Post Racial Nonsense

               Assume: It can make an ass out of you and me.

     This great line (not mine) cuts to the heart of the debate about a post-racial America. Many citizens and talking heads assume that because the nation elected a President who self identifies as black we are on the way to a world where "race" and skin color no longer define us by what poisonously divides us.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. As a nation, we still root our thinking in a series of assumptions that derive from the most hideous representatives of U.S. culture. The result is that the debate about a post racial America is a dead end; we are repeating history rather than changing it because even "progressives" provide our children and grandchildren with the same toxic concepts that dominated America in 1965, 1925 or 1865.

     Let me start with some very specific, contemporary examples. The new head of the NAACP is Benjamin Todd Jealous. In a July 30th, 2009 interview in the New York Times, the reporter asked Jealous this question: "As the son of a white father and a black mother, do you refer to yourself as black?"

   Jealous' answer: "Yes, without qualification."  First, like President Obama, Jealous makes a choice that excludes one of his parents. He is not "mixed-race", a fusion, or a combination. He is black and that is that. To me the astonishing thing is the color of the Mr. Jealous' skin. Check online and you will see that he is lighter than a large majority of so called white people.

    It's a cause of great confusion. If I called a white wall or a white car black that means I have a perceptual problem; but, if a very light skinned man decides he is black, both whites and blacks accept his designation, despite undeniable evidence to the contrary.

       How did he reach this conclusion? One part of any answer is the "one drop rule" developed by slave traders and slave owners. As Debra Dickerson stresses in The End Of Blackness, "no one believes as fervently in the one drop rule as blacks do." Thus, a man who looks white is black and he will move us toward a Post-Racial America by rooting his thinking in the awful assumptions of slave traders, slave owners and the Americans who invented Jim Crow and its century of obscenities.

     Another example is an August 14th, 2009 piece, also in the New York Times, by Sociologist Orlando Patterson. Professor Patterson talks about the "bogus demographic invention non-Hispanic whites" and then invents one of his own -something called "nonblacks". The language is necessary because "jeremiads" lament the alleged lack of assimilation of new immigrants. Patterson says to calm down. Sociologists know the truth: Currently 80 percent of the population and growing define themselves as "exclusively white" (my emphasis); even half of all Hispanics now define themselves as "white alone".

    Patterson applauds the alleged success of assimilation; unfortunately, for anyone interested in a post-racial America, the last thing the nation needs is more white people. Why? Because it perpetuates the American assumption that everyone on earth can be placed into one of three color categories: White, black or nonwhite. Thus, an (India) Indian or a Pakistani who is far darker than Mr. Jealous or President Obama is not black -despite the obvious evidence to the contrary- and gets thrown into the nonwhite category. This perpetuates a loathsome form of color and racial classification because, as Albert Murray wrote in The Omni-Americans (in 1970),  "all the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy and segregation" are represented in the eight letter word "nonwhite".

    Celebrating more whites is suicidal if you want a post-racial America because the three color triad always places so called white people in the driver's seat. First, blacks and nonwhites are "people of color" who only exist in relation to white people. Whites remain supreme because they are the designer original and by definition blacks and nonwhites are knockoffs, as good as the "made in Japan" items that Americans imported in the 1950's.

     Second, whites reign supreme because white is a color but it is not a color when you talk about white people. In the United States white people are not people of color. Only colored people get a color even if white is a color and white people are therefore colored.

    This is institutionalized insanity but it is also the assumption we use to categorize the entire world. And it preserves white supremacy and segregation because whites learn to maintain social distance from their inferiors. In the forties "white" Mexicans did everything they could to distance themselves from blacks and in the twenty-first century history is repeating itself. In a recent essay by Professor Carleen Basler,  “White Dreams and Red Votes: Mexican Americans and the Lure of Inclusion in the Republican Party”, Basler argues that “naturalized (Mexican) citizens consciously navigate the American racial landscape and all its consequences, and they often align themselves with ‘whites’ (and against blacks) in order to obtain the social and political capital inherent in whiteness.” As one of her informants noted, “Blacks don’t really count. They don’t have any real choices. Nobody thinks of them when they think of Americans.”

     The assimilation celebrated by sociologists like Professor Patterson perpetuates the ugliest aspects of American life. It moves us backwards rather than forwards, if only because sociologists and other pollsters rely on the Census Bureau for the 80% white tally. If we remember that the Census says that everyone from North Africa is white, we might have a bit of skepticism about census classifications. The Bureau offers its participants a limited number of boxes and when people tick white sociologists assume that this is their preferred classification.

   The truth lies elsewhere. In a Pew Hispanic Center National Survey of Latinos they discovered these Latino preferences: Only 12% of Dominicans preferred the white label; for Mexicans the number was 17%, for Puerto Ricans 19%, for Central Americans 14%. The only Latino group with a majority preference for white was Cubans; 55% preferred the white label.

    These numbers suggest a national tragedy of historic proportions. Latinos don't prefer the white label but sociologists will squeeze "nonblacks" into that category, preserve white supremacy and segregation and celebrate an assimilation that, among other examples, makes darker skinned Arabs into white Americans.

  It's post-racial nonsense. And anyone who accepts the "one drop rule" and the white, black, nonwhite triad is helping to make Fox news' Glenn Beck smile all the way to the bank