According to a recent Census Bureau report, whites could become a minority of the U.S. population as early as 2042. In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, contributor Hua Hsu explores the implications of this development from both a demographic and cultural perspective. Also see: Intolerant Chic (October 2008) The new "white people" are bigoted, but not the way you think--or they'll admit. A review of Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like. By Benjamin Schwarz To some extent, Hsu argues, an important shift has already taken place. "Where the culture is concerned," he writes, "[white America] is already all but finished." While some are celebrating this new, more multiethnic America, others, he notes, have reacted with anxiety--sometimes with blunt xenophobia (like Pat Buchanan, who characterizes America's white-minority future as "Third World America"), and sometimes with ironic self-deprecation (like Christian Lander, whose blog and book, both titled "Stuff White People Like," have found popular success). Such concerns about perceived or real challenges to white hegemony are nothing new. Hua Hsu opens his essay with a look at some of the fears about racial encroachment that once prevailed among a certain cadre of scholarly white men in the 1920s: Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class's political and cultural power than to a perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness. From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s.
According to a recent Census Bureau report, whites could become a minority of the U.S. population as early as 2042. In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, contributor Hua Hsu explores the implications of this development from both a demographic and cultural perspective.
Also see: Intolerant Chic (October 2008) The new "white people" are bigoted, but not the way you think--or they'll admit. A review of Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like. By Benjamin Schwarz
To some extent, Hsu argues, an important shift has already taken place. "Where the culture is concerned," he writes, "[white America] is already all but finished." While some are celebrating this new, more multiethnic America, others, he notes, have reacted with anxiety--sometimes with blunt xenophobia (like Pat Buchanan, who characterizes America's white-minority future as "Third World America"), and sometimes with ironic self-deprecation (like Christian Lander, whose blog and book, both titled "Stuff White People Like," have found popular success).
Such concerns about perceived or real challenges to white hegemony are nothing new. Hua Hsu opens his essay with a look at some of the fears about racial encroachment that once prevailed among a certain cadre of scholarly white men in the 1920s:
Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class's political and cultural power than to a perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness. From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s.
That I think is the surprise. Once Hispanics get past the first generation and start speaking English at home, it's surprising how quickly they basically see themselves as white. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
The two big cities I've spent a fair amount of time in are both majority-black, and, yes, black people -- and Latinos and Asians -- like organic food and lattes. They watch soccer and drink craft beer, too.
Anyway, as for white hegemony in culture, I'd submit that whites haven't had cultural hegemony for quite some time. Nearly the entire music industry in America, for example, is composed of artists producing songs that have their roots in Black America. Unless you think marketing the Beatles and Elvis was more important, culturally, than what Robert Johnson and BB King actually produced.
The ratings on baseball continue to tank, while soccer is on the rise -- a trend that I suspect will continue as more kids play soccer instead of baseball in youth leagues, and as America's Latino population continues to boom.
This is the point -- the point where race enters into anything -- at which a pretty sharp observer of politics, like Pat Buchanan, is exposed as the Nazi-loving racist pig he truly is. (Buchanan makes Lou Dobbs look like Martin Luther King.) "White culture" -- how the hell do you define that? -- isn't all but dead. The Very Serious People have these silly ideas that (1) cultures divided by race are still something obvious (in much of America, especially among kids, they're not), and (2) that "culture" is some kind of quantifiable thing rather than a constantly-evolving and -growing series of contributions.
It's not wholly unrelated to Tweety spitting all over Howard Fineman and Chuck Todd for five minutes straight about left-handed, anti-Vatican II, industrial working-class whites in Whothefuckcaresburg County, PA. As though they were going to magically change their opinions about everything because the guy on the ballot was black with a funny name instead of John Kerry or Al Gore. People's understandings of culture -- especially old white people in rural areas and those who masturbate to what they imagine those people's lives are like -- are really screwed up in some corners of America.
The stupid really burns. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
