White America Is Over

If you’re still hung up on race, if you think about what color someone is, if you are whether Obama identifies with being black, when he’s half white, you’re very last century.  The Atlantic has a piece by Hua Hsu called “The End of White America?“, and let’s face it Whitey, your days of being a majority in the country are just about at an end. 

Just as Tiger Woods forever changed the country-club culture of golf, and Will Smith confounded stereotypes about the ideal Hollywood leading man, hip-hop’s rise is helping redefine the American mainstream, which no longer aspires toward a single iconic image of style or class. Successful network-television shows like Lost, Heroes, and Grey’s Anatomy feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy, from The Colbert Report to The Office, seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male.

Pat Buchanan is busy bemoaning the fate of America, claiming we’re headed toward becoming a third world country.  Blond haired, blue-eyes actors are having  harder times getting work, as casting calls prefer the “ethnically ambiguous”.  Christian Lander, the founder of stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, realizes how tough it is to be white these days.  For one thing, we’re now coming off a white presidency that screwed up the world. 

The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995’s White Man’s Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

If you’re born in the ’70’s or ’80’s you have a different cultural sensibility.  If you’re networking on Facebook or MySpace you’re not even thinking about race, ethnicity, or possibly even gender or age. 

We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why-as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be-maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things

I agree, except for the word “maybe”.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.