The Washington Post reports that last year, for the first time, a very slight majority of the babies born in this country were not white. I understand that articles like this are going to make some white people uncomfortable. I don’t have entirely unmixed feelings about it myself, despite the fact that I have no tribal allegiance to my ‘race’ and have chosen to live much of my adult like in minority-majority communities. Still, there’s a small part of me who doesn’t like that “people like me” are going to be less numerous. Overall, I’d prefer to live in a more racially mixed country because I think familiarity breeds tolerance, and I’m tired of all the racial hatred I see every day. But I recognize that some white folks aren’t going to be so welcoming of our new demographics, particularly those who stand to lose, rather than gain, politically from those changes. Of course, most of these folks are too respectable to admit their true feelings. Instead, we get misdirection like this from the National Review’s Roger Clegg:
So says the headline in the Washington Post this morning. And one thing that an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic United States cannot have is a system in which its institutions treat people differently according to skin color and what country someone’s ancestors came from — where, for example, public universities and government contracting officials give preferential treatment to some and discriminate against others on the basis of race and ethnicity. Such division was never a good idea and is now simply untenable. E pluribus unum — now more than ever.
Try and see if you can construct the logic employed here by Mr. Clegg. Because less than half of the babies born here last year were white, there is now no reason to have any kind of preferential treatment for groups who have suffered from centuries of discrimination. It’s not as if the majority of babies are now black, or Latino, and a strong plurality remain white. While arguments can be made against the continuation of Affirmative Action policies, this demographic news has no logical connection to those arguments. Furthermore, Mr. Clegg says that those policies “were never a good idea.” So, a white majority treated blacks as a race for 400 years and then decided it would be a bad idea to treat them as a race as soon as it involved compensating them in any way for their mistreatment. That’s very convenient.
I guess 40 acres and a mule was supposed to be good enough. Too bad that most folks didn’t even get that.
RIP, Donna.
This has long been the nightmare scenario that the anti-abortionists expected their efforts to preclude. It was always about white babies and white people in this US remaining the majority. Fortunately, 20th Century history deprived them of the ability to state their true agenda and they had to settle for the “life at conception” claptrap. Their latest War On Women will further the trend they sought to reverse as it will disproportionately impact women of color.
Well, the entertainment value of watching the slowly developing collective freakout amongst the fear-filled, closet bigots is priceless.
Guess we can look forward to another bump in gun and ammo sales and concealed carry permits among all those “Real Americans”.
speaking of which, shouldn’t gun and ammo manufacturers be some of Obama’s biggest bundlers?
What exactly is “white” in this context? Speaking from personal experience, within living memory, there were plenty of “whites” in this country who didn’t believe Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, eastern Europeans, the French or Spaniards, qualified as “white” in any way that mattered—– come to that, they didn’t have a high opinion of Swedes or Norwegians. The sooner we can get away from any versions of the 19th century belief that there is a “white race” with special qualities, the better.
And let’s stop making projections of demographics with the assumption that 30 or 50 or 100 years from now, people will be using the same racial/ethnic categories to define themselves and others as are used today—- and which, regardless of modifications, are largely the categories of 60 or 100 years ago. Let’s hope our descendants are smarter and better than we and our ancestors when it comes to this.
Or things could end up as Ursula K. LeGuinn once suggested.
Clegg’s logic is not good, but I think there is a kernel of truth to what he says, even though he expresses it badly.
It’s not like I just became aware of the controversy around affirmative action, but it’s one of those things that I’ve tended to look at as an insoluble conundrum, and therefore I never thought that deeply about it.
But your statement that affirmative action “involved compensating them … for their mistreatment”, jarred something in my mind. My understanding was not that affirmative action was a compensation for mistreatment, but that it was a leg up for people who are socially and economically disadvantaged. And the cause of that disadvantage was largely linked to race and gender.
The question I have is whether the CAUSE of the disadvantage is really relevant. It seems to me that what is really relevant is simply the FACT of disadvantage. And if it’s the fact of it, then race and gender are secondary. The fact of disadvantage is pretty much measurable for a given person.
So, affirmative action is a good idea, but the criterion should be disadvantage, not race. In other words, disadvantaged minorities should get it, not because they are minorities but because they are disadvantaged. And disadvantaged whites should get it too. Just as there is no racial criterion for unemployment insurance or Medicaid, for exampl
Whether deliberate or not, there is a divide and conquer effect going on here. There are a lot of disadvantaged white people in this country, and a lot of them vote Republican because of this.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying affirmative action should be cut back, I’m saying it should be expanded. And I’m not denying that there are particular racial and gender aspects (discirimination) to disadvantage. But I am saying that disadvantage is where you find it, and can be defined by objective criteria.