Last Friday I was on the deck of the decommissioned USS Midway in San Diego bay to see about 90 sailors and marines take the oath of citizenship. The Navy Band Southwest performed and four sailors paraded the colors. The ceremony was rich in military tradition but it was also a picture of a changing America that lots of people find unsettling.
Yes, there were one or two immigrants from Europe who became Americans that day. One from Italy and one from Poland, as I recall. But the vast majority were Asian, African, Latin American or Caribbean. It was hard to find a white person among them.
There are still an awful lot of white people in this country and they still dominate positions of power and status. But that’s a reality that may not last long. So I wonder, what does it mean to be white and what will become of me and my fellow Caucasians?
If you watch Fox News you see white people acting pissed off as they spend great energy blasting the Obama administration. Barack Obama is a bit like those sailors on the Midway. He’s scary because he is a powerful symbol of our country’s future, which is non-white and culturally complex.
But the feelings of the angry conservative white man don’t tell the whole story. For instance, post-election polls show that if white people had been the only ones voting in California in 2008 we would have approved gay marriage. A Canadian comic and blogger named Christian Lander wrote a book called “Stuff White People Like.” His list of stuff includes Barack Obama, coffee, The New Yorker Magazine, bike shops and recycling. Clearly, he’s talking about highly educated white people living in blue states or large urban areas.
The American notion of being “white” is a strange one, though it’s not unheard of outside our borders. I assume our national whiteness was created to define who was a free person back in the days of American slavery. There were white and black people and not much in between.
The burgeoning ethnic variations now living together inside the U.S. have made it harder and harder to determine who or what is really white. Speaking of the old world, if white people begin in Europe where do they end? An Iranian acquaintance once told me that the Persian people where white but everyone to the south or east were not. He imagined a kind of Persian line of demarcation. Compare that worldview to the small town in the Midwest, where I grew up, which was so ethnically northern European that Italians were people of color.
The great white race will become something quite different, worldwide, as birth rates in Europe decline and the developing world industrializes. We’ll become fewer and less powerful. Ultimately, this could mean Fox News gets fewer viewers or it could mean countries like the Netherlands become more religious and more conservative.
Race is one in a long list of things humans have used to decide who are members of their tribe. Once it was family, then it was language, then religion, then nation, then skin color. Sadly, in the U.S. today, social class may be the most powerful determinant of our caste. It largely determines where you live, what car you drive and how you vote.
As long as I live, I’m sure skin color will continue to determine a part of what we are. That will change with time. But tribal instincts are too strongly ingrained in us to ever let us look at every human being and conclude that person is just “one of us.”
CUL-DE-SAC 