Kamala, Mitch and America's Next Racial Blending
It was an inevitable social transition
The marriage of Kamala Harris’s parents (pictured above) was legal in California in 1963 but not in seventeen other States, including Virginia, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. It took until 1967 for Loving vs. Virginia to reach the Supreme Court, where a progressive court nullified all remaining state-level anti-miscegenation laws.
Most older Americans are aware of how controversial interracial marriage was up until very recently. Pew Research reminds us that in 1990, for example, 63% of adults opposed a close relative marrying a black person.1 In Shyamala’s natal world of Chennai, India, marrying a non-Indian was so anathema that she civilly executed the marriage in the U.S. before announcing it to her parents. [I can’t believe that was a pleasant, brahminical conversation, but they accepted her decision].
It seems ‘obvious’ to many of us that marriages between whites/blacks or whites/Asians were controversial moves not too long ago. Yet, it astonishes me how few educated Americans (older or younger) ever learned in school that Anglo-Saxon elites once regarded some of America’s most sizeable European immigrant populations as different “races " and discussed them in visually coded, nasty, stigmatic terms.
The Spanish.
The Italians.
The Greeks.
The Eastern European.
When my grandmother was born (1906), calling someone “swarthy” was one of the most common racially encoded terms that rendered an otherwise ‘white’ person subordinate to the Anglo-Saxon elite and yet not as stigmatized as “black” or “negro” or the “Indian” (i.e., first nations).
Here is how Brent Staples of the New York Times neatly summarizes this forgotten era -
As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.2
In the year my maternal grandmother was born, intermarriage between Anglo-Saxons and any of the above ethnic groups was not only scandalous, it would have required a complete elopement and estrangement to pull off. I’m sure it happened somewhere because America excels at using geography to permit escape from the most conservative of behavior patterns.
Just run. Privacy beliefs will protect you.
Racism, Skin Color, and Culture
Scottsdale, Arizona, is full of wealthy white people desperately seeking brown skin tone. There is abundant evidence establishing this collective desire if you visit the place. But I submit a photo of former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake as my primary evidence:
The dude is serious about his tan, right? I wonder if it’s a spray job. Never mind.
Here’s the headshot for Senator Patty Murray of sunless Washington State for “contrast.”
Casual American observers would agree that Jeff is more “tan” than Patty Murray. Correct me in the comments if you can’t see the difference.
No human has pure white skin. But, the difference between these two headshots is not accidental perception. We have learned to notice these tiny differences in Caucasian skin tone.
… but NOT your dog.
And, yet again, let us learn from the dogs.
Why do I say this?
Well, when I use a professional color picker tool on these two headshots, the chins of BOTH Senators exhibit tiny variations in the following color -
Hex Code: EFAE99
Yes. Yes, PINK is the empirical ‘color’ of white people. Not anything close to white. And white people are not white. Color is perfectly quantifiable in hexadecimal code. Digital photographers and graphic designers live and breathe these precise codes.
For reference, this is pure white.:
Hex Code: #FFFFFF
These two colors share only one Hex code digit. Pink is not white.
I'm dragging you through this smartass commentary not to cause immediate debate but rather to break through the illusion that 'perceived skin color’ is remotely objective. We interpret the skin color of humans based on tiny variations we learn to notice and on a more critical learned desire to place strangers from strange cultural worlds into a status pecking order based on often barely perceptible variations.
For example, Jeff Flake is clearly inferior because he is over-tanned AND from Scottsdale. The latter context tells me his slightly different pink skin is a sign of extreme moral turpitude.
I’m not joking. I hate Scottsdale. But at least I’m honest.
As in the above satire, assessing skin color is fundamentally a cultural act in which we crudely predict behavior (or moral worth) by selectively calling out even minor variations based on social context.
Racism, sadly, is the false causal linking of ‘selectively’ perceived skin color variation and imputed behavior patterns. The linkage is learned, arbitrary, and based on where we stand in various status hierarchies.
Humans have always used glib, superficial perceptions of “skin color and texture” to predict a stranger's behavior. We’re lazy social analysts. Racism, in this sense, is an ancient human laziness tied to our extremely sensitive retinas, our big brains, and our historical aversion to the cultural stranger.
The same brain that can detect Jeff Flake’s ‘tan’ is the same one that castigated the swarthy Spanish-American as morally less (and this next part is critical) than even a tan Anglo-Saxon farmer in the early 1900s. And it’s the same brain that can discount your Asian or Black colleague’s cultural origins after years of working with them. You simply stopped caring about the visual difference others “see.”
As Italian-Americans, Spanish-Americans, Greek-Americans, and others integrated into the middle class after World War II, suddenly, class behavior within Euro-America overcame racialized group distinctions for these groups (yet not for others). As these groups became well-represented in business and middle-class life, they also became politicians. With elite social power, they became fully white, where tiny variations in pink just got overlooked. Elites stopped looking for visual differences they once noticed.
But not my maternal grandmother! Sigh…
The New Era of Racial Blending Was Inevitable
It was only a matter of time before the social mobility of Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians (from less educated working classes to the middle class) yielded in the 21st century what we saw with Italians, Eastern Europeans, and others in the 20th century: middle-class integration.
No better example of this trend exists than what has appeared from the conservative side of the political spectrum, where some might least expect interracial dating, let alone marriage, to occur.
Mitch McConnell says it well in a recent interview with People magazine:
“People remark that I’m in a mixed marriage. I don’t see it that way," he said, according to TIME. "In my first marriage, I married a liberal. Now that was a mixed marriage. With Elaine, she and I understand one another.3
To some extent, Mitch confesses that lifestyle preferences (e.g., career path and political ideology) are simply more important than racial ones. In a country like ours with incredible lifestyle fragmentation (think hundreds of thousands of distinct ways of living), finding a soulmate is probably much harder than ever before, increasing the need to look across racial and ethnic lines your parents never dared to cross. You’ll simply have more lifestyle endogenous choices if you’re not bigoted.
Type A post-grad educated professionals in publicly exposed Beltway careers form a tiny pool of lifestyle-similar mates. Being racist for a divorcee like Mitch was illogical in the 1990s and today (unless you are asexual). At least my Spockish brain sees it this way.
The current % of heterosexual married couples in the U.S. that are interracial is 19% and growing. But the rate of interracial coupling is what we should be watching. 30% is crazy high per historical norms.4
Yet, there is an internal status hierarchy within interracial marriages that we should acknowledge. It’s NOT a Quaker meeting circle by any means.
The dominant, interracial pairing by a magnitude of 3x vs. the second most prevalent pairing are marriages between whites and Hispanics. 42% of interracial marriages come from this cultural pairing.
11% of interracial marriages today involve whites and blacks, which is historically unprecedented and impressive (if blurring all these boundaries is a sign of progress to you).
As America becomes more Latino and Asian and more lifestyle fragmented, I think that the traditional Census race categories (excluding Blacks and Native Americans) will become more and more meaningless.
Marriage is the tipping point of the racial blending trend we are experiencing in America. Just follow the logic of copulation with me here.
The most important thing that interracial marriage and coupling yields is multiracial children, also a rapidly growing cohort in America that will grow for decades to come.
[The above chart reveals why Gregg Abbott and his buddies are so incredibly panicked]
Kamala Harris is America’s second multiracial presidential candidate. It’s incredible how few journalists connect the Census data to Barack Obama and Kamala Harris and how few point out the emergence of this massive social trend.
While journalists continue to pigeonhole multiracial adults into one racial box at a time, these individuals do not generally see themselves this way at all. They see themselves as modern individuals, living beyond the color caste hierarchy.
Kamala and Barack embody a racially blended American future in which new perceived rankings will occur but not the ones from the past. And the youth of America look more like Kamala than ever before. Kamala is the new normal, so to speak, as we ‘pinkies’ recede demographically.
I hope you’re OK with this trend. It’s completely unstoppable at this point and extremely American.
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https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
https://people.com/all-about-mitch-mcconnell-elaine-chao-marriage-7965724
Same-sex couples have a much higher rate of interracial coupling and marriage, again, because of the logic of a tiny lifestyle pool. You would be crazy to be a racist gay person. Yet, they do exist! I have met at least one!
As a fellow Hispanic born in the 90s, I've anticipated my demographic itching to "white" the same way Italians did a century ago. When I mentioned this to classmates back in college, I was called white supremacist.
I stand by it. Race and ethnic markers in an increasingly globalized world will make less and less sense. I'll keep this in mind when I see how my future grandkids characterize themselves.
If multiracial people increase as population would they adopt the anti racists ideals "white" people do?Because racism is sth ppl have to be educated out of,but some people only apply threat to the majority in America