Refreshingly careful piece. You make all the right distinctions, like ethnicity being the real thing behind “racial relations.” On integration, speaking from a majority mixed-race country (Brazil) where different races are under the same broad ethnicity, what we do here is to associate ethnicity to location. There’s no risk of black culture from Bahia disappearing into the majority culture because, well, it’s in Bahia. Same thing for white gaucho culture in the South. While we know one is more black and the other more white, we rarely think it’s all black or all white (or all indigenous, or all caipira). We’re used to thinking there will be racial variation within each ethnic group. As for our famous music, we know that Samba, for instance, is not all black and we have great white sambistas in our history. Still, Samba is indeed thought of as blacker than Bossa Nova. What wokeness brought us, to our detriment, was the emphasis on this dichotomy, which is very American and not very Brazilian. We are now rediscovering mestizos, the majority of the country, thanks to work by intellectuals like Antonio Risério.
Good comment, but let's also think about the downside for blacks under Brazil's Latin system of a color continuum rather than a color line.
African-Americans have a lot of problems, but one thing they don't lack are famous African-Americans. Over the last century, an enormous number of the most famous people on earth (e.g., Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, Stephen Curry, and so forth) have been African-American.
Black Brazilians? There was Pele and ... well ...
Consider soccer star Neymar. In Brazil, transracialism is as fashionable as transgenderism in the US, so Neymar has gone back and forth between looking like a typical black kid when he was young and poor and, after he got rich, looking at times like one of those skateboarders you see living around Southern California military bases who are a quarter black, a quarter white, a quarter Asian, and a quarter Mexican. Or something. Nobody can tell.
In America, outside of Louisiana, it has been extremely difficult for lineages to transitions from black to white, so high-achieving African-American families tend to stay African-American. In Latin America, however, among ambitious people of color, it's a reasonable ambition to have white (or whitish) grandchildren. So, in Latin America, talent tends to flow toward the white end of the color continuum. But in the USA, talent seldom crossed the color line from black to white, which helps explain the famous amounts of talent found among African Americans.
Hi Steve. I’m not sure I understand your points. It seems you are using fame as a proxy for talent, and going with the small amount of famous Brazilian black people you know as an indicator. But there are more of them who are famous among Brazilians that you probably have never heard about. Like composer and singer Milton Nascimento, or geographer Milton Santos.
The latter had an interesting perspective on race, he was against racial quotas and he used to say he was primarily Brazilian in his identity before being black. Pro-black and indigenous racial quotas are now widespread in Brazil, unfortunately in my view, since we already struggle with so little to show in terms of meritocratic institutions.
You are right that in the past, with some effect today, mixed-race Brazilians saw being whiter as a social ladder they wanted to climb. But this is changing rapidly with the incentives set in place by preferential treatment, so now more of them claim a black identity. Mestizos are still struggling to set themselves apart because, well, they’re not really apart from anything.
Risério, the mixed-race intellectual I mentioned, says that a lot of things attributed to black people alone are actually the product of mestizos, like Samba. This is not to downplay black talent, but to take back some talent that was taken away from mestizos in the name of black pride.
Anyway, my impression is that the amount of black people with prestige in the country is about as much as they are present in the general population: 7-10%. The identitarian black movement tries to artificially raise this number by adding together black (“preto”) and brown (“pardo”) to what they call “negro.” With this strategy they can get to over 50% of the population by sleight of hand, which they use dramatically to ask for even more quotas. But in Portuguese, “preto” and “negro” are synonyms. Where I was raised, “negro” was fine but “preto” sounded a bit like a slur. So it’s bewildering for me to see even our largest statistics government agency using “preto” willy nilly. As for brown (“pardo”), which is de facto mestizo, that’s the word Portuguese explorer Pero Vaz de Caminha called the natives in a famous letter he wrote after visiting the country in 1500. There is a lot about Brazilian culture, like our multiple showers per day, that comes from the natives. Their influence is hugely downplayed, even by the black movement.
Coming back to your thesis that mixing was bad for black people’s status in Brazil, I think that’s not accurate. In any case, I agree with Risério that we Brazilians should rediscover ourselves as mainly mestizos and celebrate “mulattos” (now a forbidden word) like our great novelist Machado de Assis. But we do have enough black talent.
On the idea that colorblindness dissolves ties that bind ethnic groups together, I think the point can be put even more strongly. In a thoroughly colorblind society, there wouldn’t even be ethnic distinctions. That is, ethnic distinctions only persist because of disparities in mate choice. If Nuyoricans were no more likely to couple with other Nuyoricans than with anybody else, then it doesn’t take too many generations before you don’t really have Nuyoricans anymore.
This is sort of what’s already happened with lots of “white” ethnic groups in the United States. My maternal grandmother immigrated from Poland before the holocaust (the rest of her family didn’t get out), and when she got to the United States, she was in Jewish social circles, where she met my Jewish maternal grandfather. Jewish ethnic identity persisted into the next generation (my mother), but more weakly, so it wasn’t surprising that my mother married a man (my father) with two Italian parents. Parallel story on his side. For me, while I have both Jewish and Italian ancestry, neither played a role in my life anything like the one they did for my grandparents, and so no surprise that when I got married, the woman I married was neither Jewish nor Italian, and I don’t think my children will have any sense of a distinctive ethnic identity the way all eight of their great-grandparents almost certainly did.
Thanks! I do think it’s kind of jarring to think that the sort of 90s ideal I grew up with, where we absolutely celebrated multiculturalism—as opposed to a kind of melting pot ideal where everyone is supposed to assimilate to a generic American identity—but also had a kind of default suspicion about strong ethnic/homophilic preferences in dating, is in a way incoherent. (Incoherent in that it’s not a long-run stable way for society to be organized; you can only have it for a few generations, as a transitionary period.)
Great piece, but I think you are missing one key point. You never mention disparate impact, specifically its legal framework. Disparate impact essentially makes colorblindness illegal, as long as racial disparities exist. Trump is theoretically working on repealing disparate impact through Executive Order, but there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will agree and overrule their existing precedent. You mentioned the worry about being seen as racist, but it’s currently much more magnified by the hefty legal liability.
In defense of colorblindness, let me just say that disparate impact liability mainly arises in employment law (thanks to Griggs). So the law may be a barrier to colorblindness, but not in every domain.
Great piece, Daniel! I think it’s important to break down seemingly-monolithic behavior from institutions and show how it can reduce to a series of ordinary decisions made by ordinary people. This helps to shed a bit of light on some of what’s going on with the culture war.
This valuable piece, including helpful historical context, would benefit from further discussion of the purpose for which race morally should, or should not, be considered. On the one hand are situations in which colorblindness should eventually be the norm (government policies, hiring, university admissions, etc.) but not applied to ignore intentional discrimination. On the other are those, mostly involving private relations and associations, where sharing and celebrating a common ethnicity or heritage is acceptable, or even socially beneficial. This line is not always clear, and there are certainly counter-examples for each category. But most people intuitively understand the difference between intentionally favoring certain racial groups for public jobs or college admissions, and letting Nuyoricans (or Cherokees) form a private association where they share their common heritage, where any exclusion of others seems perfectly understandable. (To be clear, I'm not defending white supremacist groups. But I do recognize limits on the desirability and practicality of policing every form of morally noxious belief.)
If ethnic identity is a legitimate source of self-respect and self-esteem, and the desire to be a part of a separate (ethnic) nation is also legitimate, would you support the reification of a White American ethnic identity?
I’m not trying to tie you to Jared Taylor or other White Nationalists (although cultivating a distinct White Amerian identity is explicitly his project), but I can’t help but notice that if the benefits of ethnic identity are so great as to outweigh the benefits of colorblindness, it appears incumbent upon White Americans to find a way to participate in it.
It’s a fair question. I think lots of White Americans take pride in their ethnic backgrounds: Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc. But I don’t like the idea of a “White identity,” because White Americans have so little in common that the group identity ends up being mainly defined in opposition to other races. “Opposition to other races” tends to attract racists — so it doesn’t surprise me that “White pride” is usually just racism. Better to have a unifying national identity instead!
I’m concerned that, given both the lack of other commonality across White Americans you cited, and the negative connotations surrounding Whiteness in the American context, an increased emphasis on ethnic self-identification will encourage White Americans to interpret what it means to be American through an ethnic lens.
This is already being encouraged on the Right, by people like Scott Greer, who have popularized the term heritage Americans to refer to White (often specifically Anglo) Americans. On the Left, I see people like Nikole Hannah-Jones also engaging in this project; the 1619 project is an attempt to reframe America as an explicitly White (supremacist) country.
It’s cliche, but I hope we manage to preserve the notion captured by Reagan, that it doesn’t matter if you’re British, Hungarian, Japanese, or Nigerian, if you come to America, you are American, and your children and children’s children will be American. If White Americans co-opt the American identity as exclusively their own, that ideal disappears.
Well said. By the way, you might like the last section of Joe Heath’s “Two Dilemmas for American Race Relations,” where he argues that, if you look outside the American context, the countries that have the most success with integration generally make race less salient. (Of course, part of what I’m arguing here is that people have understandable reasons for not wanting to integrate. So I see the issue as something of a dilemma with no easy solution in the near future.)
"White Americans have so little in common that the group identity ends up being mainly defined in opposition to other races."
Everything is defined in opposition to something else.
Do Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Indians, and Pakistanis all see themselves as possessing Asian solidarity back home in Asian the way they do in America?
Not in my experience, nor from reading worrisome headlines about World War III possibly breaking out between India and Pakistan.
In this globalized world, white Americans have a huge amount in common with each other relative to the rest of the world, as the rest of the world readily recognizes. The vast majority of white Americans' ancestors before 1607 lived in what they referred to as Christendom, spoke Indo-European languages, and formed a common civilization. Most white Americans are either descended from Brits or had their ancestors fairly aggressively Anglicized (e.g., Germans in 1917). There hasn't been a big immigration of non-Hispanic whites into the United States since roughly World War I. The Protestant - Catholic divide among white Americans vanished soon after JFK entered the American pantheon of martyrs on 11/22/1963.
The only reason people nod their heads to this self-evidently wrong talking point how little in common white Americans have is because they want to cajole white Americans into not asserting their potential political power.
I take your point, Steve, that White Americans have a lot in common. But I think it has more to do with being American than with being White.
And while you’re right that it’s okay to have an identity that’s defined in opposition to others, I don’t want that for *racial* identities in the US, because that would lead to more conflict and teeth-gnashing. (Solve for the equilibrium, as Tyler Cowen likes to say.)
Very late reply here - great treatment of a highly fraught topic.
One thing I'm not clear about: you say that colorblindness would mean the end of ethnic communities. Why would it though? You can have colorblindness as a state policy, but by sheer freedom of association, people of similar backgrounds, cultures of origins are entirely free to keep clustering together and keeping their culture alive!
It’s only if you have colorblindness at the level of individual morality that ethnic communities get unraveled. That kind of colorblindness seems to me hard to defend. But Hughes does really endorse it in the book; for him, colorblindness isn’t just supposed to be a matter of government policy, but a way of life.
In that case, I don't think they'll get very far. Government policy is fairly top-down, if you convince the right people you can get a whole policy regime like DEI installed, or (later) removed.
At the grassroots level though, you can write articles to convince people to give up their ethnic identities... but how far will that really go? At best you might convince a few ethnic youngsters to lean more towards the unmarked mainstream culture, or pair up outside of their own group. But some of that would happen anyway, and I don't think the groups themselves are in any danger of unraveling when they have so much heritage in them.
Sorry to get to this late - I've only just started reading your blog. I agree with much of this, but not the final parts about being proud of one's race. I think Du Bois is right in his "We are that people" quote - but wrong about what constitutes that people. His people are not "black", they are ADOS or "African-American". Ethiopians and Haitians are entirely different people with different cultures and different histories - as are the peoples that half of Obama's and Harris's ancestry come from.
Sorry for my slow reply, Amod -- and thanks for reading!
Your comment got me wondering, so I reread some Dubois. On reflection, I don't think he considers the Africans in America as a race in themselves, but rather sees them as the "advance guard of the Negro people," where "Negro" is a very "indefinite" term, but includes "200,000,000" people across Africa, the US, and the Caribbean.
That said, this is based on my reading of "Conservation" and The Souls of Black Folk, not the whole oeuvre, so he might use "race" differently elsewhere.
But I think that's exactly the problem - much like modern "black" activists today, Du Bois equivocates as to whether "Negro" refers to the American culture that raised him (one of which he could be legitimately proud) or of people of African ancestry worldwide. This equivocation, which erases cultural differences in favour of racial ones, seems common to calls for racial solidarity. All the arguments in favour of pride or unity (at least insofar as they work) are really referring just to the culture of American descendants of slavery, but because the term those people used for themselves was "black", it's just assumed that people who have nothing to do with that culture can be assimilated to it.
good post daniel, agree with your conclusions about colorblindness but come at it from the opposite direction since i think evolution is true (and is not magically restricted from operating above the neck, i.e. selection has heavily influenced the cognitive dispositions of populations). this review of coleman’s from last year was worthwhile.
Thanks for reading, Kenji -- and for sharing! That Aporia review was indeed worth reading, though I'm wary of "race realist" politics, given its lackluster track record in practice.
I do agree with the author that, *a priori*, there's not much reason a priori to treat in-group racial preferences more harshly than in-group family preferences. But there's very strong *a posteriori* reason to do so! In developed societies, racial strife (where it exists) is a large-scale, hard-to-solve problem in a way that family feuds are not.
Very good piece. Maybe I'm missing something but I think Coleman mostly refers to colorblindness as an approach for public policy whereas the "ties that bind ethnic groups together" are something more private that I can imagine could coexist with public policies that promote integration. Coleman says "the aim of colorblindness is to consciously disregard race as a reason to treat individuals differently and as a category on which to base public policy." As a Hispanic in the US, the fact that my daughter school has a Hispanic Heritage months is not a driver of my ties to other Hispanics, the ties come from a shared language, food, and customs. Why can those practices coexists, mutate, and develop in a context of colorblind policies?
Thanks for the comment, Gabriel! I should’ve emphasized this more, but in the book, Coleman does define colorblindness so that it applies “both in our public policy and in our private lives” (p. 19). Still, I think you’re right that it might be possible to maintain cultural ties (language, food, etc.) while also having broadly colorblind government policies.
I’ve been mulling the idea of race abolitionism for the past couple of years after reading a piece and subsequently interviewing David and Subrena Smith on the Reconstructing Inclusion podcast.
I also encountered the Theory of Racelessness in meeting and speaking to the author of the “Raceless Antiracist” Sheena Mason last year.
The overall premise for them is that wherever race resides, racism follows and it needs to be let go of completely.
Having a son who is of Spanish (Galician) and African-American (Kansas) heritage, was born and lives in Swiss-German speaking Switzerland and whose mother tongue is Swiss-French and Spanish, ascribing a race to him occurs as grossly limiting to me.
I am learning how to speak to him about it as he grows older. He might experience some semblance of racism because he is a darker complexioned than most kids he plays with, but he is also a local. And, me not having the advantage of being local rarely feel that race plays a role in my daily life here.
Yeah, racism exists but the occurrences are rare and if they do occur, I pass them off as ignorance. Not all can emotionally compartmentalize like that but it is something that I came to conclude over time—another’s belief system is not my problem it’s theirs unless they do something violent to make it mine—“sticks and stones. . .”
I will work with my son to not subscribe to racialization even if it is ascribed to him by others.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Amri. “Grossly limiting” sounds right: I feel for mixed-race kids who are pressured to define themselves in ways that don’t make sense to them or to their families. And thanks also for the tips — looking forward to listening to those interviews you did.
Actually, 21st Century DNA scans have shown that the white - black distinction in America is pretty much real. A big discovery of this century was the great majority of self-identify non-Hispanic African-Americans who have two parents who identify as black tend to be about 5/8ths to 31/32nds blacks genetically.
Similarly, most Americans who self-identify as non-Hispanic whites are well over 90% white genetically. Unlike in, say, Brazil just aren't a lot of non-Hispanics who are mostly white but kind of black until quite recently.
Once you know that genetic reality, it's pretty easy to figure out why: the one-drop rule and opposition to endogamy led to two different marriage and thus gene pools, and moving from one to the other was onerous. These cultural norms socially constructed America's genetic reality of having highly genetically distinctive white and black races.
In contrast, in Latin America, different social norms socially constructed quite different distributions of genes. It's common there for people to be 80% white and 20% black, a proportion that was only rarely seen in the US among non-Hispanics until quite recently.
It remains curious to me that the most important voice on the relationship of race history in America and how individuals think of themselves today -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- only shows up in a footnote. Watching a single episode of Finding Your Roots might help here. There is so much more to this conversation that the American public understands, quietly.
I would just point out that the notion of black as ethnicity is pernicious and can be quasi-racist, as culture does not inhere in skin color per se. I am an “intersectional” black person - not a descendant of American slaves, but a child of Caribbean immigrants who grew up in a mostly white suburb. I never felt that the default American racial categories really fit my situation, as I am not ethnically “African-American,” even though I was always assumed to by others to be such based on something as superficial as my appearance. This has lent me a unique perspective on the arbitrariness of American racial identity throughout my life.
Let’s face it - the American notion of black culture is very limited and limiting and perpetuates the idea that to be interested in anything other than “black” things marks you as some sort of oddity. You can’t grow up with a keen interest in something like chess or pottery or classical music without being made to feel by others that you are somehow inauthentically black or trying to be white. In fact, anything not specifically coded as black is deemed to be white. Nobody thinks anything of a white or Asian person interested in pretty much anything other than the fact that they are interested in it.
It’s simply another form of racism that is not focused on by the left but is quite suffocating for an independently minded black person. I don’t doubt that it is a contributing factor to low black representation in many important facets of American life.
As part of colorblindness, we should normalize the idea that the color of your skin is not an essential clue to your interests or culture.
The poker analogy in this article nicely illustrates the desire for reparation, and its presentation holds the key to understanding the need for equal outcomes. Let’s set the scene with a white man and a black man at the poker table, then add the rest of the races — yellows, browns, reds, and everyone else — to see how the game is played in real life. The truth is, everyone has been cheating as much as possible, and their historical ability to cheat depended on technological and institutional advancement. The entire history of humankind is a story of exploitation. The racial card that these neorasists are playing now is just another way of swindling.
Some people still believe that disparities are concerning and that social policies are necessary to create a uniform, equal outcome. Thomas Sowell, in his book “The Vision of the Anointed,” lists many natural disparities that have nothing to do with race or any prejudices against or for any group of people.
The author is right that colorblindness can erase ethnic and tribal identities, and I would add that it fosters unity under the American flag. Is this a negative development? Is being an American not enough? Consider countries where ethnic identities are more prominent than national ones. These countries tend to be unstable and regressive, often engaging in violence and terror. Perhaps the left-liberal intelligentsia should focus more on promoting integration and assimilation instead of defending tribal and racial divisions, as these can lead to civil war.
I think you’re right about the benefits of a unifying identity—but in a classically liberal society, there are serious limits on what the state can do to restrict individual choice. If members of a group want to live together, or go to the same church, or only marry within the group, there’s not too much a liberal can do about that.
Now you’re acting as if identity politics isn’t the official doctrine of the liberal elite—like they don’t actively promote multiculturalism or immediately cry racism whenever a dissenting voice arises, as if open border policies and the strong protection of minority groups are somehow inherent to human nature, rather than political tools wielded by the liberal elite.
Refreshingly careful piece. You make all the right distinctions, like ethnicity being the real thing behind “racial relations.” On integration, speaking from a majority mixed-race country (Brazil) where different races are under the same broad ethnicity, what we do here is to associate ethnicity to location. There’s no risk of black culture from Bahia disappearing into the majority culture because, well, it’s in Bahia. Same thing for white gaucho culture in the South. While we know one is more black and the other more white, we rarely think it’s all black or all white (or all indigenous, or all caipira). We’re used to thinking there will be racial variation within each ethnic group. As for our famous music, we know that Samba, for instance, is not all black and we have great white sambistas in our history. Still, Samba is indeed thought of as blacker than Bossa Nova. What wokeness brought us, to our detriment, was the emphasis on this dichotomy, which is very American and not very Brazilian. We are now rediscovering mestizos, the majority of the country, thanks to work by intellectuals like Antonio Risério.
What a fascinating comment - thank you, Eli!
Thank you for making me see a different side of this issue.
Good comment, but let's also think about the downside for blacks under Brazil's Latin system of a color continuum rather than a color line.
African-Americans have a lot of problems, but one thing they don't lack are famous African-Americans. Over the last century, an enormous number of the most famous people on earth (e.g., Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, Stephen Curry, and so forth) have been African-American.
Black Brazilians? There was Pele and ... well ...
Consider soccer star Neymar. In Brazil, transracialism is as fashionable as transgenderism in the US, so Neymar has gone back and forth between looking like a typical black kid when he was young and poor and, after he got rich, looking at times like one of those skateboarders you see living around Southern California military bases who are a quarter black, a quarter white, a quarter Asian, and a quarter Mexican. Or something. Nobody can tell.
In America, outside of Louisiana, it has been extremely difficult for lineages to transitions from black to white, so high-achieving African-American families tend to stay African-American. In Latin America, however, among ambitious people of color, it's a reasonable ambition to have white (or whitish) grandchildren. So, in Latin America, talent tends to flow toward the white end of the color continuum. But in the USA, talent seldom crossed the color line from black to white, which helps explain the famous amounts of talent found among African Americans.
Hi Steve. I’m not sure I understand your points. It seems you are using fame as a proxy for talent, and going with the small amount of famous Brazilian black people you know as an indicator. But there are more of them who are famous among Brazilians that you probably have never heard about. Like composer and singer Milton Nascimento, or geographer Milton Santos.
The latter had an interesting perspective on race, he was against racial quotas and he used to say he was primarily Brazilian in his identity before being black. Pro-black and indigenous racial quotas are now widespread in Brazil, unfortunately in my view, since we already struggle with so little to show in terms of meritocratic institutions.
You are right that in the past, with some effect today, mixed-race Brazilians saw being whiter as a social ladder they wanted to climb. But this is changing rapidly with the incentives set in place by preferential treatment, so now more of them claim a black identity. Mestizos are still struggling to set themselves apart because, well, they’re not really apart from anything.
Risério, the mixed-race intellectual I mentioned, says that a lot of things attributed to black people alone are actually the product of mestizos, like Samba. This is not to downplay black talent, but to take back some talent that was taken away from mestizos in the name of black pride.
Anyway, my impression is that the amount of black people with prestige in the country is about as much as they are present in the general population: 7-10%. The identitarian black movement tries to artificially raise this number by adding together black (“preto”) and brown (“pardo”) to what they call “negro.” With this strategy they can get to over 50% of the population by sleight of hand, which they use dramatically to ask for even more quotas. But in Portuguese, “preto” and “negro” are synonyms. Where I was raised, “negro” was fine but “preto” sounded a bit like a slur. So it’s bewildering for me to see even our largest statistics government agency using “preto” willy nilly. As for brown (“pardo”), which is de facto mestizo, that’s the word Portuguese explorer Pero Vaz de Caminha called the natives in a famous letter he wrote after visiting the country in 1500. There is a lot about Brazilian culture, like our multiple showers per day, that comes from the natives. Their influence is hugely downplayed, even by the black movement.
Coming back to your thesis that mixing was bad for black people’s status in Brazil, I think that’s not accurate. In any case, I agree with Risério that we Brazilians should rediscover ourselves as mainly mestizos and celebrate “mulattos” (now a forbidden word) like our great novelist Machado de Assis. But we do have enough black talent.
Really nice piece.
On the idea that colorblindness dissolves ties that bind ethnic groups together, I think the point can be put even more strongly. In a thoroughly colorblind society, there wouldn’t even be ethnic distinctions. That is, ethnic distinctions only persist because of disparities in mate choice. If Nuyoricans were no more likely to couple with other Nuyoricans than with anybody else, then it doesn’t take too many generations before you don’t really have Nuyoricans anymore.
This is sort of what’s already happened with lots of “white” ethnic groups in the United States. My maternal grandmother immigrated from Poland before the holocaust (the rest of her family didn’t get out), and when she got to the United States, she was in Jewish social circles, where she met my Jewish maternal grandfather. Jewish ethnic identity persisted into the next generation (my mother), but more weakly, so it wasn’t surprising that my mother married a man (my father) with two Italian parents. Parallel story on his side. For me, while I have both Jewish and Italian ancestry, neither played a role in my life anything like the one they did for my grandparents, and so no surprise that when I got married, the woman I married was neither Jewish nor Italian, and I don’t think my children will have any sense of a distinctive ethnic identity the way all eight of their great-grandparents almost certainly did.
That's a really great point, Daniel. Thank you!
(I promise that's not what I say in the mirror after writing these pieces.)
Thanks! I do think it’s kind of jarring to think that the sort of 90s ideal I grew up with, where we absolutely celebrated multiculturalism—as opposed to a kind of melting pot ideal where everyone is supposed to assimilate to a generic American identity—but also had a kind of default suspicion about strong ethnic/homophilic preferences in dating, is in a way incoherent. (Incoherent in that it’s not a long-run stable way for society to be organized; you can only have it for a few generations, as a transitionary period.)
Great piece, but I think you are missing one key point. You never mention disparate impact, specifically its legal framework. Disparate impact essentially makes colorblindness illegal, as long as racial disparities exist. Trump is theoretically working on repealing disparate impact through Executive Order, but there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will agree and overrule their existing precedent. You mentioned the worry about being seen as racist, but it’s currently much more magnified by the hefty legal liability.
I'm kicking myself for not making this point!
In defense of colorblindness, let me just say that disparate impact liability mainly arises in employment law (thanks to Griggs). So the law may be a barrier to colorblindness, but not in every domain.
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Source on Griggs v. Duke Power Company (ground zero for disparate impact): https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1213&context=vlr
A critical take on disparate impact jurisprudence more generally: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3482015
SCOTUS's decision to use disparate impact liability in housing: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-1371
Great piece, Daniel! I think it’s important to break down seemingly-monolithic behavior from institutions and show how it can reduce to a series of ordinary decisions made by ordinary people. This helps to shed a bit of light on some of what’s going on with the culture war.
Cheers, Jessie! And very well said.
This valuable piece, including helpful historical context, would benefit from further discussion of the purpose for which race morally should, or should not, be considered. On the one hand are situations in which colorblindness should eventually be the norm (government policies, hiring, university admissions, etc.) but not applied to ignore intentional discrimination. On the other are those, mostly involving private relations and associations, where sharing and celebrating a common ethnicity or heritage is acceptable, or even socially beneficial. This line is not always clear, and there are certainly counter-examples for each category. But most people intuitively understand the difference between intentionally favoring certain racial groups for public jobs or college admissions, and letting Nuyoricans (or Cherokees) form a private association where they share their common heritage, where any exclusion of others seems perfectly understandable. (To be clear, I'm not defending white supremacist groups. But I do recognize limits on the desirability and practicality of policing every form of morally noxious belief.)
If ethnic identity is a legitimate source of self-respect and self-esteem, and the desire to be a part of a separate (ethnic) nation is also legitimate, would you support the reification of a White American ethnic identity?
I’m not trying to tie you to Jared Taylor or other White Nationalists (although cultivating a distinct White Amerian identity is explicitly his project), but I can’t help but notice that if the benefits of ethnic identity are so great as to outweigh the benefits of colorblindness, it appears incumbent upon White Americans to find a way to participate in it.
It’s a fair question. I think lots of White Americans take pride in their ethnic backgrounds: Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc. But I don’t like the idea of a “White identity,” because White Americans have so little in common that the group identity ends up being mainly defined in opposition to other races. “Opposition to other races” tends to attract racists — so it doesn’t surprise me that “White pride” is usually just racism. Better to have a unifying national identity instead!
I’m concerned that, given both the lack of other commonality across White Americans you cited, and the negative connotations surrounding Whiteness in the American context, an increased emphasis on ethnic self-identification will encourage White Americans to interpret what it means to be American through an ethnic lens.
This is already being encouraged on the Right, by people like Scott Greer, who have popularized the term heritage Americans to refer to White (often specifically Anglo) Americans. On the Left, I see people like Nikole Hannah-Jones also engaging in this project; the 1619 project is an attempt to reframe America as an explicitly White (supremacist) country.
It’s cliche, but I hope we manage to preserve the notion captured by Reagan, that it doesn’t matter if you’re British, Hungarian, Japanese, or Nigerian, if you come to America, you are American, and your children and children’s children will be American. If White Americans co-opt the American identity as exclusively their own, that ideal disappears.
Well said. By the way, you might like the last section of Joe Heath’s “Two Dilemmas for American Race Relations,” where he argues that, if you look outside the American context, the countries that have the most success with integration generally make race less salient. (Of course, part of what I’m arguing here is that people have understandable reasons for not wanting to integrate. So I see the issue as something of a dilemma with no easy solution in the near future.)
"White Americans have so little in common that the group identity ends up being mainly defined in opposition to other races."
Everything is defined in opposition to something else.
Do Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Indians, and Pakistanis all see themselves as possessing Asian solidarity back home in Asian the way they do in America?
Not in my experience, nor from reading worrisome headlines about World War III possibly breaking out between India and Pakistan.
In this globalized world, white Americans have a huge amount in common with each other relative to the rest of the world, as the rest of the world readily recognizes. The vast majority of white Americans' ancestors before 1607 lived in what they referred to as Christendom, spoke Indo-European languages, and formed a common civilization. Most white Americans are either descended from Brits or had their ancestors fairly aggressively Anglicized (e.g., Germans in 1917). There hasn't been a big immigration of non-Hispanic whites into the United States since roughly World War I. The Protestant - Catholic divide among white Americans vanished soon after JFK entered the American pantheon of martyrs on 11/22/1963.
The only reason people nod their heads to this self-evidently wrong talking point how little in common white Americans have is because they want to cajole white Americans into not asserting their potential political power.
I take your point, Steve, that White Americans have a lot in common. But I think it has more to do with being American than with being White.
And while you’re right that it’s okay to have an identity that’s defined in opposition to others, I don’t want that for *racial* identities in the US, because that would lead to more conflict and teeth-gnashing. (Solve for the equilibrium, as Tyler Cowen likes to say.)
Very late reply here - great treatment of a highly fraught topic.
One thing I'm not clear about: you say that colorblindness would mean the end of ethnic communities. Why would it though? You can have colorblindness as a state policy, but by sheer freedom of association, people of similar backgrounds, cultures of origins are entirely free to keep clustering together and keeping their culture alive!
Great question, skaladom.
It’s only if you have colorblindness at the level of individual morality that ethnic communities get unraveled. That kind of colorblindness seems to me hard to defend. But Hughes does really endorse it in the book; for him, colorblindness isn’t just supposed to be a matter of government policy, but a way of life.
In that case, I don't think they'll get very far. Government policy is fairly top-down, if you convince the right people you can get a whole policy regime like DEI installed, or (later) removed.
At the grassroots level though, you can write articles to convince people to give up their ethnic identities... but how far will that really go? At best you might convince a few ethnic youngsters to lean more towards the unmarked mainstream culture, or pair up outside of their own group. But some of that would happen anyway, and I don't think the groups themselves are in any danger of unraveling when they have so much heritage in them.
Sorry to get to this late - I've only just started reading your blog. I agree with much of this, but not the final parts about being proud of one's race. I think Du Bois is right in his "We are that people" quote - but wrong about what constitutes that people. His people are not "black", they are ADOS or "African-American". Ethiopians and Haitians are entirely different people with different cultures and different histories - as are the peoples that half of Obama's and Harris's ancestry come from.
Sorry for my slow reply, Amod -- and thanks for reading!
Your comment got me wondering, so I reread some Dubois. On reflection, I don't think he considers the Africans in America as a race in themselves, but rather sees them as the "advance guard of the Negro people," where "Negro" is a very "indefinite" term, but includes "200,000,000" people across Africa, the US, and the Caribbean.
That said, this is based on my reading of "Conservation" and The Souls of Black Folk, not the whole oeuvre, so he might use "race" differently elsewhere.
But I think that's exactly the problem - much like modern "black" activists today, Du Bois equivocates as to whether "Negro" refers to the American culture that raised him (one of which he could be legitimately proud) or of people of African ancestry worldwide. This equivocation, which erases cultural differences in favour of racial ones, seems common to calls for racial solidarity. All the arguments in favour of pride or unity (at least insofar as they work) are really referring just to the culture of American descendants of slavery, but because the term those people used for themselves was "black", it's just assumed that people who have nothing to do with that culture can be assimilated to it.
good post daniel, agree with your conclusions about colorblindness but come at it from the opposite direction since i think evolution is true (and is not magically restricted from operating above the neck, i.e. selection has heavily influenced the cognitive dispositions of populations). this review of coleman’s from last year was worthwhile.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-god-that-failed
Thanks for reading, Kenji -- and for sharing! That Aporia review was indeed worth reading, though I'm wary of "race realist" politics, given its lackluster track record in practice.
I do agree with the author that, *a priori*, there's not much reason a priori to treat in-group racial preferences more harshly than in-group family preferences. But there's very strong *a posteriori* reason to do so! In developed societies, racial strife (where it exists) is a large-scale, hard-to-solve problem in a way that family feuds are not.
Hope you've been well!
Very good piece. Maybe I'm missing something but I think Coleman mostly refers to colorblindness as an approach for public policy whereas the "ties that bind ethnic groups together" are something more private that I can imagine could coexist with public policies that promote integration. Coleman says "the aim of colorblindness is to consciously disregard race as a reason to treat individuals differently and as a category on which to base public policy." As a Hispanic in the US, the fact that my daughter school has a Hispanic Heritage months is not a driver of my ties to other Hispanics, the ties come from a shared language, food, and customs. Why can those practices coexists, mutate, and develop in a context of colorblind policies?
Thanks for the comment, Gabriel! I should’ve emphasized this more, but in the book, Coleman does define colorblindness so that it applies “both in our public policy and in our private lives” (p. 19). Still, I think you’re right that it might be possible to maintain cultural ties (language, food, etc.) while also having broadly colorblind government policies.
Thanks for this thoughtful article.
I’ve been mulling the idea of race abolitionism for the past couple of years after reading a piece and subsequently interviewing David and Subrena Smith on the Reconstructing Inclusion podcast.
I also encountered the Theory of Racelessness in meeting and speaking to the author of the “Raceless Antiracist” Sheena Mason last year.
The overall premise for them is that wherever race resides, racism follows and it needs to be let go of completely.
Having a son who is of Spanish (Galician) and African-American (Kansas) heritage, was born and lives in Swiss-German speaking Switzerland and whose mother tongue is Swiss-French and Spanish, ascribing a race to him occurs as grossly limiting to me.
I am learning how to speak to him about it as he grows older. He might experience some semblance of racism because he is a darker complexioned than most kids he plays with, but he is also a local. And, me not having the advantage of being local rarely feel that race plays a role in my daily life here.
Yeah, racism exists but the occurrences are rare and if they do occur, I pass them off as ignorance. Not all can emotionally compartmentalize like that but it is something that I came to conclude over time—another’s belief system is not my problem it’s theirs unless they do something violent to make it mine—“sticks and stones. . .”
I will work with my son to not subscribe to racialization even if it is ascribed to him by others.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Amri. “Grossly limiting” sounds right: I feel for mixed-race kids who are pressured to define themselves in ways that don’t make sense to them or to their families. And thanks also for the tips — looking forward to listening to those interviews you did.
With pleasure. Sheena will be later but she writes on here, I believe; as does David Smith on Dehumanization.
Actually, 21st Century DNA scans have shown that the white - black distinction in America is pretty much real. A big discovery of this century was the great majority of self-identify non-Hispanic African-Americans who have two parents who identify as black tend to be about 5/8ths to 31/32nds blacks genetically.
Similarly, most Americans who self-identify as non-Hispanic whites are well over 90% white genetically. Unlike in, say, Brazil just aren't a lot of non-Hispanics who are mostly white but kind of black until quite recently.
Once you know that genetic reality, it's pretty easy to figure out why: the one-drop rule and opposition to endogamy led to two different marriage and thus gene pools, and moving from one to the other was onerous. These cultural norms socially constructed America's genetic reality of having highly genetically distinctive white and black races.
In contrast, in Latin America, different social norms socially constructed quite different distributions of genes. It's common there for people to be 80% white and 20% black, a proportion that was only rarely seen in the US among non-Hispanics until quite recently.
It remains curious to me that the most important voice on the relationship of race history in America and how individuals think of themselves today -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- only shows up in a footnote. Watching a single episode of Finding Your Roots might help here. There is so much more to this conversation that the American public understands, quietly.
Was there a particular idea that you thought was missing? (I like Gates’s work, and I might engage with him more in a follow up!)
All of it? Your piece is tops of waves, a good intro to the vast conversation, which he has kept active more than any living figure.
I would just point out that the notion of black as ethnicity is pernicious and can be quasi-racist, as culture does not inhere in skin color per se. I am an “intersectional” black person - not a descendant of American slaves, but a child of Caribbean immigrants who grew up in a mostly white suburb. I never felt that the default American racial categories really fit my situation, as I am not ethnically “African-American,” even though I was always assumed to by others to be such based on something as superficial as my appearance. This has lent me a unique perspective on the arbitrariness of American racial identity throughout my life.
Let’s face it - the American notion of black culture is very limited and limiting and perpetuates the idea that to be interested in anything other than “black” things marks you as some sort of oddity. You can’t grow up with a keen interest in something like chess or pottery or classical music without being made to feel by others that you are somehow inauthentically black or trying to be white. In fact, anything not specifically coded as black is deemed to be white. Nobody thinks anything of a white or Asian person interested in pretty much anything other than the fact that they are interested in it.
It’s simply another form of racism that is not focused on by the left but is quite suffocating for an independently minded black person. I don’t doubt that it is a contributing factor to low black representation in many important facets of American life.
As part of colorblindness, we should normalize the idea that the color of your skin is not an essential clue to your interests or culture.
Thanks for your comment, LV. I think you make a powerful point about the arbitrariness of identity categories.
The poker analogy in this article nicely illustrates the desire for reparation, and its presentation holds the key to understanding the need for equal outcomes. Let’s set the scene with a white man and a black man at the poker table, then add the rest of the races — yellows, browns, reds, and everyone else — to see how the game is played in real life. The truth is, everyone has been cheating as much as possible, and their historical ability to cheat depended on technological and institutional advancement. The entire history of humankind is a story of exploitation. The racial card that these neorasists are playing now is just another way of swindling.
Some people still believe that disparities are concerning and that social policies are necessary to create a uniform, equal outcome. Thomas Sowell, in his book “The Vision of the Anointed,” lists many natural disparities that have nothing to do with race or any prejudices against or for any group of people.
The author is right that colorblindness can erase ethnic and tribal identities, and I would add that it fosters unity under the American flag. Is this a negative development? Is being an American not enough? Consider countries where ethnic identities are more prominent than national ones. These countries tend to be unstable and regressive, often engaging in violence and terror. Perhaps the left-liberal intelligentsia should focus more on promoting integration and assimilation instead of defending tribal and racial divisions, as these can lead to civil war.
I think you’re right about the benefits of a unifying identity—but in a classically liberal society, there are serious limits on what the state can do to restrict individual choice. If members of a group want to live together, or go to the same church, or only marry within the group, there’s not too much a liberal can do about that.
Now you’re acting as if identity politics isn’t the official doctrine of the liberal elite—like they don’t actively promote multiculturalism or immediately cry racism whenever a dissenting voice arises, as if open border policies and the strong protection of minority groups are somehow inherent to human nature, rather than political tools wielded by the liberal elite.
I just mean to say that those policies come at a significant moral cost—and would clash with a lot of con law.
I have greyscale automatically turn on for all social media, so I can’t read the dots test.
That's a good choice on your part. The dots spell out "Race," by the way!