I agree that the "beige future" is rather far off, especially if the growth rate of interracial mating doesn't skyrocket.
I also agree that it sure would be nice if we got rid of prejudices in the meantime.
And I agree that even in a beige future, people might focus on minute differences in the shade of beige, just as they do with different shades of white and black (and others) right now.
But I disagree that the beige future would involve any one race disappearing or "removing the dark-skinned people." The whole point is, if the races actually crossed each others' cultural borders and mated in a more random fashion, and populations were not isolated as they have been for centuries, then the common phenotype would eventually be intermediate and the extremes would become very uncommon.
The really dark-skinned phenotype might vanish, but so would the really white phenotype, along with some other traits. If we're willing to let go of our racial pride and vanity, then nobody should give a rat's ass if the more extreme phenotypes are no longer prevalent in the distant future. I think you may be envisioning a whole swath of humanity being deliberately bred out of existence, when in reality it would just be the inevitable product of evolution----changes in allele frequencies over time----with the more extreme phenotypes fading from view. But of course events in the future could change all that, anyhow, and in 5000 years we could be back to our current color scheme.
I married someone of a different "race," and we had a kid this year. Years ago there may have been a part of me that desired to see myself and some of my recessive traits in my kids. If that desire hadn't been dismissed, I probably would've sought a mate who looked like me, and my kid might have blue eyes instead of brown, or whatever. But that shit really doesn't matter. I understand that having pride in one's phenotype and one's race may be a necessary reaction to racism and prejudice, but it's still vanity and it's still pride. Now, I don' think people should go out of their way to marry someone of another race, but if we cut out the prejudice AND cut out the vanity and pride, we'd see a hell of a lot more of it.
By all means, let's just do away with prejudice. I'm just saying that if racial traits aren't discernible then it's a lot harder to discriminate.
There is some truth to that--people tend to discriminate against people who are different from them, and the most obvious marker of difference is phenotype. From this perspective, a black/white marriage is a blow against racism, and our history of white supremacy, because it produces kids who presumably don't represent the phenotypical extreme of blackness or whiteness. The hope is that one day, we'll all be beige hence rendering racism inoperative, hence the "Beige Theory" of fighting racism.
I think to believe that requires a misunderstanding of humanity, history, and white supremacy. I'll start where I'm weakest. I don't know how the great St. Clair Drake's book, Black Folk Here And There has held up, and perhaps its conclusions are outdated. But as I recall, one of the books most profound arguments was that while prejudice and stereotyping based on--but not limited to--color is pretty natural, white supremacy is not. There is a difference between thinking black people--or any people who are different than you-- aren't that bright, and thinking that any black man should be lynched for having sex with a white woman.
More to the point, there is a difference in between thinking that blacks are animalistic and thinking that blacks are, by edict of God and science, bound to a life of slavery and second-class citizenship. For starters, while we've become accustomed to thinking of animal stereotypes in relation to blacks, it's actually pretty common theme of group vs. group prejudice, black or not. Now, one may follow from another, but it doesn't necessarily. And when it does follow, it's often about something more than naked phenotypical hatred.
Thus the point of slavery, and Jim Crow, was not to express a naked hatred of someone who looked different than you--it was to create a permanent class of free labor. In the early days of this country, you find racism, but you also find black slaves and white indentured servants running away together. You find them joining
You find them fucking and marrying, as humans are wont to do. And when Virginia decides to outlaw interracial unions, you find them organizing against the law. These people looked very different from each other, and while there was considerable racism, they did not, en masse, look at each other the way their kids would look at each other a century or two later. Color prejudice was the means of systemic racism in America, but it wasn't the end.
It may seem, at first glance like the ancient marital beef between blacks and whites extends from how different we look. But it's so much more complicated. And humans being humans, even if we were all beige, we'd find some way to discriminate. Assuming that we can destroy whiteness or blackness, assumes that these are actual, tangible things which can't be redefined, refitted and reformed. But history says otherwise, and I'd argue that should we ever become one race, we'd basically create new ones.
Circling back, it's true that the interracial couple is striking a blow against white racism--but not because they're creating a beige kid. They're striking a blow because they're thinking more about their own individuality, their own humanity, than about convention. We can all applaud that--and while applauding it, understand that the notion of fucking our way out of racism, presumes too much of our good will, and too little of our imagination.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I've thought about this a fair bit. In my mind, I imagine a race of aliens who, with benevolent intentions, modify the human genome so that all kids, from this point forward, are born blue and with a uniform set of common features.
I think that if this were to happen, people wouldn't accept the notion that there was just one "race" now. I think, instead, people would adopt the practice of wearing some sort of badge to declare that they were a member of such-and-such group, as a matter of personal pride, and that the same prejudices and bigotries would persist.
Granted, it would be much easier for someone to pass themselves off as belonging to another "race", but I suspect that the stigma of doing so (e.g., being viewed as a sell-out) would be correspondingly greater, thus offsetting that to some degree.
For whatever reason, we humans have a strong desire to draw boundaries around and between ourselves and race is simple one of the more convenient methods that we have for doing so.
@andrew This makes me think of the old Dr. Seuss story about the Sneetches, where in those with Stars Upon Thars were naturally better than those with No Stars Upon Thars.
Seuss references = Automatic WIN.
"And humans being humans, even if we were all beige, we'd find some way to discriminate."
OK. But we could take a lot of the sting out of discrimination if it didn’t have a function in the economic sector, i.e. if cheap labor weren’t an essential foundation of the system.
The "beige" argument is just simple sociology. Breaking down ingroups. Of course, as you argue, ingroups will form along different tribal lines no matter what color people may be in the future.
But if it means all girls are going to look like Rashida Jones, then whatever. Bring on the future.
It's worth thinking about the inherent assumption--that all biracial people will actually look like Rashida Jones. Part of the problem is the biracial people we all know are celebrities, and thus preselected for "attractiveness." I don't want to insult anybody, or take this too far, but I'd be careful about assuming that, based on viewing of celebrities, biracial is opposite of unattractive.
Given that at least a plurality of black Americans have some white blood and clearly do not all look like celebrities it should be pretty easy to put that thought aside.
That said, I'm pretty sure he meant it as a joke.
Yeah, I know. I didn't mean to single him out--but it's not an uncommon notion.
I think he was joking too, but you might be surprised at how many times I've heard someone marvel at the beautiful skin of a "mixed-race" child and say how wonderful we'll all look when everyone is that way. Uh, no. There will still be acne, weak chins and (as in my case) huge foreheads.
Yeah, that was a joke. It's early on the West Coast and the levity seemed appropriate.
I'm not at all unfamiliar with the "biracial=attractive" notion. We Asians call it "hapa". Weezer sang a whole song about it.
And TNC, all celebrities are preselected for attractiveness. But Rashida is attractive amongst even the preselected...CMON!
But yeah, back to the actual serious point, I agree that ingroups form along lines that have nothing to do with race so getting beige isn't necessarily the answer to solving an inherent human condition. People like discriminating against other people. I seem to recall an old Dr. Suess about discriminating against people that didn't have stars on their bellies or something like that. And there's way too much historical evidence that no matter how outwardly homogeneous racial/ethnic groupings may seem, some form of discrimination found a way to happen anyway.
You're thinking of "The Sneetches" by Dr. Suess:
I always thought it would have been a better idea if the plain-bellied ones simply responded to the star-bellies' snobbery by painting an extended middle-finger "fuck you" on their bellies.
Reminds me of a family I worked with in New Mexico. AA mother, W father, and Iwas in contact with the Mother, Grand mother, grandfather, Aunt. They had two little "beige Boys who fit the biracial= attractive stereotype, and used to always joke that they couldn't have anymore kids because they would get a girl who would have light skin, freckles, wide facial features and kinky yellow hair.
Actually, all the NON-celebrity biracial people I know personally are exceptionally attractive. I do think there's something to it. Maybe because they are sort of unusual-looking and we're drawn to the exotic.
People who look the same have long formed in-groups, heirarchies, classes, ethnicities (Serbs and Bosnians, for example.) Race is already mostly about cultural patterns and historical experiences, not just about color. Remove the small constellation of secondary genetic characteristics that signify those experiences, the rich panoply of other signifiers will still do the work.
It isn't very hard for me to recognize someone of almost identical appearance to myself who nonetheless has a very different level of educational attainment, regional origin, etc.
You can see this kind of cultural racism in my native Peru and throughout Latin America, where dress, food preferences, accent, and even favourite soccer team do more to differentiate blacks and natives from the mestizo (majority mized-race population) than do skin colour or phenotype. The beige theory also sounds a lot like the 1930s Mexican conception of a 'cosmic race' made up of mixed-race people, which mexican academics thought would save them from internal divisions and build a united nation. Of course, cultural, geographic, and class factors continue to play a role in Mexican prejudice. In fact, everyone so acknowledges the role of culture that a |Peruvian presidential candidate once recommended that natives simply move out of the countryside and into the city to become mestizos and avoid racism.
In short, I am not at all optimistic that biracial children will eliminate illogical prejudice.
dmk - I'm Peruvian, too, though I grew up in the States.
"The beige theory also sounds a lot like the 1930s Mexican conception of a 'cosmic race' made up of mixed-race people, which mexican academics thought would save them from internal divisions and build a united nation."
given the amount of time it would take to get to a genetically uniform humanity (without forcing everyone to date interracially) it takes a leap of faith to think that the present day social/technological/geographical factors contributing to our ability to choose partners of different races will last long enough to alter the human genome. Our historical moment is incredibly brief compared to the overall span of human evolution. So, while the beige future may come about, it can't be prescribed as a means to save our society from its racial prejudice and divisions.
I think there is going to be a change, or rather than continuation of a change that's already begun. I don't believe in describing things as "better" or "worse" - I don't really believe that the human condition is on a long march to utopia, and changes are (except in the cases of obvious atrocity such as slavery and pogroms and such) just changes.
But let us say that there was a period of history we could call the age of "high racism:" explicit racial ideologies, theories of racial types, theories of human development we could characterize as the "white man's burden," the spread of European colonialism throughout the world, theories of eugenics, etc. Our racial categories are drawn from this period, and are connected to, for example, 19th century theories of anthropology and 20th century racialist ideas (whether part of white supremacy, as in Nazism, or a reflexive reaction to it, like the Nation of Islam.)
Those categories as such are waning in explanatory force, but they persist and will continue to persist in the context of other signifiers - signifiers which can even stand for those categories themselves (i.e., "acting like" a member of another racial category.) My claim (prediction?) is a bit more specific than just saying there will always be something to discriminate about - I consider that both obvious and inevitable - but rather that race is going to become a more fluid category interacting with other categories, some of which are structural, some elective, some circumstantial. When I hear the term "post-racial", this is what I think of, not of the arrival of a mythical color-blind difference-free society.
If I had a vote, all women would look like Lauryn Hill or Marion Jones or Gabrille Union. (j/k)
Seriously though, what a boring world it would be if everyone looked alike, if we all had the same phenotype -- skin tone, hair texture, etc. I value diversity.
Plus, even if we all looked exactly alike, there would still be classism, sexism, and a host of other isms.
A dominant group would still exist, probably the group with access to the most economic resources, that would exploit those less fortunate, based on some perceived difference.
I replied before I read Lemmy's post. He says what I am trying to say much better.
Yeah Lemmy, way to cite actual history and not Dr. Suess.
If I had a vote, all women would look like Lauryn Hill or Marion Jones or Gabrille Union. (j/k)
Of course, they probably all have some European ancestry mixed in with the African.
I always thought the "beige" arguements were incredibly stupid. I mean the most extreme act of racism I can think of in the past 20 years was the Rowandan genocide between Tutsis and Hutus who are both black african peoples. And, meaning no disrespect, from what I've seen they basically look just alike. And its not like this is an isolated case. The worst bad blood is always between populations that are very similar from a genetic point of view.
Forgot about that one. Great point. One other thing--I was reading this piece on Rwanda (which I'll link to later) and some of the very stereotypes which black folks often hold about white women in private ("tricky" "man-stealer" etc.) were prominent among the Hutus toward the Tutsi women. It's very eerie reading that. I suspect it's more about power than skin-color.
The Rwandan Genocide rather proves your whole thesis above. The Tutsis and Hutus were, by my understanding, artificially distinguished ethnic groups, created by Beligian colonials. The Tutsis were "created" by selecting the natives who were more "Caucasoid" in appearance, intelligence, and/or temperament. You also have the same "other as vermin" dynamic you noted above, with the Tutsis being referred to as "cockroaches." The power dynamics the Belgians introduced created what are now ethnically separate groups.
I'll never forget the footage of the massacres we had to watch in my ethnic conflict mediation class in undergrad. That was the most brutal stuff I've ever seen.
The Balkans are also another case study in this.
A good point, TNC: as you say, prejudice and oppression MAY be based on "phenotype"; but it's not always a necessary factor: I remember reading in a biography of WEB DuBois that on an early trip of his to Europe, he visited eastern Germany (western Poland?) and was amazed to find that the Germans looked down on had attitudes towards the Poles not dissimilar to how white Americans views their less-white compatriots. Which was odd to WEB, of course, since to him, the Germans and Poles all looked just like undifferentiated "white folks" - which in those border regions, they were quite likely to actually be.
It just seems to be an unfortunate attribute of human societies that in the absence of gross indicators of difference (like skin color), we tend to fall back on the finer ones: culture, religion, language, etc. Germans/Slavs; Serbs/Croats; Chines/Japanese/Korean, etc: somebody is always going to want somebody to look down on: just human nature....
(but yes, fucking our way out of prejudice may be be the most effective method, b
Rats - let's try again:
But yes, trying to fuck our way out of prejudice may not be (and probably can't be) 100% effective - but it sure beats a lot of the alternatives (like in Rwanda).
Yeah, I'm not sure if we can fuck our way out of racism either. But it sure would be fun to try. I'm therefore volunteering myself.
The "bi/multi-racial people (women) are prettier" trope is often applied by people in regard to real life folks they know, though. I understand you made the point about the ones we *all* know being celebrities. But that idea reaches into folks' real lives. In other words, many guys would rate the typical mixed girl they know as being better looking than the typical non-mixed girl they know, I'd guess.
Again, this is tough when you think about blacks. The easiest example is always Harold Ford\Barack Obama. Who's mixed? Who's not? I can show you some stunners who look like Vanity, who aren't--technically--mixed.
I'm not sure what difference it makes if they're bi-racial or not, if they satisfy the self-loathing aesthetic they are "mixed." The point is the aesthetic is there to value those who have a phenotype that is more European above those who have phenotypes that are less European. The very notion that bi-racial=attractive is a precisely the root of the colorstruck pathos.
Also, I understand this is a thought experiment, but there is very little evidence that there will ever be beige future. Not only are racial out-marriage rates very low, but bi-racial people are no more likely to procreate with each other than anyone else and the children of bi-racial people are not, generally speaking, "beige." They take on the dominant phenotypical characteristics of whatever predominates in their bloodline. And certainly the grandchildren of the bi-racial are not obscurely or indeterminately multi-racial any longer. I mean, Michelle Obama's grandfather was bi-racial. She is in no way beige. The president's daughters have white grandparents and their father is bi-racial, if they reproduce with African American men, this will have no bearing whatsoever on the racial categorization of their children. Same difference if a bi-racial person marries a white person, and their children marry white, etc. This is similarly true in the case of Asian out-marriage, or any other kind.
Do these facts make a mockery of our racial categorization system? Absolutely. But it points to the fact that the "beige future" is already here. It just ends up being black, white, Asian, etc. again in a generation or so.
A futuristic beige-ing would require a level of inter-mixing that simply has not nearly obtained in America. We're just not that integrated. Interracial couples, depending somewhat on class, are likely to be in certain kinds of social circumstances and their children are likely to be immersed in an environment where one racial culture or identity predominates and that's the rubric they'll use to arrange their lives, including the intimate and procreative parts.
Well, it is interesting. While I've learned a lot about the black community and how people of lighter shades were valued, it's also important to note that a lot of white people put value in going to tanning beds. A white person with a nice tan is looked at as being healthier and more appealing. Incredibly pale people are also made fun of. This might be oversimplifying things, but it seems as though a lot of people mixed race have a skin tone that is valued by both races.
A white person with a nice tan is looked at as being healthier and more appealing.
Besides melanoma, the problem with this is that white people who get tanned a lot (whether via tanning beds, going to the beach, or just working outside) tend to visibly age a lot quicker. Lots of tans when young leads to leathery, wrinkled skin way before your time.
That's why I always say, "there's no such thing as a healthy tan," and get pissed off when freckled people say, "Oh one day they'll all meld together and I'll have a nice tan."
It took a long time and a getting over a LOT of teasing for me to find peace with my white-as-white-can-be, yet still freckly, skin tone and red hair. And I have it easy in the scheme of things.
Meanwhile....mmmmm....Shemar Moore....
I'd guess some of that is the human desire for novelty.
And political correctness. In general, I get nervous about assessing attractiveness in terms of race. Who one is attracted to is not really logical.
Yeah, this. Everyone wants to screw the unfamiliar and the "exotic." If we were all beige, we'd be worshiping people who were "Pure."
me in college: "Dad, there's his half-Indian girl at school.. she's really beautiful."
Dad: "Yes, half-breeds always are."
@sv *twitch*
Ow. I think I just had an aneurysm..
My reply button isn't working. That last reply was supposed to be to TNC's first reply to mobygrape.
All the various groups from the former Yugoslavia look pretty similar to me, too. You don't have to look different to fight.
But I do think it's harder to maintain stereotypes when nearly everyone has a connection to some member of the other group. You may not marry outside your group, but your sister or best friend might. And then there are all these new people around at social events, and you get to know them on a more intimate level than you might have otherwise.
Yeah, the British and Irish come to mind.
Louisiana, for all our problems, has been dealing with this since the beginning. White Black Creole Indian mix. (It also resulted in some ludicrous "one drop" laws, but again, the South...)
I did some research on race relations in New Orleans and found Glenn Loury's book "Anatomy of Racial Inequality" to be valuable as a framework. Basically, since biology offers no distinction between races, "race" is a social construct imbued with sociological phenomena. Rwanda's a good example - also India, where dark girls are encouraged to bleach their skin, and the most common compliment I got while living there was "Oh, you're so fair!" The caste system was as much about color as it was about anything else.
For a long time, Louisiana was one of the only Southern states that had a sort of 3 tier racial caste-Whites, Creoles of Color(who you refer to), and Anglo-Blacks. It has been argued that American/Anglo influence had a lot to do with changing this system. Its been argued that for years, there was no distinction between Creole Whites and Creoles of Color, both groups referred to themselves as Creole. But with American/Anglo influence brought on by the Louisiana Purchase, things changed dramatically and White Creole began to adopt the one drop ideology. There are many reasons why this came to be (political, social, economic) and I and others have wrote about it. But Creoles of Color of Louisiana are an interesting group to look at when having these types of discussions.
One of my friends is from southern India and her parents are looking at potential husbands for her. In the personal ads, caste, religion, as well as education level are the major factors. One guy's parents asked her parents "what color" she was, and for that reason itself, she turned him down because she said that she did not want to be judged by that along with him not having met her.
I'm convinced that people will always find ways to differentiate themselves and assert superiority, whether it's appearance, economics, politics, geography, etc. It seems like that impulse is universal.
Sorry for not being able to reply in order, but regarding the HF, BO comparison, I'd say the title of Mixed doesn't matter or change the outcome of people's psychology much. Harold Ford is essentially "mixed" in the way most of us tend to mean that term - roughly balanced between African blood and white blood. (I think - I'm not intimately knowledgeable about his family tree, but he is a southern black grandee, so you know hot *that* goes). Plus other stuff. J
ust because he adheres to the One Drop Rule (I'm assuming here, I don't know how he'd address this point) doesn't change who his actual ancestors were and where they came from.
It's only tough when applied to blacks because of that One Drop Rule, which is merely a convention and a tool created to effect the end of racism you referenced above - white domination and Godhood.
We have a tendency when talking about race to think the term describes both more and less than it does. We think it describes culture. It doesn't. One can have dark skin or have it and be African and not be ethnically or culturally African-American. One can be ethnically African-American and live outside of African-American culture (though some may assume you live in it) in the same way that one can have an Irish-Catholic background and live outside of that culture.
And except when we discuss race, we don't talk about a thing called "white culture" because we know that one term can't describe the cultural practices of Boston Catholics and Alabama Baptists and New York Jews or Bay Area secularists who are sometimes refugees from those other groups.
My point is that in a beige society, regions and cultures will still exist and we will base our differences on those, as we already do when we aren't talking about race. And we will base our prejudices on our differences. My hope is that we may someday arrive at the point where our prejudices play no more of a role in the life chances of "racial" (or sexual) minorities than they do in the life chances of the heterosexual "racial" majority at present.
This is not to say that prejudices play no limiting role in "white" lives. It is to say that reducing their role in everyone's lives to that general level may be the best we can hope for.
Jews, Catholics, and the Irish haven't always been considered "white." The expanding evolution of "white" to include these groups has only happened in the last forty to sixty years.
Good point, and not at all confined to those groups. Many Argentinians, for example, to do not consider themselves Latinos, but Caucasians. They feel much closer to their ancestry with Spain. But then the Spanish themselves are all kinds of groups, and they you get into the crypto-Jews and conversos in Latin America and the Caribbean... holy crap, it's enough to make one's head asplode.
I had an ex-girlfriend who's Brazilian. She said that Brazilians don't consider themselves to be Latino because they're "whiter." (I admired her candor.) What's interesting to me is that Brazil's got the one of the largest - if not THE largest - "African-[nationalityy here]" populations in Latin America. Apparently having too much 'native' blood was worse than having 'black' blodd in their eyes. I guess it's human nature to always need some group you can look down on.
Great point. Don't know how I managed to forget this when I was writing my post.
Did more American whites identify as "white" in response to non-whites starting to asserts their rights? The timing seems to maybe indicate that. I really don't know the answer to this question ... curious.
While the point is well-taken that Jews, Catholics and Irish endured discrimination and worse as late as a half century ago, it's not true they were ever considered not white. This is no mere quibble but a fact in support of Ta-Nehisi's astute thesis that a desire to secure class privilege drives discrimination not skin tone.
Southerners never barred Catholics and Jews from whites-only privileges. That the Protestants knew they lived in the South is shamefully clear from KKK pamphlets and the laws that once barred nonChristians from holding public office. Restricted deeds in the South have never only said "whites only". They've also said "no Jews". The false notion that WASPs ever considered Irish or Catholics, per se, non-white, when the former are indigenous to the British Isles and the latter preceded Protestants there by a thousand years is mind-boggling.
To Stacey, the tanning thing is wrapped up in class (although ALL people tend to look good after a quality tan.) In modern times, tanning is a sign of leisure that is only available to the wealthy. Of course we know during the days when folks worked outside more on farms and such, it was the reverse and tanning was a sign that you toiled, while the rich (white folks) could stay out of the sun and stay pasty. This is much like corpulence being valued along class lines as well in certian places and times, and then the reverse popping up elsewhere - again based on class.
Thanks for the insight. That is interesting, and I never really thought of it as a class issue. I say this as a pasty guy who needs some sun. It's going to be a long winter.
Consider the term 'redneck': it was a term of disparagement for those poor whites who had to work their own or someone else's fields. It may not be pure classicism (esp. in the South, where whiter skin was better), but it's damn close. That's among the reasons I avoid both the term redneck and white trash.
Tho' I do have to admit to my own biases: As a kid in small town Wisconsin, we did all we could to avoid 'farmers tans.' Such a tan was usually confined to the arms, face and neck, i.e., those parts of the body not covered by a shirt. Oh, and the farmer's legs would also be dead white, because you wouldn't work the fields in shorts.
On a kinda/not-really related point, I can't help but flash back to an old Alice Walker (I think) response to a child's question about skin color: she wrote, in effect, that white people lack a kind of cover that color would give them. It is not, I think, a rip on white folks, but was meant to be reassuring to a black child to treasure her own skin. Yeah, blackness has all kinds of meanings, but this always struck me as a kind of powerful nugget for a child to carry with her, as a way to fend off some of the more malignant meanings assigned to her color.
As a palepalepale woman, I have to be on guard against the threat of melanoma due to all my youthful sun indiscretions. I don't 'regret' being white (not least because that's hardly the way to better thinking about race), but, thinking of Walker's observation, in this specific case I can't help but rue that the lack of melanin in my skin means I lack protection.
In Boston, there's a "cabbie" tan - just your left arm!
Excellent!
Excellent!
I think this is a beautiful point. In so many ways color-prejudice in this country is bound up with the after effects of a system of chattel slavery based on the color of a person's skin. From where I stand it seems that racism as we know it in so many ways is an outgrowth or a by-product, not the cause, of centuries of slavery and segregation. I mean prejudice exsited before, but the American system of slavery that, unlike serfdom in europe, or even ancient slavery, linked a person's status as property to the color of their skin is certainly at the root of so much racism in this country.
"We like the colored guy" -- European comment on the American election, maybe Feb/March 08.
Race conscious, but entirely unconscious of the way American culture made that statement a fairly large faux pas.
While it sounds pessimistic, it's entirely realistic to think that we will create new rationales for bigotry and prejudice even if the population's range of color is narrower. After all, African folks of different tribal heritage still stereotype each other (in everyday life, not just extreme situations like genocide), even though some arguably look more similar than, say, an Irish American and a Haitian American. While skin color makes our prejudices easier to execute on some level, historical (and not so historical) cultural and economic differences play a significant role in how people decide "who's one of them." And those don't necessarily go away as we beige-ify. Which isn't to say that everything's hopeless or that beige is bad; I just don't think everyone being "the same color" is the certain cure for bigotry.
Rather than a cure, though, perhaps it is a symptom of a bettering society. While sexual politics certainly aren't the be-all-and-end-all of politics or equality, we're not just talking about purely sexual politics here. We're talking about marital politics and family values. More multi-racial kids, of course, mean that more folks are in interracial relationships. And, while we shouldn't always assume that those people are entirely without prejudice (they certainly aren't), that's something.
While I think the idea that we’ll always create new classifications by which to discriminate against one another is unnecessarily cynical, I tend to think the great beiging of humanity, or whatever, is best understood as a metaphor. Maybe that’s because if you take it literally, the whole thing is just ridiculous. It’s a weird, almost dystopic form of idealism that seeks to solve a problem after, one assumes, it's already been solved. Our problem isn't that we have phenotypic variations, it's that we've always misunderstood what they signify.
First, a quick fact check to TNC: do you mean Daniel Shays, or Nathaniel Bacon? I think Bacon is the one who had the anti-Native American rebellion that runaway slaves/indentured servants were attracted to.
On the larger points, from my own experience I have to say that the hope that we can "mix" our way out of prejudices and racism is naive. As pointed out above, the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis are quite mixed with each other, but it still didn't stop the personality stereotypes, or even the physical ones (Hutus were supposed to be shorter, darker and more "low-class" Tutsi's taller, lighter and more "regal" or something or other), even when there was no scientifically provable physical difference between the two groups (I think Jared Diamond talks about this). Niall Ferguson (in one of his moments of more lucid thinking) pointed out that intermarriage of Jews and Gentiles in Europe was increasing in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, precisely when there was the rising wave of racially-motivated anti-semitism. If anything the mixing is the natural state, and the prejudice in favor of the pure, untainted phenotypes is the almost-mythological (and in fact quite hypocritical) reaction against reality.
From my own travels and observations, Asia (or, let's get in the mixing theme, "Eurasia") is a case in point. Here in America we look at descendants of immigrants from Scandinavia and descendents of immigrants from China and think we know that there is one race here and one race there. But the whole middle of the continent is nothing like that: people are mixed, and mix all the time, and think nothing of it at least on "racial" (skin, eye, hair colour, face shape etc.) grounds. People from the same family can have blonde-haired, blue eyed members, dark-skinned, dark haired members and everything in between. Marrying between different ethnic groups is also a lot more common than one would think, the world is messy like that.
But it doesn't take much knowledge of history or more than a cursory glance at the newspaper to see that the Eurasian continent is some kind of peaceful, prejudice-free continent. People fight each other in Afghanistan regardless of appearance...usually it has something more to do with "my cousin hates your cousin, so let's throw down" or "you're family is X group...historically they're trash, so I am going to vent my spleen on you just because". Being a rainbow nation of sorts hasn't helped to put this in the past.
I suppose its similar to the debate a couple days back about whether religion really is the cause of conflict. I think there is just too much in human nature to make people want to find differences and fight, no matter what color, creed or whatnot you are. If anything, sometimes people being almost the same makes those little differences that much bigger and deadlier.
Thanks for the correction. It was Bacon. Good comment.
The beige future may eventually come to pass, but the timescale for such is measured in units of thousands, not hundreds, of years. Genotype (what you have as genetic inheritance) and phenotype (how it is expressed) plays out unpredictably due to issues of dominant and recessive genes being only partially so. Based on historical social overlays, no society has ever operated without preferential mixing based on status, this slows the fusion to an even greater degree. The most freely intermixed societies still have "racial" categories after hundreds of years.
It is equivalent to a discussion about the future shape of the continents or the constellations. You can make predictions, but I'm not really seeing the point.
For an interesting example of discrimination with no connection to phenotype/skin color, check out the Burakumin people of Japan.
also the tanning thing is not related to race or racism because tanning is essentially a superficial change that doesn't impact your racial designation at all.
pre Civil Rights, white people weren't getting rejected by colleges, or subjected to redlining, or denied voting rights because they had tans.
but, regardless of their skin color, even the palest/lightest black person had to think about being discriminated against because of their race.
Even if we all had the human colour, whatever that is, we still would have the struggle of human thought, whatever that is.
But you know it is for sure that we can't blame this human condition on the colour of cats, whatever that is.
Americans like to think that because our race-based systematic discrimination uses racial phenotypes to differentiate groups, discrimination is caused by variations in phenotype.
Countries that don't have comparable variations in phenotype, however, still discriminate -- they just use different criteria. As alluded to in some of the other comments above, places like India, Brazil, and South Africa all have their own hierarchies of groups based on different social markers, some phenotypes, some not. People are enormously innovative in the ways they find to undercut one another, and a Beige America would be no different.
Very true, though it is worth noting that color is a big point to discriminate on, even in areas where it does not signify genetic variation.
I discovered this when I went out with an indian girl and she put on whiteface. Apparently this is reasonably common in Delhi among upper class women who are dark. When I first saw her, she asked me how she looked. My response of "like the Joker" didn't go over so well.
I think humans are hardwired to notice color of objects. Think of how you would describe fruit (orange!) or clothing, for example. Even for things which have no intrinsic color, we tend to like to assign a color to them (red states vs blue states or the green movement). Since people are objects, we will tend do the same thing with people that we do with fruit.
Another story, that backs what you say. Israel has a big mix of skin colors as a result of immigration, ranging from Russians from up north who are as pale as Swedes, all the way to Ethiopians. And while relations between the Ethiopians or the Russians and the "locals" aren't always the best, those are basically issues of immigration politics familiar anywhere. ("They're new! They have different customs! They'll take our jobs away! Etc!")
But the big ethnic line there, of course, is between the Jews and the Arabs. Unless you've lived there for a while, you would have a hard time telling one from the other -- lots of Jews, especially ones whose families have been in the Middle East for a few hundred years, look physically very similar.
But to the locals, it's all the difference in the world, and it's very easy to tell one from the other. You end up in the situation where day-in and day-out, people consider Russians, Ethiopians and Sephardic Jews to be the same "race," and Arabs to be a completely different one.
I think the upshot of this is, people may use skin color as a description of who they consider to be their own race, and then again they may use something else. It always boils down to other things in the end -- political power, economic power, groups fighting over too small a pie. Even in a beige world, I'm betting that there will still be just as much prejudice and discrimination.
Can you expound on this? What tell-tale signs do the locals have?
A comparable example--to my mind, Dominicans and Haitians favor each other quite a bit. Sure, in the mind of your average Dominican, a Haitian is jet black undeniably African but so are quite a few Dominicans. And maybe Haitians consider Dominicans to be "Spanish-looking" but France and Spain arent so remarkably different that a French African and a Afro-Spaniard would be easily distinguishable.
However, thousands of Haitians were slaughtered by Trujillo goons in the 30s because they could not pronounce the Spanish word for parsley "perejil" without betraying a French accent.
So I guess Im asking, are there "tells" or giveaways that allow Israelis to distinguish Arabs from Jews? Because otherwise I agree, they are physically very similar.
Hi all, newcomer here. Thanks for bringing up the Jewish/Arab situation. To my knowledge, this is the oldest known prejudice/warfare situation (between actual COUSINS, if the bible is to be believed)and as you say, only the European-mix Jews look all that different from the classic Arab type. I've always observed that poeple can find anything and everything to discriminate between themselves and the "other." I feel blessed to be living in a time when we're at least making progress. And I feel blessed to have a beautiful mixed-race grandson. I'm glad I discovered this thread. We're all mutts anyway, out of Africa!
dope.
Just as a clarification point, and I think it is an important one, white supremacy does NOT stretch back to antiquity. It has some of its origins in Roman thought; moreover, it is also the case that Europeans found historical arguments for enslaving black people in Islamic writings on blackness (i.e. the racial and religious Other) in the 14-16th centuries. But as a socio-political construct, white supremacy does not really begin to become systematized until the 18th century and it was really codified in the 19th century. It is part and parcel of the development of a Herrenvolk philosophy based on civic and political equality (or at least access) to all white men. White supremacy is not simply an outlook concerning the nonwhite Other (not saying you said that), but it is more importantly the coupling of this outlook with the belief in the endowment of natural rights (i.e. property, political, and social) for the white human exclusively and thusly operating accordingly.
I guess my point is that there was not white supremacy before the 18th century because there was no need for it. Indeed there are definitional antecedents that pre-date this period, but so too were there historical antecedents of what we call "capitalism" or "democracy" during the Middle Ages. That does not mean they (i.e. white supremacy, democracy, capitalism) existed, but rather these periods share certain strands of knowledge, rather than foundational structures that ordered and regulated people's lives.
Yeah, that was the implicit point. I shoulda made it clearer.
BTW, this addresses my downstream question. I don't know why I missed it earlier.
Beige is boring. I like the differences.
Yes, it would be terribly boring. Which makes me think an all-beige future might never happen. As the population became more beige over time, the increasingly rare dark-skinned or light-skinned folks (with their accompanying variety of hair and eye colors) would become more sexually attractive. These exotic types would (in theory) reproduce at a relatively higher rate, thus restoring diversity. Vive la difference!
Absolutely... can we adopt some other term besides beige (and besides something obviously marketstudyfocuagroupedtodeath, vis: "sun-kissed golden brown."
"sun-kissed golden brown."
Love it.
Dammit, TNC! Stop ruining the fantasy! I'll find a problem we can fuck our way out of yet!
win
Plus, how am I supposed to pick up black chicks now? "Hey, baby? How about we defeat racism?" was the best line I had going. Now I've got nothing. "I'm jewish" doesn't work outside of New York.
How about Hi. Would you like to go out for a cup of coffee?
It Usually works for me. :)
Certainly when you know people who are different than yourself, it helps defuse bigotry, stereotyping, racism, and the like. It's more than simply convention being flaunted; it's really helpful to know people on a first hand basis. We are currently in a period as well in which wide swaths of Americans live in extended families with family members bringing a whole host of backgrounds to the table.
But the basic issue of being human, especially in a world in which environmental factors are becoming extreme stressors, isn't going to change. What happened in Rwanda was quite complicated, and the divisions of the two peoples was not simply something created by colonialism. However, the slaughter there was precipitated by the astronomical increase in population over a short period of time combined with a group of ruling thugs who used some typical historical resentments that had never been anywhere close to being so extreme as to lead to genocide as a way in which to aggrandize power.
We live in a world with vast inequities; we live in a world where we currently lack potable drinking water for all our human inhabitants. If we want to understand why people blow themselves up for a cause, or ruthlessly slaughter others, or focus in on the racial elements of the life of our current President as a mechanism by which they can code oppositional propaganda, then we need to understand the larger dynamic of history in which racism is but one of many mechanisms through which people have been divided over the most fundamental issues of life--who has access to power, who has access to the world's wealth, and how we go about obtaining such access, and to recognize to no small degree these issues have environmental stressors that must be attended to.
as Russell Peters said: one day we'll hump you, and everyone will be beige. I don't care, I'm already beige.
TNC - one question. You date white racism back to antiquity. I place it as really having its origins in European expansion in the 16th century, without a significant history before that: I specifically do not see a heavy racial subtext to the Crusades, as well (due to the constitution of both Christiandom and Islam in that time.) On what basis do you locate racism - rather than simple chauvinism - in antiquity?
No, I don't date it back to antiquity. I wasn't clear on that:
This entire section was suppose to describe my old view. Sorry for the confusion. I date white supremacy to the era of the transatlantic slave trade. This is not a small point. It's why I'm so optimistic about blacks and whites. It wasn't always this way. It's not natural.
I'll go back to something I read (wish I had the link) about the Congo. There is some reason to believe that even before the slave trade that racism was used in the economic exploitation of the Congo by the Portuguese, and that racism (that is something more than ethnic, cultural, other-ness attributed by non blacks toward blacks) had its origins in that time period (16th C).
Well, it seems I'm late to my own afterparty.
And humans being humans, even if we were all beige, we'd find some way to discriminate.
Sure. But I'd be less depressed if people discriminated against one another for things like ideas and politics and haircuts (things we choose) instead of skin color, gender, height, and other traits that we (usually) can't choose. I think a Republican shouting at a Democrat, for example, is fair whereas an old white man telling a young black girl to get her black ass off his lawn is unacceptably stupid and cruel. We'll find other ways of being awful to each other besides racism? Fine. But let's cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, if "racial" phenotypes should get more indistinct due to increased interracial marriage and/or increased indifference toward ethnic heritage, then racism will get much harder to practice.
Circling back, it's true that the interracial couple is striking a blow against white racism--but not because they're creating a beige kid.
How about a shout-out for the blow that's dealt to the racism of the other group, too? My white grandparents might've grimaced a bit if they'd lived to see me marry a non-white woman, but my wife's grandparents certainly would've been just as bummed, if not moreso, to know that she didn't marry an Asian. It goes both ways.
And why isn't an interracial couple both a powerful (if incidental) symbol in the here and now AND a meaningful act in the long run in genetic and evolutionary terms? It's a two-for-one. 'We're showing the world that love transcends race, and we're producing offspring that, incidentally, are going to render people's race radar inoperable.' Meanwhile, we could defeat racism through culture and intellect whilst simultaneously accepting that Homo sapiens in the year 3000 looks more like a Three Musketeers bar and less like a packet of Skittles. Just as we'll find new ways of being mean to each other, we'll find new ways of being diverse and different. For starters, everyone should realize that there were at 64 million different ways that your parents genetic material could have aligned and assorted to make you, so the possibilities in terms of individual uniqueness in one living room are unfathomable, let alone in a city, state, or nation. We will always have diversity even if some types fade from view.
"We will always have diversity even if some types fade from view"
but unless you defeat racial prejudice first, the types that fade from view are not going to be neutrally distributed throughout races and cultures.
the types that fade from view will be those that are despised by racism.
that's why i disagree with the notion that forming multiracial identities will necessarily free us from racism -- those identities can be also composed through the operation of racism.
someone may not think black features are attractive, but be over the moon for latino looks -- those people may date interracially, but still be making choices according to racist ideas. do you see what I mean?
the types that fade from view will be those that are despised by racism.
How would they fade? Would these despised people stop mating within their own group out of sadness for having been left out of the beige movement? In your hypothetical, wouldn't they just keep reproducing within their group, to hell with the rest?
someone may not think black features are attractive, but be over the moon for latino looks -- those people may date interracially, but still be making choices according to racist ideas. do you see what I mean?
Well, then the scenario isn't what I'm talking about. I'm envisioning a future in which the likelihood of mating with someone from another race is as high as the likelihood of mating with someone within your race. It's random mating, at least in terms of these phenotypes we're talking about.
I think you're just saying "this isn't going to happen because some group is going to get shafted" and I'm saying "this is likely to happen over a long period of time."
"a future in which the likelihood of mating with someone from another race is as high as the likelihood of mating with someone within your race. It's random mating"
but this equal likelyhood does not come about without removing race-based prejudicial barriers to dating and mating.
"..being left out of the beige movement"
here is a logical inconsistency...on the one hand everyone will become beige, but on the other hand some groups may not be included in the beige movement because of racism...so how will the future be entirely beige? how does being in the beige set mean you've overcome racism?
i am on the verge of repeating myself, and rather than go in circles endlessly for everyone's amusement -- i will excuse myself from this discussion.
"so how will the future be entirely beige? how does being in the beige set mean you've overcome racism?"
I get it. It's a chicken-or-the-egg thing: We won't get to beige unless we become race-blind enough to start mixing those genes. To a great extent, racism will have to have been overcome in order for interracial mating to become so prevalent that beige becomes common or normal. And then the beige norm will make any return of racism impossible. I guess I just think that we're definitely headed in that direction, whereas you and others may not. Fair enough.
Many posters have already pointed out that a narrowing of racial differences isn't going to change people's natural tendencies to find excuses to be discriminatory or bigoted towards others who are different from them. But I'll add yet another story in there to prove their point.
Some of you have heard of Thomas J. Leyden, a former neo-Nazi skinhead who renounced his white supremacist beliefs and now works with the ADL. He told a story about how he was at the Aryan Nations compound one time, and just for the hell of it, he asked some colleagues next to him, "You know, let's say we win the race war. What do we do next?" And one guy answered semi-jokingly, "We'll start going after people based on hair color." Leyden was convinced that there was some element of truth to it.
You could turn the entire human population of this planet into a single racially homogenous mass, and while you're at it, give them the same culture and language. People will find some excuse to become tribal and discriminatory.
Edith Hamilton once wrote in her introductory text on the Greeks:
Today - we know much more about how the animal brain works. The brain would be overloaded if it concentrated on all our many similarities. We all have the same feelings, a nose, two eyes, some from of hair, we all have skin etc. It is easier to spot the few differences. It is hence more difficult (and less intellectually lazy) to see and understand the similarities. Nowhere is this more obvious than when humans distinguish themselves from animals. It took ages for our society to understand evolution and what Darwin meant by "humans are only different in degree but not type compared to other animals".
To me, hence - black and white and brown are states of mind and not color. If you are able to see the similarities - you would feel silly to do accounting of the differences. But it requires empathy and consideration. That is also why Gandhi argued that he was vegetarian in order to work at the root of all human problems. Is that why Obama hopes that the US is build on Gandhi's foundation?
Sorry some typos: "it united each on to the rest" and "what was important in a man were recisely the qualities he shared with all mankind".
At college there was a popular mythology surrounding 'beige foam.' The SAGA food service (now a Marriott subsidiary) was rumored to pipe this foam to all of its food service locations, where it would be shaped and molded into the various dishes on student plates -- green beans, jello, mystery meat, etc.
It may well be that this beige foam has been adopted as a raw material for certain major fast food chains as well.
As to an ethnic identification, beige has some lasting and not-too pleasant associations for me... I would hope that we can find some less-generic end-state.
Beige is a color with very boring connotations. I think it's deliberate use is meant to perpetuate the idea that the coming multiracial reality will be one of blandness, when that's clearly not what reality is, or will be.
I think the reason people have trouble dealing with the future multiracial world is their discomfort with how that would screw with the "one narrative" that is assigned a race/culture/ethnicity, when already, we have all failed in our own ways to fit into those boxes. Yet we cling to the narrative, whose time is past.
Sure, folks will find another way to discriminate. Let them. Better be hated for your haircut or beliefs than for your gender or skin color. Is one worse than the other? Yes. Undeniably so. Let's not equivocate in the future tense.
Sure, folks will find another way to discriminate. Let them. Better be hated for your haircut or beliefs than for your gender or skin color. Is one worse than the other? Yes. Undeniably so. Let's not equivocate in the future tense.
Bingo.
To discriminate and judge is part of being a sentient animal. We have to do it just to make our way out the door and down to the corner store. Certain kinds of judgments are legit and have merit, but others are grotesque and the epitome of unfairness. If discrimination in the year 2100 is about haircuts, clothing, politics, and language, but it's no longer about skin color, nationality, sexual orientation, or gender, then the species will have made progress. Whether that progress is deliberate or the cumulative process of countless individuals practicing different mating habits than their ancestors doesn't matter much to me, though there's an obvious nobility to the idea of humanity consciously triumphing over racism.
This strikes me as a really dishonest reading of this thread. Numerous incidents of ethnic hatred have been listed, all of them based on things that are beyond the control of the victims. That you think that people who "look alike" will only hate each other on haircuts shows that you haven't really read the comments in this thread.
You're not really interested in dialogue--if you were you'd think about, and address, some of the other examples in this thread, wherein ethnic hatred was not based on skin color. You're interested in turning your own personal choices into something they aren't. In that effort you're straw-manning and addressing hatred based on "haircuts," instead of addressing the much more complicated examples raised up thread.
Did you read this post and the comments, or did you just scroll down? Did you not see the numerous examples raised of ethnic hatred expressed by people of the same color? You don't "choose" your ethnicity. "Tutsi" isn't a belief.
You may "think" that, but your not actually addressing what anyone in this thread has said. Your just confronting your own presumptions and strawmen.
I grew up in a Midwestern college town of about fifty thousand people, nearly all white. There were so few blacks that I could almost list them by name.
Two black kids in my high school.
A black mayor.
The members of the football and basketball teams of the U.
The foreign students from various places in Africa, mostly Nigeria.
The father and mother of the two black kids, both professionals affliated with the university.
About these folks I believe the following generalizations are true: the altheletes experienced a lot of hostility from the community and the police. The mayor was popular and respected. The two black professionals, in spite of thheir education and monwy, could not get bank financing to buy a house and rented on the wrong side of the tracks. The African students did not experiennce hostily from the police or commmunity as soon as they revealed their status as not Americans ( Africans being different in the white public imagination that Africann Americans). The two black kids I knew from school did their best to be accepted: super neatly dressed, excellent students, strived for leaderswhip positions at school, went to college, became evenntually bitter angry adults.
This was all back in the seventies. I don't know how things are now.
I'm not sure skin color had much to do with any of this. I think that a lot of white people didn't have racist attitudes toward bladck people if those people seemed distant and non threatening but did toward real black people they actually knew. So they could vote for a black mayor but didn't want a black neighbor, for example. Africanns weren't "real" blacks. Some of it had to do with behavior. The student athletes tended to be very big men and mostly came from Chicago with big city manners. Iowans tend to be reserved and polite. There was a real cultural conflicted between the big, loud young men from the city and the quiet, reserved twonsfolks, a clash of manners that stirred up all the scarey stereoptypes of scarey black men.
Anyway I agree that, even if we all were the same skin tone, people would still find ways to divde themsleves into tribes and fear the Other. We are the descendents of pack hunting territorial omnivores, after all.
It's all narcissism...... and tedious..... and small. We are spirit creatures. That is where you will find black and white distinctions of value. Even if some are seemingly resolved to grey.
I agree with Ta-Nehisi's assertion that even if modern categories of race were to be abolished, we as human beings would still find ways to discriminate and exploit other peoples. Though I disagree with the assertions of many racialists that categories such as "white" and "black" reflect our biological and naturally tribal, I do believe that as humans we evolved with an in-group vs. out-group mentality. This type of thinking not only manifests itself in racial matters, but other aspects of life as well. As you can see from my username, I am a major fan of Star Wars, whereas other people categorize themselves as "trekkies" or "trekkers" (don't know what they exactly call themselves these days). As a fan of the San Francisco Giants, I despise the Oakland A's and L.A Dodgers. These examples may seem very trivial compared to the painful and controversial issue of race, but they reflect our tribal mentality. While "whiteness" and "blackness" are mainly social constructs, once society has determined the groups, our tribal mentality causes us to embrace those categories. Also, Ta-Nehisi, I recall reading one of your earlier posts where you claimed that the goal of black freedom fighters was never to force white people to deconstruct their racial whiteness, but rather to free themselves and their people. You concluded by saying that your interest in anti-racism was fading, but your interest in black people remained essential. In "A Deeper Black," you mention that Obama's blackness "rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism, but also understands that esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege will not do anything to move the discussion further." Based on my readings of your articles and posts, it is my understanding that you are more interested in substantial policy changes that will help black people rather than deconstructing white identity and privilege, which is what anti-racists such as Tim Wise and Noel Ignatiev seek to accomplish. I think this is the main reason why you are skeptical about the whole notion that the a "beige" society will eliminate all of our problems. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Don't know if this is too late, but basically, yes. You have it right.
Ursula K. LeGuin, 1971 -- "The Lathe of Heaven" -- As part of this story, she postulated a world in which all humans were, in fact, beige. This was a condition deliberately imposed in the course of the story in order to eliminate racism. I do not recall the details, but I believe that it was less than an unqualified success. In any case, you might find it interesting reading. She is, in my opinion, a quality author.
Forgive my typo. I meant "reflect our biology and naturally tribal instincts."