Changing Minority Landscape

I remember in the nineties when demographers and futurists predicted the day would soon come when -- because of the growth in minority populations -- whites would become the "new minority." Combining all the minority populations -- African-American, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern and others -- would equal a number greater than that of European-Americans.

Although we're not quite there yet, that day is still approaching, and the pace of that growth is quickening due to the rapid influx of Mexicans into the U.S. in recent years.

Pundits in the nineties suggested that whites would lose some of their political influence because blacks, Latinos and other minorities would forge political alliances, becoming a unified minority population and outvote the whites on critical civil rights, social and economic issues. But the blending of minorities -- the social and political forging of black and brown -- has not been occurring as many had hoped it would. Nor are the new minorities of Middle Eastern or Asian descent creating significant alliances with blacks or Latinos.

In fact, rather than coming together, minority groups in America seem to be isolating themselves in their own communities, maintaining their own languages and cultural traits. The new Latinos arrivals, generally are not assimilating into American values and language. The government-led multicultural movement has facilitated this separateness by encouraging Spanish as a second U.S. language and the private sector has bolstered this with the rapid growth of Spanish and Arabic language radio and television programming. This isolationism is enabled further by our diversity ethos that celebrates separateness more than it does inclusion. These are generalizations of course, pointing to a trend. To be sure, many new arrivals, legal and illegal, are making sincere efforts to assimilate and become Americans at least in life-style.

Some tension is being felt between the black and Latino communities across the country, especially between newly-arrived Mexican immigrants and blacks. Mexicans are moving into previously all-black urban neighborhoods and the usual friction between black and Mexican youth and young men is occurring. In extreme cases, Mexican gangs are attacking and killing black gangs members and even killing blacks who are not involved in gangs as a way to intimidate. This may end up being just another episode in the long history of neighborhood youth gangs in America. But for now it is doing nothing to foster togetherness between black and brown people. Luckily, inter-ethnic gang activity has not emerged as a problem in Detroit as it has in Los Angeles, Florida and Virginia.

Many blacks are now sensing that illegal immigrants -- especially Mexicans -- are taking jobs away from blacks. We're not talking about low-paying seasonal work picking fruits and vegetables. The jobs being filled more and more by Latinos are in steady work with contract landscaping companies, building and road construction, home improvement, and nonunion trade jobs. The new workers are willing to work for less than American workers, and many employers are candid about their belief that the (mostly Mexican) immigrant workers work harder than Americans -- white or black. I am not sure how much of this occurs in Metro Detroit. But I still see few blacks working on construction crews in a city that's 90 percent black (see below).

Make no mistake, legal immigration is good for America. In Southeast Michigan alone, immigrants add 15-20 percent of our gross domestic product. The poor condition of our state and city economies dictates that legal immigrants from all countries with talent, education and skills -- and those will little skill but a willingness to work -- should be encouraged to come here and help us rebuild our communities.

But I'm not yet seeing any coming together of minority groups to forge a political monolith to challenge white people on social and political issues.

See related posts:

• Where are black construction workers?
• Detroit near last in minority hiring for road crews.

End of Blackness

Several years ago I read The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and was impressed by her facile and intellectual writing style and the force of her message. In her book Dickerson concludes that we’ve gotten all that we are going to get from whites in terms of apology or concession, that through begrudging white acquiescence and black determination, blacks have made tremendous strides in the past 45 years since the Civil Rights Movement, that racism is not dead but has morphed into a new, less virulent strain that while still harmful no longer prevents blacks from achievement, and most importantly, that blacks should stop looking to whites to solve their problems but rather find solutions within themselves as individuals and from within their own community.

I pulled Blackness off the shelf recently and began to read it again, as I do with most books that I really enjoy. I expected to savor again some of the lucid, clear points that Dickerson makes in this very insightful and pragmatic writing. But something is happening this time around. I’m picking up a vibe that I’m not sure whether I missed the first time, or that my views have since shifted – probably to the right but still left of center – since I last read the book and I’m reading it now through a different prism. From this reading of Blackness I’m feeling from her an edge, an anger, even a meanness that I didn’t feel before.

I know that a black person writing meanly about white people should come as no surprise, and is with justification. I’m used to taking a beating, as a white, reading black literature of the fifties, sixties and later, about black oppression and victimization, about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and overt racism, about how a white can take no comfort in racial ignorance, that all whites are guilty, actively or passively, in America’s great Original Sin. I fully understand, though no longer fully accept, that today's white cannot wash his hands of the racism of centuries ago by simply saying I wasn’t there. Such readings for me have always had a purging effect, as if reading the work of an angry black author was a cleansing, washing away at least some of the white guilt, and possibly – though rarely – showing me the way to salvation from the racial swamp that we all have to muck around in.

Writings like Dickerson’s always leave me perplexed. As a white reader you take a real pounding from constant reminders of how your being white ties you permanently to our nation’s treatment of blacks first as as slaves, then victims of the Jim Crow era, followed by being the recipients of the various forms of overt and invidious racism of the 20th century up to today.

The black writers remind a white person how barren is his soul of love, how hopelessly egocentric and Eurocentric he is. What’s perplexing is that nothing concrete is offered as to how whites can help. I believe that the vast majority of whites want to do the right thing when it comes to helping other Americans in need, regardless of race. But whites today don't know what to do when it comes to being part of the race solution, if there even is one, and blacks have nothing substantive to offer them as to how to help. (Dickerson at least offers a strategy for blacks to follow.)

Most of us have come to recognize that blacks historically have been treated egregiously and, we are willing to take part in something to make things right. America has been trying to do that for the past 45 years. First, the black-led Civil Rights Movement blew the doors off old-school racism, prejudice and discrimination. Then President Johnson ushered in the $7 trillion Great Society that harmed more than helped black America, destroying the black family and black manhood with open-ended welfare. Maybe whites have not embraced the change, but we have accepted it as inevitable, and we either stepped aside and let it happen, or jumped in and helped to bring about the change. After all, the vast majority of the social workers and social engineers of the Great Society where white liberals, motivated by a blend of white guilt and a sincere, if naive, desire to do good.

Dickerson thinks that because American culture is out there, highly visible for all to see on television, film, art, and the Internet that blacks know what whites thinking and feeling. Black race writers always see whites as transparent, an easy read. They still rely on the dated model of the old days, when blacks worked in the midst of white folks but were invisible as slaves, domestics, and menial laborers. And whites carried on with their lives in the presence of these blacks as if they were invisible. Or some blacks became close friends or confidantes and were brought in on the nuances of white life. But those days are past. Today, all our shit is hanging out there – black, white, Latino, whoever. And all of us from all cultures and groups in America know, or have access to, what the others are thinking, or how they feel on a certain topic. There are no more racial secrets in America. We’re the Mulatto Nation now.

Conservative Movement Growing in Black America

The Democrats many now have a political majority in U.S. House of Representatives, but there is no question that the conservative movement is making inroads into black America. Many reasons explain this change in political belief among a small but growing number of blacks. One is the physical disintegration of the black community. The upward mobility of blacks and their physical move to the suburbs has strained the black community's cohesiveness because the entire community no longer lives in one concentrated urban location. Another is that affluent and middle class blacks no longer feel powerless and dependent on goverment to improve their lives. Economist Walter Williams is one of my favorite writers on race in America and he explains things this way in an article he wrote in 2005:

By any assessment, black Americans have made the greatest progress, over some of the highest hurdles and in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in the history of mankind. If one added the earnings of black Americans and thought of us as a nation, we'd be the 14th richest nation. Black Americans have held some of the nation's highest positions, such as secretaries of State, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and Education; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and mayors of some of our largest cities. Blacks are some of the world's most famous personalities, and a few blacks rank among the world's richest people. In 1865, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed these gains possible in a little over a century, if ever. As such, it not only speaks well of the determination and intestinal fortitude of a people, but also of a nation in which such gains were possible.

Here's the link to the entire article.