistaken to see white/non-white as the primary axis of race in the United States rather than black/non-black. At various points in time in American history, Irish people and southern and eastern europeans have been defined as non-white. My guess is that in the future the vast majority of people descended from immigrants from Asia or Latin America will be seen as white. In part that will be because of high intermarriage rates, and in part it will simply reflect the fact that the boundaries of whiteness have always been porous in America.
More on Painter’s The History of White People from NPR and Stephen Colbert. Benjamin discusses Searching for Whitopia at a DC bookstore on Book TV. Excerpts from Roediger discussing How Race Survived U.S. History in an Ohio State lecture last year. Lander describes the meaning and genesis of the phenomenal success of Stuff White People Like at an LSE lecture last fall.
LATER — More links, from reader DLS:
I saw your “whiteness” (NW European-ness) article on TMV. If you didn’t see this the last time race became a subject on TMV (prior to suppression of reader comments), here is a good source plus another additional book recommendation…
Cavalli-Sforza is the best source [the cover picture on the first book is itself a wonder]: The History and Geography of Human Genes; Genes, Peoples, and Languages; The Great Human Diasporas: The History Of Diversity and Evolution; and The History of Everyone and Everything.
Olson’s book is also good, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins.
Thanks D!
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