Author Ta-Nehisi Coates got some pushback in the New York Times over the weekend in a column which is making the rounds on facebook and twitter, “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power,” by Thomas Chatterton Williams.
After discussing the “Sonderweg,” the German perception of the “special path” that led to Hitler, and the almost passive view of their past as an unavoidable fate, Williams describes the emerging view among activists and others, of white supremacy as a primordial American original sin, that has dictated all of American history, and, invariably, our future as well, in an American Sonderweg. Williams continues:
I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring. . . .
However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.
Now, every now and again one reads about the path that non-WASP groups took from being “not white” to being considered “white” as they integrated into mainstream American life: the Irish, Jews, Italians, and so on were each in turn considered “not white.” And even now, various Asian immigrant groups are, if not necessarily deemed “white,” then deemed “not a minority” in various forms of beancounting.
I am also reminded of one of my son’s science fiction books — apologies for not remembering the specific book — in which everyone all pretty much was olive-skinned, the result of generations and generations of intermarriage.
And back in the spring, Iowa Representative Steve King came under harsh criticism for a comment that was taken as suggesting he wanted America to be all-white. The actual quote (from which his opponents dropped the first clause):
If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same.
What are the statistics? Will we eventually find ourselves in a future where everyone, except for new immigrants, has mixed-race ancestry?
As of 2015, according to Pew, 17% of new marriages were intermarriages, defined as marrying someone of a different race, or a a Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic (that is, acknowledging that, despite the Experts’ declaration that “Hispanic” is an ethic group, most Hispanics themselves don’t see it that way — Pew finds that only about 20% of Hispanics agree that this is an ethnic classification). But the percentages intermarrying vary sharply by racial group and by sex — see this Pew chart:
Despite these high rates, Pew nonetheless reports that only 6.9% of Americans are actually multiracial, based on their self-reporting of parents’ or grandparents’ races, and only 1.4% of Americans consider themselves multiracial — that is, the remainder, despite actually having ancestry of multiple races, identify themselves only a a single race — e.g., men and women like Barack Obama himself, who defined himself by his absent father’s race, because that was how society defined him. Even in more “enlightened” times, one reads Sunday human-interest articles in the Tribune of women writing about “what it’s like, as a white woman, to raise a black child” rather than “a multiracial child.” At the same time, the percentage of babies born who are multiracial is much higher, at 10% of the population. Yet this percentage is itself significantly lower than that of the percent of new marriages. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that in the case of unmarried women of all races who have children, it’s far more likely that a man of the same race has fathered their children — after all, intermarriage itself is more prevalent among the educated, again according to Pew. The gaps in intermarriage between men and women are also striking: for blacks this has long been explained by middle-class black men marrying white women as a sign of upward mobility, and black women lamenting that the reduced number of marriageable men causes them to be unable to marry. Regarding Asian men, I don’t know — one doesn’t read much about single Asian men unable to find spouses — is this statistic distorted by the growing number of Asian men coming here on H1-B visas and returning back home to marry?
But in any case, I look at these statistics and ponder the future of race in America.
Coates and Spencer agree that race is immutable and all-important.
Intermarriers disagree.
Given these statistics, is King right? If, each generation, 10% of whites marry other races, then in 10 generations, only a third of that original group’s descendants would remain white, and the large majority of the population would be multiracial. If intermarriage rates increase to the point where one marries within one’s race only to the extent it’s statistically likely to do so, given the population mix, this would happen all the sooner. And all of our present-day beancounting about who’s what, and which racial group is the largest, would seem laughable to future generations.
Or will there be a peak of intermarriage, with the middle/upper middle class intermarrying as they please, and the immobile poor being locked into their racial groups? And will the emerging “wokeness” mean a push-back on intermarriage?
Pew has one last chart of interest: drilling down on the types of intermarriages:
In other words, nearly half of intermarriages are whites marrying Hispanics, cases similar to that of a friend in college who revealed he had a special scholarship for minorities, white as he appeared to be, because, while Dad was Polish, Mom had a Spanish surname. (I remember that precisely. It wasn’t “because I’m Hispanic,” but “because my mom has a Spanish surname.”) Raised in a thoroughly middle class and somewhat intellectual family (Dad was a teacher at a private high school), you’d expect that he would, like generations before him, “melted” and think of Hispanicness as more of an ancestry no differently than one might say, “I’m half-German,” but, funny thing is, his name is distinctive enough that he’s google-able, and he turns out to have become a hot-shot lawyer for a top progressive NGO, and he uses his full name, that is, with his middle name, in his professional biography and writing, and, oddly, it appears that he only recently added the middle name — that is, older publications are without the middle name/Hispanic identity marker.
I started this post last night thinking that there was something clever to be said about these two issues, and got a bit into the weeds on Pew data and the like, so I’ll leave this with the usual question: readers, what do you think?
Image from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/en/hands-life-swirl-interracial-family-1950980/
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