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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, \u201cHow Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power<\/a>,\u201d by Thomas Chatterton Williams.<\/p>\n After discussing the \u201cSonderweg,\u201d the German perception of the \u201cspecial path\u201d 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. \u00a0Williams continues:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race \u2014 specifically the specialness of whiteness \u2014 that white supremacist thinkers cherish.<\/p>\n This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates\u2019s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist \u201cwoke\u201d 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 \u201ctalisman,\u201d an \u201camulet\u201d of \u201celdritch energies\u201d that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a \u201cmeta-biological force,\u201d 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. . . .<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, every now and again one reads about the path that non-WASP groups took from being \u201cnot white\u201d to being considered \u201cwhite\u201d as they integrated into mainstream American life: \u00a0the Irish, Jews, Italians, and so on were each in turn considered \u201cnot white.\u201d \u00a0And even now, various Asian immigrant groups are, if not necessarily deemed \u201cwhite,\u201d then deemed \u201cnot a minority\u201d in various forms of beancounting.<\/p>\n I am also reminded of one of my son\u2019s science fiction books \u2014 apologies for not remembering the specific book \u2014 in which everyone all pretty much was olive-skinned, the result of generations and generations of intermarriage.<\/p>\n And back in the spring, Iowa Representative Steve King came under harsh criticism<\/a> for a comment that was taken as suggesting he wanted America to be all-white. \u00a0The actual quote (from which his opponents dropped the first clause):<\/p>\n If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I\u2019d like to see an America that\u2019s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What are the statistics? \u00a0Will we eventually find ourselves in a future where everyone, except for new immigrants, has mixed-race ancestry?<\/p>\n As of 2015, according to Pew<\/a>, 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\u2019 declaration that \u201cHispanic\u201d is an ethic group, most Hispanics themselves don\u2019t see it that way \u2014 Pew finds<\/a> that only about 20% of Hispanics agree that this is an ethnic classification). \u00a0But the percentages intermarrying vary sharply by racial group and by sex \u2014 see this Pew chart:<\/p>\n Despite these high rates, Pew nonetheless reports<\/a> that only 6.9% of Americans are actually multiracial, based on their self-reporting of parents\u2019 or grandparents\u2019 races, and only 1.4% of Americans consider themselves multiracial \u2014 that is, the remainder, despite actually having ancestry of multiple races, identify themselves only a a single race \u2014 e.g., men and women like Barack Obama himself, who defined himself by his absent father\u2019s race, because that was how society defined him.\u00a0\u00a0Even in more \u201cenlightened\u201d times, one reads Sunday human-interest articles in the Tribune of women writing about \u201cwhat it\u2019s like, as a white woman, to raise a black child\u201d rather than \u201ca multiracial child.\u201d \u00a0At the same time, the percentage of babies born who are multiracial is much higher, at 10% of the population. \u00a0Yet this percentage is itself significantly lower than that of the percent of new marriages. \u00a0The only explanation that makes sense to me is that in the case of unmarried\u00a0women of all races who have children, it\u2019s far more likely that a man of the same race has fathered their children \u2014 after all, intermarriage itself is more prevalent among the educated, again according to Pew<\/a>. \u00a0The gaps in intermarriage between men and women are also striking: \u00a0for 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. \u00a0Regarding Asian men, I don\u2019t know \u2014 one doesn\u2019t read much about single Asian men unable to find spouses \u2014 is this statistic distorted by the growing number of Asian men coming here on H1-B visas and returning back home to marry?<\/p>\n But in any case, I look at these statistics and ponder the future of race in America.<\/p>\n Coates and Spencer agree that race is immutable and all-important.<\/p>\n Intermarriers disagree.<\/p>\n Given these statistics,\u00a0is King right? \u00a0If, each generation, 10% of whites marry other races, then in 10 generations, only a third of that original group\u2019s descendants would remain white, and the large majority of the population would be multiracial. \u00a0If intermarriage rates increase to the point where one marries within one\u2019s race only to the extent it\u2019s statistically likely to do so, given the population mix, this would happen all the sooner. \u00a0And all of our present-day beancounting about who\u2019s what, and which racial group is the largest, would seem laughable to future generations.<\/p>\n 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? \u00a0And will the emerging\u00a0\u201cwokeness\u201d mean a push-back on intermarriage?<\/p>\n Pew has one last chart of interest: \u00a0drilling down on the types of intermarriages:<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0(I remember that precisely. \u00a0It wasn\u2019t \u201cbecause I\u2019m Hispanic,\u201d but \u201cbecause my mom has a Spanish surname.\u201d) \u00a0Raised in a thoroughly middle class and somewhat intellectual family\u00a0(Dad was a teacher at a private high school), you\u2019d expect that he would, like generations before him, \u201cmelted\u201d and think of Hispanicness as more of an ancestry no differently than one might say, \u201cI\u2019m half-German,\u201d but, funny thing is, his name is distinctive enough that he\u2019s 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 \u2014 that is, older publications are without the middle name\/Hispanic identity marker.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll leave this with the usual question: \u00a0readers, what do you think?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image from Pixabay: \u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/hands-life-swirl-interracial-family-1950980\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, \u201cHow Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power,\u201d by Thomas Chatterton Williams. After discussing the \u201cSonderweg,\u201d the German perception of the \u201cspecial path\u201d that led to Hitler, and the almost passive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":7448,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[754],"class_list":["post-7447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-intermarriage"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"http:\/\/www.pewsocialtrends.org\/2017\/05\/18\/intermarriage-in-the-u-s-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia\/\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2017\/10\/Pew-3.jpg\")
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