Phactotum
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- Jan 18, 2024
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Do you agree with her angle?
Do you agree that this would destabilize anything??? It looks foreign to me, what she says here.
What say you?
here's an excerpt:
Do you agree that this would destabilize anything??? It looks foreign to me, what she says here.
What say you?
here's an excerpt:
Since America’s racial disparities remain as deep rooted
after Barack Obama’s election as they were
before, it was only a matter of time until the myth of
postracism exploded in our collective national face.
–Peniel Joseph, The Chronicle of Higher Education
(July 27, 2009)
In electing me, the voters picked the candidate of
their choice, not their race, which foreshadowed the
historic election of Barack Obama in 2008. We’ve
come a long way in Memphis, and ours is a story of
postracial politics.
–Congressman Steve Cohen, Letter to the Editor,
The New York Times (September 18, 2009)
Race is not going to be quite as big a deal as it is
now; in the America of tomorrow. . . race will not
be synonymous with destiny.
–Ellis Cose, Newsweek (January 11, 2010)1
Are racial divisions and commitments in the
United States just as deep-rooted as they were
before the 2008 presidential election, largely
eliminated, or persistent but on the decline? As
the epigraphs show, one can easily ½nd each of
these pronouncements, among others, in the
American public media. Believing any one of
them–or any other, beyond the anodyne claim
that this is “a time of transition”–is likely to be
a mistake, since there will be almost as much evidence
against as for it. Instead, it is more illuminating
to try to sort out what is changing in the
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American racial order, what persists
or is becoming even more entrenched,
and what is likely to affect the balance
between change and continuity. That,
at any rate, is what we propose to do
(if briefly) in this article.
Given space constraints, we focus on
young adults. Even if we cannot fully
disentangle the effects of age, historical
era, and cohort, understanding this population
is essential if we are to grasp what
is and is not changing in the American
racial order. We argue that younger cohorts
of Americans were raised in a different
racial context and think about
and practice race differently than their
older counterparts do.2 Older Americans
are products of “the sixties” and
its sequelae–namely, a rise in immigration,
blacks’ assertion of pride and dignity,
whites’ rejection of racial supremacy
(at least in public), a slow opening
of schools and jobs and suburbs to people
previously excluded, and a shift in
government policy from promoting segregation
and hierarchy to promoting (at
least of½cially) integration and equality.
Now, however, new institutions and
practices are moving into place: of½cial
records permit people to identify with
more than one race, antidiscrimination
policies are well established in schools
and workplaces, and some non-whites
hold influential political positions. The very meaning of race for most of the
twentieth century–a few exhaustive
and mutually exclusive groups into
which one is born and in which one
stays–is becoming less and less tenable.
Immigration and interracial relationships
have produced a set of
people who do not ½t conventional
racial categories and who change
their racial identity in different contexts.
Today’s young adults will move
through adulthood with the knowledge
that one need not be white in
order to become the most powerful person
in the world.
For these and other reasons, young
Americans’ racial attitudes are usually
more liberal than those of older Americans,
and their social networks are more
intertwined. Race, while still predictive,
is less able to determine a young adult’s
life chances and eventual socioeconomic
status than ever before in American
history. These changes in the views
and behaviors of young people have the
potential to produce a new American
racial order–that is, if Americans take
the political and policy steps needed to
diminish barriers that still block the
chances of too many young Americans.
If residents of the United States make
the right choices over the next few decades,
the country could ½nally move
toward becoming the society that James
Madison envisioned in Federalist No. 10,
one in which no majority faction–not
even native-born European Americans
–can dominate the political, economic,
or social arena.
We are hardly the ½rst to notice signi
½cant changes in young Americans;
bookstores are full of volumes on “the
new millennials.” But we analyze destabilization
of the racial order more systematically
and theoretically than many
others have done, and we add some distinctive
elements. Following the work
of government and social policy scholar
Brenna Powell, we de½ne a racial order
as a society’s widely understood and
accepted system of beliefs, laws, and
practices that organizes relationships
among groups understood to be races
or ethnicities.3 A racial order can be analyzed
through ½ve components: de½-
nition of a race or ethnicity; classi½cation
of individuals into races or ethnicities;
groups’ position relative to that
of other groups; acts that are forbidden,
permitted, or required; and social relations among groups. All these components are changing–within individuals,
between persons, among groups, and across society. Variations in the ½ve
components of the racial order may even be multiplicative in the sense that forms
of instability interact to increase the momentum of transformation. Young adults
are not only more likely to be immigrants and to marry across racial lines, they are also less committed to the cognitions, emotions, behaviors, and assumptions associated with the racial order of the civil rights era and its aftermath. If these new views and practices persist as young adults move through the life cycle, influencing the people growing up behind them, then the magnitude and pace of racial destabilization may increase at
ever faster rates. This image of a snowball gaining girth and speed as it tumbles down a hill does not, however, quite complete our argument. The racial terrain has roadblocks
and boulders that can halt, deflect, or even explode the rolling snowball. Some of the least attractive features of the current American racial order have remained
stable, and some may even be solidifying, especially among younger Americans. New groups–for instance, undocumented Latino immigrants or Muslim men –may be moving into the old roles of “most disfavored.” Extraordinarily high levels of police stops and incarceration among young black urban men deepen old racial barriers. Some features of
the American racial order could even be solidifying because other features are
becoming unstable. For example, advocacy groups may seek even greater group solidarity for fear that the dissolution of a uni½ed group will worsen persistent race-based prohibitions or deplete the ability to defend against growing anti-immigrant discrimination. They may be right, since perceptions and practices of racial distinctiveness
are dissolving faster than group based hierarchy is being undone, potentially leaving the worst-off without supporters or even a language to challenge injustice.
On balance, the old racial order is being transformed–but how it is changing, how much, for whom, and to what effect is not easily discerned. Disaggregating the changes into ½ve strands is, in our view, the best way to address these questions. Having done so, we are con-½dent in predicting that racial attitudes, practices, and relative inequalities will be profoundly different for our children and grandchildren than they are for us.
We anticipate, but we cannot con½dently predict, that the gains will outweigh the
costs. That result will depend largely on how the American political and social systems deal with the unintended consequences of these pending transformations. Young adults face an array of answers to the simple question, what is a race?
Figure 1 shows two forms used by major American universities on job applications
for an assistant professorship during the mid-2000s. The University of California, Berkeley (left) aimed at precision through detail, while Pennsylvania State University (right) aimed at precision through minimalism. Both mix race and ethnicity on a single list; Berkeley adds the complications of ancestry while Penn State hints that its main interest lies in legal statuses with budgetary implications.
Berkeley acknowledges both biological and cultural components of race; Penn State was silent on the culture/biology dimension. These examples suggest that de½nitions of race are increasingly in flux–returning us in some ways to the nineteenth twentieth centuries.
As postmodernists have been pointing out for several decades, if the meaning of a term is unstable and nonconsensual, the social structures and practices built around it are much less solid than they appear to be. 4 Young adults are coming to realize that nominal racial groups do not have the solidity that they used to. In 2007, for example, young black adults were more likely than older ones to agree that “Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse.”...
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