See other Editorial Articles
Title: Maybe We Can All Get Along—But Not Because Of Interracial Marriage
Source:
Vdare
URL Source: [None]
Published: May 7, 2007
Author: Steve Sailer
Post Date: 2007-05-09 22:46:00 by Tauzero
Keywords: None
Views: 187
Comments: 11
By Steve Sailer The Los Angeles Times editorialized on April 30: "For California's teenagers and young adults, the answer to Rodney King's question is a definite yes: We can all get along. Race and ethnicity, according to a new survey of Californians ages 16 to 22, are far less significant to this generation than to any in the past." LAT to peasants: Pay no attention to those brown v. black race riots behind the curtain in LA high schools and jails! [VDARE.COM NOTE: The cell phone survey is here: California Dreamers: A Public Opinion Portrait Of The Most Diverse Generation The Nation Has Known, New American Media is conglomeration of ethnic journalists.] The LAT continued: "Not only are young people encouragingly unconcerned about the skin color or nationality of others, they don't think of themselves much that way, either. When asked the most significant aspects of their identity, they chose music and fashion. Their tribes? Punk-rock skaters, hip-hop activists, salseros." Well, okay … but didn't anybody at the LA Times notice that punk-rock skaters (white), hip-hop activists (black), and salseros (Latino, I presume) are almost ethnically exclusive categories? Indeed, in my three decades of living in LA, I've never even heard the term "salsero" before. That shows how culturally unified LA is. Granted, I'm an old fogey—but, according to Google, this is the first time "salseros" has ever appeared in the L.A. Times! The LAT continues, somewhat credulously: "The survey, sponsored by New America Media, found dramatically liberal attitudes when it comes to the issue of getting along. Two-thirds say they have dated someone of another ethnicity, and a whopping 87% say they would marry or have a life partner of a different race." Maybe. Or maybe “Generation Tolerant” is simply “Generation Politically Correct”—intimidated from its early youth by the Baby Boom refugee radicals who now infest the education industry. This obsession with interracial marriage reflects the common assumption among white pundits that, by generating multiracial individuals with family ties across racial lines, it will allow America finally to "transcend race." Yet, some unexpected things have been happening recently on the intermarriage front. Hence this press release from Ohio State, summarizing a February 2007 article in American Sociological Review: "Immigration played a key role in unprecedented declines in interracial and inter-ethnic marriage in the United States during the 1990s, according to a new sociological study. The findings, published in ‘Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage,’ suggest that the growing number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants to the United States has led to more marriages within these groups, and fewer marriages between members of these groups and whites." This trend has been visible for some time in Southern California. Asians used to be widely dispersed all over the suburbs, and thus tended to marry the whites around them. Now, however, not only are there more Asians, but they tend to cluster in the San Gabriel Valley. So you see a higher proportion of Asian-Asian couples than you did a quarter of a century ago. This has obvious implications for assimilation. Hence this: "The share of Americans who identify themselves as multiracial has shrunk this decade, an unexpected trend in an increasingly diverse nation. About 1.9% of the people checked off more than one race in a 2005 Census Bureau survey of 3 million households, a meaningful decline from two surveys in 2000." (Fewer Americans call themselves multiracial, by Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY, May 4, 2007) It's not clear why people have become less like to identify as multiracial, but it's striking that this has happened. As biographical accounts about people of multiracial backgrounds accumulate, the less confidence we should feel in making simple presumptions about how mixed descent will impact their views on race. Some people of diverse ancestries do indeed "transcend race," as Ward Connerly's life story Connerly first came to national renown in 1996 as the leader of the successful campaign for California's Proposition 209, the initiative authored by Thomas Wood and Glynn Custred to outlaw racial preferences a.k.a. quotas. Connerly explained his complex family tree to me in 2003: "My maternal grandmother was half Irish and half Choctaw Indian. My maternal grandfather was white of French descent. My paternal grandmother was part Irish and part American Indian and my paternal grandfather was of African descent. My grandchildren are all of me and their Irish grandmother, and two of the four are all of that and are partly of Vietnamese descent as well." This background has helped inspire Connerly to crusade for colorblind laws. In response to the Supreme Court's notorious 2003 U. of Michigan decision upholding race quotas (just as long as they’re not called quotas!), Connerly devoted over three years to a heroic campaign to reproduce Prop. 209 in Michigan. To be honest, I didn't think his new Proposition 2 stood a chance because almost the entire Michigan establishment of both parties opposed him. Yet, Connerly's initiative won a stunning 58 percent of the vote last November. Connerly is now working to put similar affirmative action bans on the ballot in Arizona, Colorado Missouri, and Oklahoma. In sharp contrast to Connerly, though, is the popular Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama. He made a radio ad last year opposing Connerly's Proposition 2. Obama played to this white expectation that interracial marriage leads to interracial harmony in his famous keynote address at the 2004Democratic convention. It began with a (heavily airbrushed) version of his family history, recounting how his father from Kenya and his mother from Kansas met in Hawaii. Obviously, that must make Obama feel equally warmly toward both races! Right? And sophisticated listeners also understood that Hawaii has never been home to the one-drop rule, which automatically defines the offspring of mixed marriages as belonging solely to the minority parent's race. Clearly, Obama must be bringing a new, more sophisticated Hawaiian conception of race to the Mainland! Those pleasant presumptions, however, are all exploded, however, merely by reading Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance In his Introduction, Obama describes his book as "the record of a personal, interior journey—a boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And when Obama runs into other part-black people who actually do profess a multiracial identity, the future Presidential candidate is disturbed and annoyed by them. For example, when Obama is in his late 20s, he finally meets his half-brother "Mark," a physics student at Stanford who is the son of their father's third wife (and second white American wife). Mark, who grew up in Africa and thus doesn't share the Honolulu-born Obama's romantic conception of the Mother Continent, perturbs Obama by not being a black racialist. When Obama challenges him over his lack of black African identity, Mark tells him: "Other things move me. Beethoven's symphonies. Shakespeare's sonnets. I know—it's not what an African is supposed to care about. But who's to tell me what I should and shouldn't care about?" Obama thereupon immediately and permanently cuts off all contact with his own half-brother. Similarly, Obama dumps a girlfriend he might have married when he visits her prosperous parents' country house and realizes how deeply rooted they are in traditional white American culture. Apparently he found that an intolerable threat that is to the black identity he devised for himself in Hawaii while watching Soul Train on TV: "The family knew every inch of the land, … the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors … I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers … I pushed her away." Of course, in reality, Obama, the preppie from paradise, has spent much of his life collecting credentials from educational institutions begun by white people quite similar to his ex-lover's parents: Punahou School (Hawaii's top prep school, founded by New England missionaries in 1841), Occidental College in Los Angeles (founded 1887), Columbia University (founded 1754), and Harvard (founded 1636). You might imagine that the generous treatment these prototypically white institutions afforded Obama might make him better disposed toward his mother's race. After all, the loving care Connerly received from the white-Indian grandmother who raised him helps him look benignly on all races. But, Obama, like most humans, isn't as emotionally straightforward as Connerly. As Ben Franklin pointed out, if you want somebody to like you, don't do them a favor. They will just resent the fact that you can do them a favor. So the intellectuals' assumption that interracial marriage will eliminate racial conflict turns out to be naïve—at best. But it’s one of the rationales used to justify our current immigration disaster. Maybe We Can All Get Along—But Not Because Of Interracial Marriage
First, the rate of interethnic marriage between whites and Latinos and whites and Asians has been dropping. Second, the percentage of people who tell the Census Bureau they are multiracial has actually dropped over the last half decade. Third, people of diverse ancestries do not necessarily "transcend race". 
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tauzero, Jethro Tull, HOUNDDAWG, who knows what evil, robin, Eoghan, BTP Holdings (#0)
good read
This is the key to this absurd article. Whites have been PC'd (PC doesn't apply to blacks or Hispanics). There is nothing more dopey looking than some white suburban kid acting the part of a wigger, complete w/the baggy pants and reverse hat. Wiggers deserve a smack to the head and their parent(s)? prohibited from adding to the population until they show parental responsibility.
Interracial marriage will always be in the low single digits. Even among "blacks," the lighter-skinned ones have formed an upper crust. I know a woman who is half-black and half-white. She's what used to be called "high yellow." Curiously, she gets abuse from unattractive black guys, I assume because they stand no chance with her. She only dates white guys and has a child who passes for white.
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." -- Thucydides
A sign that white women are FINALLY 'straightening up their act'?
Like my wife said, "My mother always told me white guys make the best husbands. She was right."
I eat cannibal, feed on animal; Your love is so edible to me, I eat cannibals
Profound. Thanks.
ha. my nephew is a wigger. man, some days these kids are gonna look back and cringe. all i did was wear bell bottoms and stuff.
"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit---to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." -Alan Watts /
Not quite right. There's an order of precedence to these things, but not a flat one. Everybody can criticize and make factual observations about whites. More than that, they can make shit up. Asians may criticize asians and whites, but not blacks. Blacks and hispanics may criticize themselves, asians, and whites. Hispanics can't criticize blacks outside their own circle. It's not clear yet whether blacks can criticize hispanics. My guess is the answer is "no", as the Mexican invasion is more useful at the moment than black predations to the powers that be. Lastly, no one can criticize jews, though blacks are punished less for transgressions, as might be considered just in light of blacks' low level of competance.
I eat cannibal, feed on animal; Your love is so edible to me, I eat cannibals
I agree.
My son tried to be when he went to HS. I smashed his hip-hop crap - literally - and replaced it w/the Stones, Cream and other classic rock material. He got over it.
This woman has commented more than once on my "blue eyes." Her child's father has blue eyes, too.
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." -- Thucydides
#2. To: Tauzero (#0)
Or maybe “Generation Tolerant” is simply “Generation Politically Correct”—intimidated from its early youth by the Baby Boom refugee radicals who now infest the education industry.
#3. To: Tauzero (#0)
#4. To: Tauzero (#0)
First, the rate of interethnic marriage between whites and Latinos and whites and Asians has been dropping.
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#5. To: YertleTurtle (#3)
#6. To: Tauzero (#0)
As Ben Franklin pointed out, if you want somebody to like you, don't do them a favor. They will just resent the fact that you can do them a favor
#7. To: Jethro Tull (#2)
#8. To: Jethro Tull (#2)
Whites have been PC'd (PC doesn't apply to blacks or Hispanics).
#9. To: Tauzero (#8)
#10. To: gengis gandhi (#7)
#11. To: Tauzero (#5)
Like my wife said, "My mother always told me white guys make the best husbands. She was right."
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest