Things were happy go lucky in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s? What about "race riot" sounds happy go lucky to you?
He's speaking comparatively. Every trend has dips and peaks, but averaged over the years race relations were much more peaceful in the USA after about 1965 than they were from the end of Reconstruction to WWII. When's the last time you heard about a lynching? The last public KKK meeting? Do I really have to mention President Obama?
Euro- and Afro-American children started going to school together. That single, major act of integration made a quantum improvement in race relations. When kids learn from age six, on a daily basis, from personal observation, that they're all pretty much the same, they will change their culture. And they did. Of course there is still animosity, but it is NOTHING like it was between 70 and 130 years ago.
Now it seems that segragation is taking place on it's own but not because of whites, but rather because many minorities wanting their own cities/neighborhoods.
(At least) some sociologists use the rate of outmarriage as a measure of integration. This is the engine that heats up the Melting Pot and keeps it boiling. If you have people of another ethnicity in your very own family, it changes your perspective on ethnicity. It changes even further when those people have children, who no longer have an "ethnicity" at all (except on holidays
) but are just unhyphenated Americans.
My classroom data is a little old but news articles and chats with people in the field tell me it hasn't changed much: The American ethnic group considered the most culturally conservative, both by its own members and outsiders, is Asian-Americans. (Sorry, I of all people know they are not a single group but the figures aren't broken down.) Their outmarriage rate is about 25% in the first generation and rises to 70% in the third. I regard the fourth generation as the barometer of assimilation, and it's really hard to find an American whom I (or he himself) would describe as a fourth-generation Chinese- or Korean-American. (For a reality test, how many people do you know who call themselves even second-generation Italian- or Irish-Americans?)
For Latinos, the ethnic group that conservative Americans love to hate because "they're taking over our country," the first-generation intermarriage rate is more than 30% and in the second it's up in the 70s. It's hard to find a third-generation Latino. Los Angeles's leading Mexican music radio station had to switch to anglophone DJs because it's now fashionable for the children of immigrants to not know a word of Spanish. (Music endures, language doesn't. I'm glad I'm a musician and not just a linguist
)
So what are the rates among Afro-Americans? Well first we have a problem defining "first generation." For a moment we'll leave the new wave of African and Caribbean immigrants out of this and just talk about the descendants of freed slaves. Their families have been here
and free for at least seven generations.
Sure, but with segregation and all, maybe not too many of them were in a position to outmarry. Okay, the laws against "mixed-race" marriage were nullified thirty years ago. (The surname of the couple whose appeal overturned the last one was "Loving," so for all eternity the history books will remember this case by its official, poetic name "Loving vs. Virginia."
) Anyway, that means we've got two generations of Afro-Americans who are free to marry whomever they want. And you foreigners will have to take my word for it, there is no shortage of Euro-Americans willing to marry them, even if a shameful number of us are still Unreconstructed.
And after this, the outmarriage rate of Afro-Americans with the mainstream population is about
three percent! When I was a kid most "mixed marriages" were a "white" guy and a "black" gal, but today it's reversed. Many Afro-American women look down on outmarriage. On an episode of "Oprah," they called Afro-American men who date outside their community "traitors."
A couple of years ago the Washington Post ran a series of articles on the problem of single-parent households in the Afro-American community. One woman described the reason in a sentence I will never forget: "There just aren't enough nice black men."
Sure, I understand that the unfairly enforced drug laws and a host of other cultural problems result in a lot of Afro-American men having prison records, poor education, yatta yatta. I guess they're the kind of men a woman doesn't mind having as the father of her child, but doesn't want him to stick around and help raise him.
But what I'm getting to is this: can you visualize this piece of journalism with the colors reversed?
hypothetical news report said:
Meredith Schwarz, a white woman in predominantly white Bethesda, Maryland, is a single mother in a community dominated by single mothers. When I asked her why she and so many of her sisters aren't married, she replied, 'It's because there just aren't enough nice white men'."
Imagine the uproar! Thousands, probably millions of people across America would lambaste her for not even considering the possibility of marrying an Afro-American, a Latino, an Asian-American, a Native American, or any of our other ethnic minorities!
You know how many letters there were in the Washington Post, complaining about that Afro-American lady's point of view? Just take a guess. I think you know the answer.
Zero. I know I didn't write mine. I only say stuff like that where I can hide safely behind a pseudonym.
Frankly I have no idea what that says about race relations in 21st century America. I'll just sum it up fer ya: They may have come a long way, but they're still fucked.
To get back to that new wave of dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, I have opined before (and my Afro-American friends say I could be right) that they might turn out to be the key to solving this problem. They have none of the cultural baggage that came with slavery. The Underground Railroad, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, Jim Crow, Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, the Tuskegee Airmen, Little Rock, Selma, MLK, Watts, Rodney King: these are not parts of their history and they are not rattling around in their Collective Unconscious. They endured poverty that makes a 19th century sharecropper look like a rich man, and they endured persecution that makes having a separate-but-equal water fountain look like palatial living--all at the hands of other Africans!
Of course they're not naive and they see the friction between the lighter- and darker-skinned people in America. But compared to the freedom and economic opportunities they have here, and especially the future their children look forward to (wasn't that Obama dude's father from Kenya?), they think a person would have to be an idiot to complain about this country's flaws.
I think the new African-Americans (and in a little linguistic brawl that I find amusing, both the established families of African ancestry and the new immigrants each think the OTHER group has no right to that label!) will be a bridge between the old Afro-Americans and the rest of us.
Geezy weezy, at least I sure hope so!
