Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Catholic
Politics and Religion
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Intermarriage, and the Future of Whiteness

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Intermarriage, and the Future of Whiteness

Last updated on: October 9, 2017 at 10:20 am by Jane the Actuary

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Intermarriage, and the Future of Whiteness 2017-10-09T10:20:53-06:00 Jane the Actuary

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

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:

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/intermarriage-in-the-u-s-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/

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:

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/intermarriage-in-the-u-s-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/pst_2017-05-15-intermarriage-00-00/

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/

Uncategorized

intermarriage

Previous Post

October 7, 2017

A "stay at home mom" observation

Next Post

October 9, 2017 About those "soda tax" commercials

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Actuarial/Retirement Issues Politics Uncategorized

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 December 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 August 2021 June 2021 April 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the king who arranged for Hezekiah's scribes to compile additional Proverbs?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jeroboam Hezekiah Ahab Solomon