Sunday, April 05, 2009

Disappearing white racialism



The top graph shows a four decade decline in the share of whites who favor a law against black-white marriages (GSS data).

The bottom graph shows how much white attitudes have changed just since I finished high school. In 1990 almost 70 percent of whites would oppose a close relative marrying a black person. (I'm sure if we had data from two decades before, the number against it would be even higher). The number dropped dramatically in the 90s, and even in the past two years fewer whites have a problem with it. In fact, in 2008, more than a quarter of whites can't wait for a family member to cross the racial line. Such enthusiasm! We can consider this question a measure of white racial consciousness; it has gone from the norm to something uncommon.

This has been a self-imposed change in the hearts of white Americans. They've given up their racialism. Most are willing to walk their daughters down the aisle and leave her with a man from a different race.

Whites didn't have to do this, but they did. And what have they gotten for their efforts? The Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the NAACP, La Raza, LULAC, the National Association of Black Journalists, BET, Univision, Georgetown professors calling on all black jurors to send guilty black defendants home, large percentages of NAMs who think of themselves as racialists first and Americans second--need I go on?

As for myself, in the abstract I would answer this question "neutral"--it wouldn't matter to me one way or the other. My ideal is neither racial consciousness or SWPL posturing. My son would be fortunate indeed to marry Sasha Obama. (I would be the unlucky one who would have to put up with all the in-laws' liberal and racialist bullshit).

But I'm not going to close my eyes to the statistics either. I dated a black women who was a fine girl, but there would have been a good chance that our kids would have gotten sucked into her lower-class family's culture and the wider dysfunctional black culture as well. Even middle-class black guys from the suburbs get sucked into black street life. And the thought of my kids or grandkids adopting all that victimhood, fight the power stuff would make me lose me mind.

Some freshman orientation worker will no doubt ask, "Don't you want your kids to be white to save them from all the discrimination they'll face in life?" My answer is, "Ha!! That God would curse us with the burden of black skin!"

10 comments:

  1. couldn't this simply reflect a decrease in willingness to say they are against it on polls?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3:39 PM

    Ron,

    This 2 minute YouTube vid from the BBC perfectly characterizes how some polls are conducted:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhN1IDLQjo&feature=player_embedded



    Ron,
    You are not a racist for despairing that your race, the race that brought moderninity, electricity, sanitation, communications, televisions, airplanes, movies, flight, space travel, modern medicine, the scientific method, internal climate control, vaccination, mass agriculture, and democracy to the world is dissapearing demographically. I think that if many more whites KNEW the statistical realities, they'd be more alarmed, but the cudgel that is political correctness applied to them (especially in high school and college) has them terrified to speak about it except to the closet aquaintances. Thats just what Marcuse would have wanted.

    m

    ReplyDelete
  3. I come from British ancestry on both sides, both sets of grandparents rural Midwest farmers.

    Now, among my many cousins we have 4 married to Asians, one to a Latin, and one to a Black.

    I would say things have changed.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous6:50 AM

    "Don't you want your kids to be white to save them from all the discrimination they'll face in life?"

    What about, "don't you want your kids to be white so that they actually resemble you?". That is my main concern.

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you'd seen this face, you'd know why it's not a high priority.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Funny, my kids are mixed race but one daughter looks like me and the other a lot like my mom.

    By the by, is the 'race' Anonymous is worried about the Jews?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sgt. Joe Friday10:00 AM

    I agree that the polling results could be due to people being less willing to express attitudes that go against the "approved" politcally correct POV. Was the polling done in a one-on-one setting with an interviewer asking the questions? That could skew the results, since no one wants to be thought of as a knuckle-dragging racist, even by people they don't know and probably won't ever see again.

    That said, I have first hand experience in this area. My first wife was from Central America, and I'm an English (and Spanish) speaking American of northern European ethnicity. The marriage crashed and burned. The lesson I took away from that debacle was that men and women have a tough enough time communicating to begin with, you don't need to throw in ethnic and/or cultural factors on top of that.

    Strangely enough, when I decided to start dating again after my divorce, I found that a disproportionate number of the women contacting me on the dating sites I belonged to were Hispanic. It seems that within the Hispanic subculture having a white boyfriend is a status symbol of sorts.

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  8. Thank God conservatives still have gay marriage to oppose. What will they do in the next generation, when everybody already accepts gay marriage?

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  9. JA: I'm not sure what your post has to do with white racialism, but I'll bite: The next fad we'll be opposing is up to folks like you. Like pyromaniacs, you always have to torch something.

    After reading that Foucault thought that a little girl jerking off a retarded man was perfectly harmless, my guess is that the next issue will be lowering the age of consent. Perhaps to 12 like Justice Ginsberg suggests.

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  10. Anonymous2:31 PM

    "Thank God conservatives still have gay marriage to oppose. What will they do in the next generation, when everybody already accepts gay marriage?"

    Tell that to the blacks, uh I mean Mormons, yeah, Mormons who voted aginst it in CA.
    Seriously, is your memory that bad or are you just disengenuous? Both, I'm betting...

    ReplyDelete

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