by Gregory Rodriguez

In 2006, the last time Congress took a serious look at comprehensive immigration reform, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, legal and illegal, marched through the streets of the nation’s cities. The resulting media coverage was filled with stories about real people — brown people! — whose lives would be affected by the proposed legislation. It was one of those rare moments when the public could witness the intersection of grass-roots movements, insider political maneuvering and their human consequences. But that year’s push for reform wound up going nowhere.

So far in the current debate over immigration reform, the immigrant story you’re most likely to hear is that of the Cuban American senator from Florida, Republican Marco Rubio. The marches are gone. And so is the multiplicity of voices and faces.

There’s something disembodied and disconnected about the discussion now. Other than the president’s quick hop to Nevada to give his post-second-inaugural immigration speech some local color, the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively inside the Beltway and behind closed doors. Quick, what are the terms of the “bipartisan framework”?

If reform does come this year, it’ll be absent any pretense that it was accomplished for the people or by the people, except very indirectly. That’s because we all know that reform is advancing not because of human needs but because of political needs: Specifically, the Republicans’ desperation to save their reputation with Latino voters.

If you’re in favor of comprehensive reform — as I am — you couldn’t care less how it happens, as long as it happens. But there’s real danger that fixing immigration in an inside-the-Beltway manner may worsen an even bigger problem: the growing disconnect between the public and politics.

The way immigration is being debated is exactly why so many Americans are so cynical about the political process. Civic do-gooders are constantly telling us how important it is to engage in our public institutions, to make our voices heard. We Americans want to believe that, but then we see major national policy made with little public input, and we rightly suspect that the political class ultimately works for the greater glory of the political class. Does it even matter if we get involved?

It should. Yes, grass-roots public debates, let alone mass marches, are messy. The messaging isn’t always clear or smooth. Real people don’t have press secretaries or public relations consultants. Their arguing points arise from textured and nuanced real-life situations that don’t lend themselves to the purist positions held by the ideological extremes, which drown out real discussion in our national dialogue. Finding lasting solutions to problems requires going into the weeds.

One reason our politics keep failing to produce nuanced solutions is that hot-button issues are raised to the level of abstraction. Take the specific applications to specific lives out of the conversation and polarization results, shades of gray disappear. Does it ever seem to you that the people who do engage in debates most fiercely on such issues as abortion or gay marriage are the very people who are least likely to be personally grappling with the issue?

One sure sign of the need for a reality check in the immigration debate is the number of politicians and policies claiming to serve the interests of a national “Latino community.” That “community” — as a single entity — is a myth. All 50 million Latinos can’t be reduced to a single-issue interest group.

Such reductionism allows Washington to hijack “Latinos” for its own purposes. It allows the media to entertain the absurd notion that throngs of mestizo Mexican Americans from California will one day help carry a white Cuban U.S. senator from Florida to the White House, because they’re all Latino. It enables the Republican Party to think that supporting immigration reform is enough of a solution to having become a de facto white race party.

The best check on such nonsense is the public, and especially those members of the public who would be affected by the policies under construction. The people need to be engaged not only to counter Washington myth-making but to make sure that whatever reform is produced serves actual human constituents, distinct human dilemmas. Dehumanized debates, after all, too often produce dehumanizing policies.

Originally posted in the Los Angeles Times on February 18, 2013.

*Photo courtesy of Talk Radio News Service.

By Sarah Rothbard

The premiere performance of Citizen Who—a one-man show written and produced as part of author and civic entrepreneur Eric Liu’s fellowship at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University—opened with the Zócalo audience at The Actors’ Gang being asked to stand to take an oath.

It’s an oath familiar to some Americans but very foreign to most—the U.S. naturalization oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

As the audience took their seats, Liu asked them how it had felt to take the oath. “What did we just do? To whom did we make that promise?” And, if it felt, odd—even unnatural—why?

Over five acts—“Dream,” “Arrival,” “Betrayal,” “Redemption,” and “Dream,”—Liu recounted his journey across America trying to answer that question, and to figure out what exactly this strange oath means and how it’s practiced.

Liu punctuated each act with a violin performance of a quintessential American song, from “America the Beautiful” to “This Land Is Your Land.” Along the way, audience members were asked to answer history and civics questions from the citizenship test, some simple (Who was the first American president?) and others more complex (What is one responsibility that is only for U.S. citizens?).

Liu wove together these acts through his story and his family’s—his mother’s journey from Taiwan to New York, from file clerk to a job at IBM, from immigrant to American—along with those of other Americans, both foreign- and native-born.

Gerda Weissmann Klein survived the Holocaust, moved to America, wrote a bestselling memoir, and founded an organization called Citizenship Counts. Her life, said Liu, has been extraordinary in many senses. But she also raised a family; she relished the simple pleasures she was denied as a girl. She lived an ordinary, American life.

Liu decided to join the Marine Corps as a sophomore in college. At officer training school, he was hazed: “I was a little guy, an Asian guy, an Ivy League guy, a guy with glasses.” When at last he was mocked for holding his head high—as “General Liu”—he realized he was an insider at last.

Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamos who had emigrated from China, was falsely accused of espionage and imprisoned; his name was leaked, and his case was splashed across the media. When he was finally exonerated, no one noticed—or even apologized.

A South Philadelphia high school student becomes embroiled in a race war, and decides to empower his fellow Asian classmates. A Latina Republican becomes an accidental activist. A Pentecostal preacher in Tulsa rescues abused guest workers from India.

These are people with consciences, said Liu—people whose consciences have been animated by the question of what is freedom for, when is loyalty dissent, and when is dissent loyalty?

Most of us remain citizens by birthright only. We don’t earn it. But what if we had to? What if, like naturalized citizens, we too had to take an oath? Liu asked the audience to test this proposition, and to join him in taking the Sworn-Again America Oath:

I pledge to be an active American; to show up for others; to govern my self
to help govern my community. I recommit myself to my country’s creed: to cherish liberty as a responsibility; to serve and to push my country—when right, to be kept right; when wrong to be set right. Wherever my ancestors and I were born, I claim America
and I pledge to live like a citizen.

But how do we live up to these vows?

It starts, said Liu, by introducing yourselves to your fellow Americans.

“I am Eric Liu, citizen. Who are you?”

Watch full video here.

See more photos here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

For the past year, photographer Chad Ress, a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, has been crisscrossing the United States to capture in photographs how Americans gather today. His work has taken him to Florida, the Dakotas, Kentucky, California, and many other places east, west, north, and south. Ress offers the viewer basic pieces of information—location and happening—and leaves the rest for us to ponder as we take in images of places that, to most of us, are unfamiliar, even though they might be nearby. Today’s selection of images is the third installment (here you may see one and two) of previews of his work. The effort will result in a final exhibition of Ress’ prints.

See gallery of photographs here.

Chad Ress is a photographer based in Los Angeles and a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. His most recent project, America Recovered, was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Harper’s Magazine.

by Gregory Rodriguez

Give Karl Rove a break. His meltdown on election night may not have been entirely about Fox News prematurely calling Ohio for President Barack Obama. After all, the poor guy had every right to get upset while watching the Republican Party nominee’s campaign crash and burn.

For all intents and purposes, Mitt Romney trampled on Rove’s once vaunted GOP playbook–and leaves a weakened GOP in his wake.

Once upon a time, Rove had hoped to build a big-tent Republican Party that would be well-poised to capture the support of a rapidly diversifying America. He was the mastermind behind George W. Bush’s Latino strategy, first when Bush won reelection as Texas governor in 1998 and again when he campaigned for the presidency in 2000. In ’98 Bush became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas to win overwhelmingly Mexican-American El Paso County. Two years later, he won a respectable 35 percent of the Latino vote nationally.

Initially at least, Latinos were a crucial part of Bush’s overall strategy. His ability to capture a sizable portion (40 percent) of the Latino vote while Texas governor was, in fact, the one concrete thing he could point to when trying to pitch himself as a “compassionate conservative.”

How did Bush do it? It certainly wasn’t a long list of promises he delivered as governor. Because there was no list. Nor was it those charming moments when he trotted out his elementary Spanish-language skills. And as governor, immigration policy wasn’t even in his wheelhouse.

The secret to Bush’s success with Latinos in Texas was, as Woody Allen would say, just showing up–literally.

In his first term as governor, Bush visited El Paso, a Democratic stronghold that is closer to San Diego than it is to Austin, no fewer than 13 times. On those visits, he delivered a Rove-devised message of inclusion and Texas unity. His Latino-targeted gubernatorial reelection ads, which would presage his national campaign two years later, stressed commonality of values between Texas Anglos and Mexicans. The message was that hard work, pride, and the strong family values of Mexican-Americans are quintessentially Texan, too.

It didn’t hurt that Bush’s brother Jeb married a Mexican woman and that his nephews were olive-skinned. (George H.W. Bush once referred to them affectionately as “the little brown ones.”) To George W., Mexican-Americans were family, literally, and, unlike so many national pols, his rapport and comfort level was actually genuine. He wasn’t about to repeat President Gerald Ford’s famous gaffe of biting into a tamale before removing the corn husk.

Truth be told, for many Latino voters, the battered wives of American politics, Bush’s appeals were a breath of fresh air. They countered the GOP’s anti-Latino reputation, which had been created by California Governor Pete Wilson in 1994, when he endorsed a mean-spirited, racially charged ballot initiative. Proposition 187 was designed, among other things, to bar undocumented children from schools and other non-emergency government services.

Rove’s Latino strategy also had the added benefit of making the long complacent Democrats actually fight for Latino votes.

The early post-mortems of the 2012 presidential campaign have seen a lot of conservative pundits claiming that the only way to win Latino votes is to pass immigration reform that would include some sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants, a position that most Republicans refuse to support. But that’s a decidedly narrow view of why Romney’s showing among Latinos was the worst since Bob Dole received 21 percent of their vote in 1996.

There’s no doubt that many Latino voters would respond positively to a GOP plan for immigration reform. But immigration isn’t the only issue Latinos care about. In fact, it isn’t even the most important issue.

An election eve ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions poll found that, at 53 percent, job creation and the economy was the most important issue for Latino voters, followed by immigration at 35 percent and education at 20 percent.

Rove’s Latino strategy was central to Bush’s first presidential run. It certainly included immigration reform. But it’s important to remember that it was part of a broader appeal that included a focus on values, entrepreneurialism, and patriotism. Bush showed up. For Romney, Latino voters were more like an afterthought.

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly’s sullen lament on election night about the GOP’s fate in the face of America’s demographic change both echoes Romney’s infamous 47 percent comments and the gist of so much post-election griping from conservatives.

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel the economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

O’Reilly’s disdain for minorities doesn’t derive from any disagreement over immigration policy. Rather, it’s rooted in a weird racialist worldview that holds that whites are more bootstrapping and self-sufficient than moocher minorities. That theme of white integrity versus minority dependency is as old as white supremacy itself. But its recent resurgence among mainstream Republicans is pushing the GOP toward a demographic cliff as much as any debate over immigration.

Last Tuesday, only 12 percent of Romney supporters were nonwhite. His decisive loss suddenly has everyone realizing what has long been so painfully obvious to Rove: that Republicans can’t build a majority if they can’t garner a sizable share of minorities, particularly Latinos.

Rove did essentially say those words on Tuesday night. But his delivery wasn’t as dramatic or memorable as his Ohio meltdown. George W.’s strategist may have been wrong on Election Night, but on the much bigger question of minorities and the fate of the GOP, Rove was right.

This piece was cross-published by Reuters Opinion and Zócalo Public Square.

Gregory Rodriguez is publisher and founding director of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of @mjb.

by Gregory Rodriguez

Eight years ago, after former California Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg was knocked out of the L.A. mayor’s race in the primary, urban critic Joel Kotkin and political consultant Arnie Steinberg bravely predicted that the chances of a Jew ever being elected to the mayoralty had been greatly diminished.

They agreed that the demographic writing was on the wall. The “growing dominance of Los Angeles by Latino politicians and public employee unions” and the diminishing Jewish percentage of the Los Angeles electorate were “limiting the options for Jewish politicians.”

Even the briefest glance at the major 2013 mayoral candidates should convince you of how deeply wrong those gentlemen were. Right now, I’d put the chances that the next mayor of Los Angeles will be intimately tied to Jewishness or Judaism by blood, conversion or marriage at about, um, 100%. Eric Garcetti is Mexican Italian Jewish. Jan Perry is an African American who converted to Judaism 30 years ago. Wendy Gruel is married to a Jewish man and is raising her son in her husband’s faith.

Kotkin and Steinberg weren’t the only ones to misread the long-term ethnic significance of Antonio Villaraigosa’s election in 2005. Four years earlier, labor leader Miguel Contreras had suggested out loud what so many other civic observers just assumed: that James Hahn, who was elected in 2001, would be the last white mayor of Los Angeles.

There’s no doubt that Villaraigosa’s victory in 2005 was a historic milestone. His election signaled that Latinos at last had a seat at the table politically and were becoming more socially integrated. It marked a new era, as L.A.’s Mexican Americans got to experience the political coming-of-age that so many other ethnic groups achieved in a variety of U.S. cities before them.

But somewhere in the all the hoopla we mistook the milestone for the end of the road. We wrongly thought that the political emergence of Latinos was a juggernaut that would eclipse all other comers in a zero-sum game.

We should have known better than to think that demography was destiny. After all, blacks never made up a large percentage of Angelenos, and we had an African American mayor, Tom Bradley, for 20 years (and two black police chiefs). Likewise, since the 1970s Jewish politicians have played a role in the city’s civic life that has belied their numbers in the population. In the 1990s, L.A. had half a dozen Jewish state Assembly members. In 2010, Southern California elected seven Jewish politicians to Congress.

The election of a Mexican American mayor in L.A. didn’t so much signal the end of the process of fully including Latinos in the city’s establishment as its beginning.

And the more important issue may be what happens outside City Hall. Constant demographic change requires ongoing efforts to integrate the new with the long established. A healthy society is an inclusive one, a place where a broad cross-section of stakeholders feels represented at the highest levels. Politics is certainly one means of inclusion. But it’s not the only one.

Look around, and except in the Catholic Archdiocese, there are too few local Latinos at the helm and even the mid-level of the city’s major institutions. One head of a philanthropic foundation. No heads of museums or universities. No Latino surnames on the current masthead of this paper. And never a Mexican American police chief.

L.A.’s civic elites bemoan the city’s embarrassingly low rates of engagement and political participation. But other than fretting about what the region’s ongoing demographic change will mean for their hold on power, it’s not clear what they are doing to make the broadest cross-section of Los Angeles feel like part of the city’s civic life.

Villaraigosa’s mayoralty has been a significant moment in the history of modern Los Angeles. But it can’t be a substitute for a concerted effort to integrate the city’s social and cultural life. Remember that word “integration”?

So, no matter what the next mayor’s background turns out to be, the need to bring the many disparate parts of the city together remains the same. Making Los Angeles’ institutions look like L.A. is not just about symbolism, politics or the mayoralty. We’ll never be a great city if native-born members of the emerging majority can’t imagine themselves growing up to one day become — not just a breakthrough mayor — but its everyday, year-in-year-out movers and shakers.

Originally posted in the Los Angeles Times on January 7, 2013.

*Photo By: Tyrone D. Washington/ LA Mayor’s Office. Courtesy of Antonio Villaraigosa.

by Eric Liu

Nobody’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. But as someone of Chinese descent I have been asked plenty of times where I’m from — and when I say “Poughkeepsie,” I often get the follow-up question that’s almost a cliché now among Asian Americans: “No, where are you really from?”

It’s always disheartening to get that question, even though I’ve learned to answer it with equanimity and usually take care to make the inquisitor feel not-stupid. But it’s always clarifying, for it reveals the default picture in the minds of some of my fellow Americans about who they are, who we are, and who I am.

That’s why Mitt Romney’s birther-baiting remarks today are, in a way, welcome. Let there be no doubt: He is the candidate for people who think the name Obama must be Muslim and its bearer indelibly foreign. He is also the candidate for the greater number of people who do not initially imagine that someone with my face, my eyes, my skin could be from this country.

Even in one of his home states (Michigan, the site of today’s remarks), Mitt Romney is not some iconic American hero whose patriotism is beyond reproach. The reason no one questions where Romney was born is simply this: he is white. If that’s good enough for you, then you’re good enough for Romney.

But that’s not good enough for America. I have as much a claim to be the image of an American as Romney and his offspring do. So does Barack Obama. So, by the way, does Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz or Susana Martinez — nonwhites in Romney’s own party who likely have also been asked (no, really) where they are from.

Romney’s implicit pledge of allegiance to the birther movement is as revealing of his character as anything else in his campaign of half-deliberate opacity. He appears to lack a core capacity for empathy. He literally cannot see himself as someone not white, as someone accented or a newcomer.

In fact, Romney’s tactics suggest that he’s the one whose Americanness should come under question. True Americanness is not about how WASPy your surname is, how pale your skin, or how many generations your family has lived here — or how much you can lord those facts over others. Nor is it about how subtly you can stir up secret prejudices against people who could be deemed outsiders.

True Americanness is about fidelity to a creed that by design transcends color or place of family origin. Yes, we as a nation have often subverted that creed, or averted our gaze, but it still stands in timeless judgment, measuring our willingness to deliver on the promise of equal citizenship. True Americans see in a sea of colored faces a chance to bring everyone into the fold, so that the team is stronger and the creed redeemed. Mitt Romney can prance all he wants but his words today were those of a second-rate American.

And the more he plays his Donald Trump card, the more his becomes a last-gasp candidacy: the inarticulate paroxysm of those who still silently believe, as was once permissible to declare in public, that America is a white nation and that the interests, mores, and preferences of whites should predominate.

Romney may yet win in November. But he and this whole odious line of attack are on the losing side of history. The tide of demographics is irresistible, and soon enough it’ll sweep up his birth certificate and mine into a new notion of who is truly from this country.

Originally posted in The Atlantic on August 24, 2012.

*Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

by Eric Liu

Are we citizens of the world?

In recent years, an unlikely collection of lefty environmentalists, Internet libertarians, multicultural educators, and voracious capitalists has coalesced around the idea that nations don’t really matter anymore – that all we need is state-free citizenship of the globe. It’s a powerful vision. It has in its favor much evidence and many trends. And it is a mirage.

To be sure, technology and economic globalization have made nations weaker and borders less meaningful. Mega-problems like climate change and financial panics know no boundaries. More than ever, we need to understand the deep interconnectedness of economic, political, and cultural life on the planet. And as Tim O’Reilly notes, the Internet is indeed birthing something like a global brain.

But what we call “global citizenship” is usually one of three things, none of which is quite global citizenship. The first is an ethic of consciousness about the worldwide impact of our actions, and the worldwide forces shaping our actions. This is what educators and environmental activists mean when they talk about being good global citizens. Reduce your carbon footprint. Recognize your shared responsibility for conditions in other countries. Learn about the cultures and histories of those countries.

This version of global citizenship, baked into the mission statements of many colleges and philanthropies, is worthy and necessary. It is certainly global. But it is not citizenship, at least not in the sense of participation in a sovereign political community. It’s more a general template for mutuality and pro-social behavior, using citizenship as a metaphor.

A second notion of global citizenship, heard among the tech-minded and among fans of multilateral diplomacy, does indeed contemplate creating or bolstering institutions that can help govern the people of Earth. Whether the issue is regulation of the Internet or adjudication of territorial disputes, we see more cooperative efforts arising to address sticky issues of transnational governance.

This, too, can be a useful thing. At the same time, it has practical limits. When even the most avid self-described global citizen realizes he can’t get or afford health care, he will not turn to the United Nations or the World Health Organization. He will turn to his local or national government to enact and enforce laws that provide that care – that is, if he’s lucky enough to live in a part of the planet where the government is stable and effective enough to respond.

The third notion of global citizenship, championed by Fortune 500 CEOs and other winners in the global economy, holds that capital has globalized the economy and corporations have transcended their countries of origin, thus freeing capitalists from the nation-state. As Thomas Friedman puts it, corporate leaders don’t think any more about being from “here” or outsourcing to “there.” The world is their game board, and they deploy pieces wherever cost-effective.

This version of global citizenship is mainly a form of self-justification. It allows economic elites to forget that their corporations were made possible by the investments and institutions of actual nations – and to shed responsibility for the health of those nations. It permits them to treat as God-given and fixed, rather than man-made and malleable, an arrangement in which everything is subservient to capital. This isn’t citizenship of any kind; it’s an excuse to opt out.

So if there’s not really a there there when it comes to global citizenship, what are we left with? Networks and nations. Technology now is enabling us to invert the 1960s slogan and to think local, act global. That is, think about how to change our own localities and then, via technology, link up with local changemakers in other places to form a global grid of action. A few years ago, for example, when the U.S. failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Seattle’s mayor led a network of mayors from hundreds of cities across the planet to reduce their greenhouse gases. This kind of networked localism is only going to increase.

But in the end, nation-states and national citizenship still matter most because they remain the most workable vehicles for collective, large-scale problem-solving. If humanity averts climate catastrophe, it will be because states like China, India, and the U.S. each get their act together – and then act together. And while the Internet fueled the Arab Spring, it has not enabled the citizens of what is still called Egypt to govern themselves. The story after the Spring, like it or not, is being written within the framework of national governments.

Nations matter for a deeper reason too. They give form to the human need both to belong and to exclude. We are hardwired for tribe, and tribe means some are in and some are out. At the opening and closing of each Olympiad, when the five-ring flag is raised or lowered and the Olympic anthem is played, no one cries. No one (not even Morgan Freeman) says “Go World.” And no one ever will, at least until we begin competing against athletes from other planets.

This is why, among nations, the United States matters uniquely. The U.S. by design has the most capacious form of tribe possible, based on a universal civic creed rather than blood or soil or deity. Yes, we regularly fail to live up to that creed. But there it stands, challenging us to do better and compelling people from around the world to come here. That makes America the planet’s petri dish for new combinations of genes and memes and ways of life.

Citizenship of the United States is also the closest humanity has yet gotten to an actionable version of global citizenship. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights may be more expansive than the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but only the latter comes with effective power of enforcement. “Equal protection under law” is a killer app with viral potential.

That’s why Americans today – especially if their concerns are global – need to engage more fully in the civic life of this country and to see themselves as citizens of the United States, with all the responsibilities and powers that status entails. Want to be a citizen of the world? Help America be all it can be. There’s nothing more cosmopolitan than a true American patriot.

Originally posted in The Atlantic on August 14, 2012.

*Photo courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

by Gregory Rodriguez

It’s official! A new study by the Pew Research Center proves the old trope true: Asians are the new Jews. All those essentially positive stereotypes you’ve heard about — the hard work and the Tiger Moms — have made Asian Americans the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. Not only that, in the last few years, Asians have overtaken Latinos as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S.

This is all good news — both for Asian Americans and the United States — but the Jewish comparison has a dark side. Once the cheering over this study, titled “The Rise of Asian America,” has subsided, we might remember it as the dawn of a new era of anti-Asian bias.

Americans tend to view race and ethnic relations as a linear progression. The triumphant narrative of the civil rights movement has us convinced that things get better over time: Economic status rises as prejudice decreases, and vice versa. We also like to tell ourselves that bias is always targeted downward, at the weakest and the most vulnerable in society.

But neither assumption is true, and the sooner we recognize that, the better position we’ll be in to manage race relations in a rapidly changing America.

We should start by getting rid of the canard that modern anti-Semitism is primarily a form of religious bigotry. Christopher Hitchens was one of the few contemporary figures who openly argued what I have long suspected: distrust or disdain of Jews can sometimes be motivated by envy and resentment of an identifiably separate group that’s significantly wealthier than the population at large.

A decade or so ago, a prominent conservative political writer went so far as to tell me off the record of his suspicion that a large portion of Jewish philanthropy is motivated by a desire to defuse envy over the income disparity between the Jewish and Gentile populations.

All of this suggests that invidious comparisons between groups are alive, that they’re stoked by economics and that, though not particularly venomous in the U.S. right now, they have the potential to become dangerous under the wrong circumstances.

Chinese merchants throughout Asia have known this for a long time. In Southeast Asia, they make up something of a creditor class that has, from time to time, faced persecution and political attack. Nowhere is this more true than in Indonesia, where the Chinese are known as “the middle race.” In 1959, the Indonesian government implemented anti-Chinese legislation that forced Chinese merchants to abandon their businesses. In 1973, a riot in West Java led to the looting and destruction of more than 1,500 Chinese Indonesian-owned shops and houses. In 1998, as Indonesia’s economy imploded amid the broader Asian financial crisis, rioting with a strong anti-Chinese element took the lives of at least 1,000 people, costing $250 million in damages.

I’m not predicting that any of this will happen to Chinese Americans, who make up nearly a quarter of Asians in the U.S. But you’d be naive not to see the flip side of last week’s Pew study, which states that the median household income of Asian Americans is 33% higher than that of the general public.

Here in California, we’ve long heard grumbling about the number of Asians gaining admittance to the public university system. UC Irvine, whose undergraduate student body is 49% Asian, has been nicknamed the “University of Chinese and Indians.” UCLA, which had a 2011 freshman class that was 41% Asian American, has been dubbed “University of Caucasians Lost Among Asians.”

The “rise of Asian Americans” coincides withChina’semergence as a global power. As competition with China heats up, Asian Americans may feel the brunt of any anti-China sentiment. And history tells us that bigots don’t really care about your actual background as long as you look the part. Case in point? Last week saw the 30th anniversary of the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American in Michigan who died after he was beaten by two out-of-work autoworkers who blamed him for competition from the Japanese automobile industry.

It’s tempting to ascribe the success of Asian Americans to our beloved rags-to-riches narrative, and to believe that they have achieved the old-fashioned American dream. But that’s not quite true, and that too could feed resentment.

Six in 10 adult immigrants from Asia arrive in the United States with at least a bachelor’s degree. So while activists have spent the last generation demanding an end to low-skilled immigration, we shouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing calls for the end of highly skilled immigration from Asia. More than anything else, race relations American-style have always been about sharp elbows and hunger for a piece of the pie.

Originally posted in the Los Angeles Times on June 25, 2012.

*Photo courtesy of centinel.

by Gregory Rodriguez

Here we go again. The Census Bureau has released yet one more milestone data point that supposedly reveals the profundity of America’s ongoing demographic change. This time, it’s news that, as The New York Times put it last week, “Whites account for less than half of births in the U.S.”

It’s one of those front-page headlines that give you pause. You know it means something significant—why else would it be on the front page?!—but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Don’t buy into the hype and all the overwrought commentary (of which there was plenty on cable TV following the demographic “breaking news”) on this supposed milestone. The Census Bureau’s drumbeat of racial change is nothing but empty, invidious data that says more about the uselessness of our current racial categories than it does about any transformation of American society.

For one, reports that “whites” account for less than half of births in the U.S. are not accurate. Since almost half of American Latinos identify themselves as white racially, you can rest assured that, strictly speaking, “white” babies are still securely in the majority of delivery room miracles. Sure, the body of the story specifies that what they’re talking about is “non-Hispanic whites”—a term no one but bureaucrats and wonks use—but the headline says it all. Real white babies or traditionally white babies or the babies we’ve come to consider white are lagging behind in the race to be born.

In the U.S., we’ve traditionally understood biology as being the fundamental difference between “ethnicity” and “race.” Race is seen as genetically predetermined and therefore unchangeable, while ethnicity—which encompasses language, religion, and culture—can change over time and place.

The Census makes clear that black, white, American Indian, Asian, and Native Hawaiian are racial categories, while Hispanic is an ethnic one. The term non-Hispanic white then, or “white Hispanic” for that matter (think George Zimmerman), combines the racial and the ethnic indicators. It is a jerry-rigged term with no clear objective meaning or predictive value.

Official government usage notwithstanding, whiteness is in the eye of the beholder. Last week, a political journalist friend of mine wondered aloud whether Mitt Romney was “too white” to be elected president. Last month, a flight attendant whose parents were born in Sicily told me she didn’t consider herself white because of her olive complexion. The first instance of whiteness here refers to the candidate’s behavior and mannerisms that might derive from a particular ethnic background; what my friend really meant was Yankee. The second instance was referring solely to skin color.

Plenty of other traits can confer whiteness on a person—class, economic, educational, or social status to name a few. Five years ago, I followed two friends of mine deep into the heart of the Mississippi Delta where they were studying the construction of whiteness, the process by which a variety of ethnic subgroups forged an uneasy and hierarchical alliance called “white people.” One remarkable interview with a retired sheriff in Sunflower County taught me more than any demographer, social scientist, or race theorist ever had.

After a winding chat about subtle class and ethnic distinctions among whites in the Delta, we decided to ask the sheriff where a variety of local groups stood in relation to whiteness.

“Are Lebanese white people?” we began.

“Yes,” he said, “although they’re real dark.”

“How about Italian Catholics; are they white?”

“Sure.”

“And Jews?”

“Yes.”

“What about the Chinese?”

“Yes,” he said, “they go to the white schools.”

“And Mexicans?”

“They’re becoming more white. More of them are getting an education.”

“Then what’s a white person?” we asked.

After some confusion over the meaning of the question, he concluded that it was probably anybody “who isn’t black.”

So, if whiteness is more a negative indicator than anything else, it makes sense that for most people the process of becoming white has also been one of negation.

Throughout history, new immigrants to these shores were obliged to fit themselves on one side or the other of the black or non-black (white) racial divide. Not surprisingly, most chose to identify themselves with the side that had full rights. In books such as How the Irish Became White, scholars have traced the path that immigrant subgroups took to become considered part of the “white race.”

It’s a poignant and peculiarly American journey.

That’s because the status of whiteness—and the protection it conferred—came with a significant cost. Over time, most distinct subgroups gradually lost their distinctiveness. Their members traded specific ethnic labels—Italian, Dutch, Swedish, French—for the generic racial label of “white.” They exchanged identities that told us something about their unique family histories for an elastic racial category that mostly tells us what they are not.

A decade or so ago, I had an epiphany while skulking around Milwaukee’s once German, now African American, West Side. In few places are the mechanics of becoming white so clear. Milwaukee had an ethnic German majority from 1860 until roughly the middle of the 20th century. This demographic clustering created an ecosystem of newspapers, bakeries, churches, and social groups that nurtured the city’s ethnic distinctiveness. (Even the city’s 1895 City Hall, built in German Renaissance Revival style, resembles Hamburg’s Rathaus.) But in the early and mid-20th century, as greater numbers of blacks moved north in search of industrial jobs, ethnic Germans began to move to the surrounding suburbs, thereby moving beyond the radius of the social organizations and businesses that had nurtured their Germanness several generations after the actual immigrant experience. That’s when they became white.

Not only did this jump into whiteness deprive post-ethnics of all sorts of traditional comforts and ethnic-based networks of affection and meaning, it also stripped them of ethnic identity itself, something that had long served as a source of cohesion and rootedness in the larger, peripatetic society.

In her 1990 book, Ethnic Options, Harvard political scientist Mary Waters argues that being American doesn’t give people that sense of belonging to one large family, “the way that being French does for people in France. In America, rather than conjuring up an image of nationhood to meet this desire, ethnic images are called forth.”

It therefore stands to reason that moving beyond ethnicity into whiteness can lead to a greater sense of individual isolation and loneliness. In her fieldwork, Waters found that many post-ethnic whites often long for the sense of “specialness” and intimacy that being “none of the above” can’t provide. That longing prompts many to grasp for new ways to connect. In 1972, historian and journalist Thomas C. Wheeler warned that, stripped of embracing ethnic identities, Americans reel off “endlessly on fads” and in “search of life-styles.”

More recently, however, the emptiness of whiteness is not only eroding the social contract but also encouraging people to embrace the abstract certainties of rigid ideologies. Like newly minted atheists who search for all-encompassing worldviews to replace the religions they’ve left behind, atomized post-ethnics substitute political causes for the bakery and social clubs their grandparents once enjoyed.

Recent headlines on infant demographics contained more than a hint of alarmism. Implicit in the story was the belief that changes in the racial makeup of the country would pose a challenge to the nation’s values, identity, and heritage. But race in America has always said more about what people are not than what they are. On some level, whiteness can only be understood as an anti-heritage, a privileged enclave whose price of entry has been checking one’s past at the gate. The end of whiteness as a majority category doesn’t mean the country is relinquishing something. Quite the contrary, we will literally be losing nothing.

Gregory Rodriguez is founding director of Zócalo Public Square and executive director of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University.

Originally published on Zócalo Public Square.