{"id":13250,"date":"2012-02-03T00:59:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T00:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13250"},"modified":"2014-11-27T03:26:43","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T03:26:43","slug":"miscegenation-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13250","title":{"rendered":"Miscegenation Ball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Miscegenation Ball<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\n2011-02-01<\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Editor<\/p>\n

Reporters should stop writing these beiging of America stories, and listen to Jamelle Boiue<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, the American racial landscape goes beyond white\/black\/Latino\/Asian. Which is why it’s important to understand the significance of a black\/non-black divide. On nearly every measure\u2014from income and education to housing and health\u2014the distance between blacks and everyone else is large and enduring. Upwardly mobile immigrant groups have always counterpoised themselves against the descendants of slaves in an effort to attain the privileges of whiteness. This is a simplified analysis, but my guess is that the dynamic will remain, with a few alternations. Some ethnic immigrants may never “become” white, but since blackness retains this social stigma, it’s very likely we’ll understand them as non-black, which in practice, is the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a depressing perspective. But it’s not only the likely truth about our future, it’s the truth about our past. The first thing to understand is that race, as we know it, is an invention and a re-invention. You need not go back but a century to see people referring to the “Irish Race”\u00a0 or the “Italian Race.”\u00a0 or the “Hebrew Race.” Indeed, by the standards of the 19th century racialism, today’s “white people” are an unholy, mongrel mix.<\/p>\n

And so it has long been with “blacks,” an ethnic group whose members range in appearance from Beyonc\u00e9<\/a> and Charlie Rangel<\/a> to Yaphet Kotto<\/a> and India Arie<\/a>. I love my family. But the photos from our Christmas Eve dinners immediately reveal that the notion that we’re all of the same “race” is not so much a statement of phenotype, but of culture and sociology. It should not be forgotten that both <\/strong>America’s president<\/strong><\/a> and <\/strong>First Lady<\/strong><\/a> have “white” ancestry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well-meaning neophytes often suggest that if people of different “races” screwed each other, we’d all look the same, and our problems would disappear. Unfortunately, such magical thinking underestimates the abiding complexity of human thought.In fact people of different “races,” have been screwing for over two millenia. Our response\u2014over the past 500 years\u2014has been to invent more races…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miscegenation Ball The Atlantic 2011-02-01 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor Reporters should stop writing these beiging of America stories, and listen to Jamelle Boiue: The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,394,20],"tags":[6002,6000,6001],"class_list":["post-13250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-jamelle-boiue","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-atlantic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}