How long before "race" is antiquated in the US?

Great Debates
1

My experience with race in America is conflicted. On the one hand, it seems like Americans are obsessed with it, and also reify it to a degree by insisting that everyone know what race they belong to and be prepared to put that down on a form periodically (for school, insurance, etc.). I may not choose to identify as white, but that’s too bad: anyone who sees me knows that I am and expects me to identify as such. (And, of course, White Privilege: treats me as such whether I want that or not.)

On the other hand, quite a lot of people I know are mixed race. Not in the sense of “I have ancestors from different continents,” but in the sense of “I have close family from two or more races and don’t feel compelled to make a choice.”

In my parents’ generation, this only applies to a couple of people, some of my dad’s cousins.
In my generation, it’s not uncommon (I’m from California, b. 1970s), though maybe only 5% of the total people I know.
In the next generation, it’s even more common, and I assume the pattern will continue now that the artificial barriers are going away.

Presuming that this is a more general pattern, how long before the majority is mixed-race?

Just as people stop being “Irish” or “French” after a few generations in America, how long before people stop being “White” or “Black” or “Latino”? Or does the institutional support of these categories, plus the fact that they’re home-grown divisions of the American population, mean that they’re here to stay?

Personally, I suspect that the categories will seem quaint and archaic in about a hundred years, at least in mainstream society.

(Context: this arose because I have a friend who talks about being Asian. I insist that “Asian” is such a huge category that it’s basically meaningless, at least in terms of culture.)

2

It depends on whether the barriers to “interracial” marriage are, as you say, “artificial”.

There are (or were) obviously barriers like legal restrictions. But nearly all societies practice both exogamy (there is a group of people that you should not marry, e.g. your near relatives) and endogamy (there is a group of people within which you are expected to marry). The latter group may be a bit vague around the margins, but still represents a real constraint on the marriage choices people tend to make. Jews, notably, are expected to marry Jews, and the fact that some Jews marry out doesn’t mean that this factor ceases to have any influence. But even non-Jews are subjected to consdirable expectations about the age, ethnicity, social class etc of their marriage partners. Are these cultural influences counted as “artificial” constraints?

Perhaps it makes no difference whether they are or not. Even if they are, we have no reason to expect them to disappear, since constaints of this kind seem to be universal (even if the particular constraints may vary from society to society). As long as Americans display ethnic preferences in the selection of marriage partners, then ethnic differences will persist, and will be treated as signficant for social purposes. It’s not inevitable that Americans will continue to display these ethnic preferences, but not is inevitable that they will cease to do so.

3

Well, that’s essentially what I’m asking. (Edit: stupid hamsters.) Up until recently, your average white person in America was socially expected to marry a white person. Now, at least a large subset of white people is only expected to marry another person in America, with race less of a consideration. How long before that’s generalized, and how long before it takes effect?

4

I don’t see any reason to suppose that it will ever become generalised.

(Don’t get me wrong. It m ay well become generalised, and if it does then racial distinctions will disappear in the course of a few generations. I just don’t see any reason to assume that this is inevitable. The persistence in one society of groups that tend not to marry one another is not unusual.)

5

Around the same time as in Japan.

6

Race and marriage? Marriage? You crazy middle-class liberal, you.

7

Much sooner, I should hope, Japan being mostly monoracial.

8

Indeed.

9

Judging by Brazil even if a large portion are mixed, you’ll still have racialism.

10

I think it’s feasible that within a century or two we’ll have the means to customize skin colour, and if so, and once the use of said technology becomes commonplace, that will essentially be the end of the concept of race (though other forms of identity / categorization will of course persist).

I know that sounds quite different to what the OP was asking, but “mixing” of the genepool on the kind of scale the OP is imagining would take centuries. I’m saying that I suspect the issue could become moot before then.

11

You don’t need to totally get rid of race preferences in choosing mates to make it pretty hard to differentiate between races over a few generations. And there’s a certain amount of feedback effect: as inter-racial marriages become more common, they both become more accepted and make the next generation less racially distinct, which in turn leads to more inter-marriage in the next generation. It’s not inevitable, but I think that feedback effect makes it pretty fast and hard to stop once it gets going. And it is going, the rate of inter-racial marriages have tripled since Loving.

In the US we’ve already seen a decent amount of this. A few generations ago ones religion was as much a factor of ethnic heritage as of belief. Marriage between religious groups was taboo, and generally rare. My (Catholic) great-grandmother was estranged from her family when she married a Methodist. Three generations later and not only does that sort of marriage hardly raise an eyebrow, but we hardly even think of religion as an ethnic category anymore. A sizable number of people that use the term WASP probably couldn’t even tell you what the “P” stands for.

12

I expect racism to still be a major social distinction around here after the United States are no more. Unless “around here” is uninhabitable that is.

13

Humans have a great capacity to subdivide themselves. We could carve out new racial categories and “rules” based on hair texture alone. And class always have a way of making things…interesting. Anyone who thinks a utopia follows from having mixed-race populace has never heard of places like Brazil or Haiti. And lest we forget, the Hutus and Tutsis teach us that what appears as a homogenous “race” to the uninitiated is not always so in reality.

That said, I am optimistic that the US will become more enlightened, not less.

14

I’m not convinced. Racism isn’t an universal. I think that our current racial categories are pretty arbitrary, and have no reason to persist forever. I’ve argued in the past that this racial categorizing didn’t exist, for instance in the antiquity, and that they’re are an accidental artefact of some centuries of European domination (since for the first time, everybody who was a white European was “civilized” and everybody who wasn’t one wasn’t “civilized”, hence making possible to believe that there was a direct relationship between skin colour and abilities). You don’t get to think that darker skinned people are inferior when they kick your ass on the battlefield and build more impressive monuments than you do.

With western domination coming to and end, we’ll see, in my opinion, these arbitrary “racial” distinctions fade away, especially since they hardly make any sense when you examine them closely (deciding who’s black and who’s white and who’s latino, etc… is very arbitrary to begin with. Evidence number one : Barack Obama)

15

I’m guessing that poster means there is nothing special about the US, and humans are always categorizing people one way or another. The answer to the OP is: probably never.

16

I think the days are long passed when anyone whose opinion matters (i.e., not the neo Nazi nitwit) cares about what “race” you are in terms of an individual’s genetic ancestry. When people track down their genetic ancestry, they are more typically amused or fascinated (Vanessa Williams comes to mind). That sort of race obsession is gone, except among the ignorant. I can’t think of a single individual I know who gives a rat’s ass what any given person’s genes actually are, whether it’s in regard to marriage, friendship or simple association.

There is a paradox in getting rid of “race” as a social construct because we have a long history of disparate treatment and disproportionate representation in the US, at least. The reason Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity (SIRE) groups are catalogued and tracked is not an obsession with race; it’s an obsession with equality.

There is no mechanism by which we can create societal constructs which promote equality and proportionate representation among self-identified groups if we can’t track how many for each group there are, and that means requiring a self-identification be made.

The paradox is that such self identification only furthers SIRE groups as a “normal” even though the underlying purpose is to try and get to a place where SIRE groups become meaningless because representation within society is homogenized.

What we need to work for is that all of us place ourselves in an “Other” category. When we all self-identify into that category, we can get rid of the concept of “race.” However currently there are substantial incentives for self-identification with SIRE groups (in the attempt to drive fairness), so I don’t see “race” going away any time soon.

Plus, what would happen to Al Sharpton’s job reminding us how racist we all are? :smiley:

17

As your link shows race is still a big deal in Brazil, but they have only been dealing with a multiracial society and intermarriage for five hundred years.
The answer to the OP is never, it is human nature to divide up into groups. I can’t tell the difference between a Bosnian, a Serb, or a Croat, but the people who can were willing to fight wars over who gets what. The same with Irish Catholics and Protestants and Hutu and Tutsi.
As affirmative action is dismantled, the differences between the races will diminish in importance but they will still be around.

18

Thank you. My only quibble with it is that he focuses on White/Black instead of White/{People of Color from many different racial backgrounds}. I understand why Rosenberg focused his theme around White/Black (two of the three people that served as catalysts for writing the article made racist remarks specifically regarding Blacks), but his purported audience – white people who are unaware of or deny they have privilege – may very well come away with the impression that (Rosenberg is saying) racism isn’t a problem for Latin@s, Asians, Native Americans, etc.

Especially related/important to the OP is the section The Situational Blind Spots of White Colorblindness.

With that in mind, OP, your “context” for this thread,

is a fantastic example of what that article is talking about. It’s also amazingly rude and arrogant, although I 100% believe you had no intention of being so. You are not Asian. You are, in fact, White. You have not and cannot experience what it is like to live as an Asian (or person of Asian descent) in America.* So why on God’s green earth do you think its appropriate to “insist” that you know more about it than they do? That you are better qualified to judge whether or not being Asian American is important or relevant to Asian Americans? And do you even realize that you thoughtlessly told your friend that you think something that is clearly important to them is “basically meaningless”?

  • Which doesn’t mean there is one singular Asian Experience that everyone of Asian descent will have. But the likelihood that everyone of Asian descent has experienced some form of racism (large or small, intended or unintended, action or ‘just’ words) that Whites will not experience is damn near 100%.
19

I didn’t say “basically meaningless,” I said “basically meaningless, at least in terms of culture.” What I mean is that Thai and Korean culture doesn’t have a lot in common except in the context of being lumped into the same category by mainstream American society. In other words, if you say someone is “Asian American,” that tells you NOTHING about them other than the continent their ancestors come from. “Asian” is only a thing because our society has made it one.

That’s not to say that Asian Americans haven’t had common experiences here, and that those aren’t significant (and, to use your words, important and relevant). I am sorry if that’s what came across. What I mean is that it’s a recently created identity, based on racism in America and not culture in common.

I know humans will always divide into categories. I don’t mind that if the categories are real. Different ethnicities make for a vibrant and healthy culture. It’s the races that I’m curious about: White, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American. I can see both heritage and regional identity persisting forever, but it seems like we could outgrow race specifically because it’s artificial.

Anyway, the response to “Asian” is what got me curious. People seem to feel strongly about a this as an identity, and I’d like to understand why.

Edit: I appreciate being called out on this stuff. I don’t think of myself as racist, but as I mentioned in the OP, I am white, and some racism comes with the territory. The only way to get rid of it for good is to understand it. I read the linked article on white privilege and though “that’s irrelevant to this thread, though,” but zweisamkeit made it clear why it applies. So, thanks.

20

If we dismantle race-based AA in the US, fewer than 10 black applicants would qualify for an Ivy League based Medical School. HBCUs would have to disband, serving to educate a majority of our black physicians. Similar catastrophes would result for Law and PhD programs in STEM fields. On screening exams for any professional advancement (such as for firefighters and police and teachers) whites and asians would overwhelmingly outscore blacks.

Even if we adjust for income, educational opportunity, or parental education, at every grouping tier which we created, blacks would be in the bottom of that particular tier for educational achievement as measured by grades in the same courses or schools, or standardized exams, or extracurricular achievements. As a consequence they would not be advanced into selected positions. Business with screening exams for prospective employees would not be allowed to make race a preference and would therefore not pick black applicants, who would be in the tier with the lowest scores.

In short, if we dismantle race-based AA, we will roll the clock back 40 years for black achievement into professional roles in the US.

It’s not clear to me how anyone looking around at that society would think the “differences between races” would have “diminished in importance.”