{"id":31967,"date":"2013-06-30T22:57:06","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T22:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31967"},"modified":"2013-06-30T22:57:06","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T22:57:06","slug":"a-nation-of-mutts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31967","title":{"rendered":"A Nation of Mutts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2013\/06\/28\/opinion\/brooks-a-nation-of-mutts.html\" target=\"_blank\">A Nation of Mutts<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2013-06-28<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Brooks_(journalist)\" target=\"_blank\">David Brooks<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we\u2019ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we\u2019re possibly heading to 15 percent.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, up until now, America was primarily an outpost of European civilization. Between 1830 and 1880, 80 percent of the immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. Over the following decades, the bulk came from Southern and Central Europe. In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born population came from Europe, with European ideas and European heritage.<\/p>\n<p>Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams \u2014 Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It\u2019s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.<\/p>\n<p>Because high immigration is taking place at a time of unprecedentedly low ethnic hostility, we\u2019re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan. These people transcend existing categories and soften the social boundaries between groups.<\/p>\n<p>This won\u2019t lead to a bland m\u00e9lange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%C3%81lvaro_Vargas_Llosa\" target=\"_blank\">Alvaro Vargas Llosa<\/a> points out in his book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.org\/publications\/books\/summary.asp?id=103\" target=\"_blank\">Global Crossings<\/a>,\u201d the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire opinion piece <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2013\/06\/28\/opinion\/brooks-a-nation-of-mutts.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Nation of Mutts The New York Times 2013-06-28 David Brooks Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we\u2019ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,394,20],"tags":[15059,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-31967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-david-brooks","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31967","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=31967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}