In 2010, a record 10 percent of opposite-sex married couples told
America’s census takers that they lived in an interracial household—up
from 7.4 percent in 2000. Given America's racial history with blacks,
Latinos, Japanese and Chinese, 1 in 10 is no doubt a pretty intriguing
fact about the country, a reflection of big social transformations that
have taken place over the past few decades, and worth examination on its
own. But the numbers don’t just tell us about where the country is—they
suggest a dramatic story about where it’s headed.
President Barack Obama is the living embodiment of this trend—a one-man melting pot, as he noted during his March 18, 2008 address
on the long-since-forgotten Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy. “I have
brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race
and every hue, scattered across three continents,” he said, “and for as
long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is
my story even possible.” He was re-elected in 2012 amid historic turnout
among minority voters, a fact that has not been lost on his opponents,
especially the white conservatives who inhabit the outer reaches of the
far right.
In that sense, the often racially charged opposition
to America’s first multiracial president is due less to his own mixed
heritage and more to what he represents: the big demographic and
cultural wave that threatens to swamp the Republican Party. For the
modern GOP, whose aging, overwhelmingly white base increasingly
resembles the United States not as it is today but as it once was, the
same feverishness that animated the partisan fights of years past is now
joined with a sense of powerlessness as a younger generation of
Americans looks like increasingly hostile territory—for now.
America has had plenty of racial diversity in past eras, of course—particularly in the American South and Southwest. For most of the 20th century, blacks were around 10 percent of the U.S. population, but in the pre-civil rights era South, blacks were more than a quarter of the population. Hispanics made up approximately 20 percent of the population in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas after 1900 (a number up to about 30 percent today). The difference back then is that across these regions, the doctrine of white racial supremacy was the norm, discrimination and segregation were commonplace and interracial marriage was illegal in the South; mixed marriages were almost unheard of. We’ve had plenty of diversity, in other words, but not the ingredients to change our politics.
The civil rights movement upended all that as Americans erected legal protections against racial discrimination, advanced affirmative action and ended the restrictive 1920s immigration quota system. But it was only the belated acceptance of interracial marriage that became the threshold for real racial acceptance and equality. The country had passed the Voting Rights Act and barred discrimination in employment in 1965, but even two years later the nation was in a tizzy over the first mainstream portrayal of a mixed-race couple in the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. True acceptance—as with the more recent debates over gay marriage—has been decades in the making.
Only recently, in fact, have Americans embraced interracial marriage in overwhelming numbers. Overall, approval went up slowly during the civil rights era, stalled in the 1980s short of a majority, but jumped after 1995, reaching a high of 87 percent today. White approval jumped after 2000 and now stands at 84 percent. (Barely a majority of whites over 50, however, and just under 40 percent of white seniors, tell pollsters it would be OK if a member of their own family married someone black.)
Americans aren’t simply coming to terms with the inexorable march of demography; young people in particular have come to view interracial marriage as a positive thing —something that shows we are a better society. More than 60 percent of those under age 30 and almost half of those under 50 believe this, while only 5 percent of Americans under 30 say intermarriage is bad for the country. Contrast that with older Americans among whom racism persists: Just a quarter of seniors—and a third of conservatives—look at interracial marriages and say this makes us a better America. Millennials—those born between 1978 and 2000—will already be well over a third of eligible voters in the next presidential election, and there is every reason to believe the younger generation behind them shares that same outlook, with a vengeance. For many young people, tolerance is a point of pride: Roughly half say younger people have better attitudes toward other races and groups than older people.
It’s this combination of increased diversity, reduced legal barriers and attitudinal changes that has taken interracial marriage mainstream. The proportion of new marriages between couples of different races and ethnicities doubled from 6.7 percent in 1980 to 15.1 percent in 2010. A stunning 17 percent of newly married African-Americans, 26 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of Asian-Americans married someone of a different race. About a quarter of newly married African-American men and over a third of Asian women formed interracial households. This is the new America.
Extrapolate current population trends to 2016, and Republicans have even more to worry about. With the same proportional turnout rates by race, age and gender, Obama would win Florida by 4 percentage points. Arizona and North Carolina are becoming competitive, and even Texas could someday go blue. No wonder conservative Republicans are so terrified of America’s first interracial president—not for who he is or what he does, but for what he means.
But if there’s one truism about American politics, it’s that no advantage is permanent. After all, Democrats once had a lock on the South, and it was Southern Democrats like Georgia Sen. Richard Russell who stood firm against President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda. The two parties swapped regions and voters on a big scale. As America’s racial and ethnic categories continue their mad scramble, Republicans will face a crisis, and who can predict how that will shake out? The future of the parties is in any event much less interesting than the future of the country. The young people who helped twice elect Barack Obama might someday bring us the first half-black, half-Hispanic president, or the first half-white, half-Asian president. And who knows how they will change the country? That's what will matter.
Stanley B. Greenberg is a Democratic pollster and political strategist.
1 comMENTS:
Do not Commit Adultery.............Miscegenation
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