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.
