Peter Schrag: Mestizaje: Making our racial categories obsolete

Sacramento Bee ^ | 11/28/7 | Peter Schrag

[SmithL]

As Ward Connerly prepares initiatives to abolish race-based affirmative action in five more states, New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez, no fan of Connerly's movement, has published an eye-opening book that nonetheless reinforces deep questions about the nation's racial assumptions and categories.

Connerly is the Sacramento businessman and ex-regent of the University of California who drove the successful campaigns overturning race-based preference policies in public education, employment and contracting in California, Washington and Michigan. He's now planning similar campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Connerly's most notable failure was the overwhelming defeat of California's Proposition 54 in 2003, which would have prohibited the use of official racial categories in all instances where they were not required by federal law and not essential to public safety. Those categories, Connerly said, legitimized racial divisions that were long obsolete.

Rodriguez's book, "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America" raises similar questions but folds them into a compelling, extensively documented history, going back to the conquistadors, of the consequences of the Mexican racial and cultural synthesis called mestizaje – the mixing of Spaniard and Indian.

Because of it, he writes, "Mexican Americans are forcing the United States to reinterpret the concept of the melting pot to include racial as well as ethnic mixing."

It also undercuts the historic American racial dualism of "white" and "nonwhite."

The use of the word "mongrels" is calculated –

[2harddrive]

Kudos to Ward Connerly, who has a REAL dream for America!

[Macrinus]

I’m a hybrid of the Alpine and Mediterranean Caucasoid sub-races, and I want reparations from the descendants of the Huns, pronto!

[Kenny Bunk]

...from the descendants of the Huns,...

Given the price of oil, I think you might have better luck with the Cart haginians.

[goldstategop]

The classic racial classifications are obsolete. What does one call the child of a black father and a Chinese mother? These classifications detract from rather than aid our understanding of humanity. They should swept away with as they only serve to call attention what divides rather than what unites us. They are the vestige of a bye-gone racist era when skin color and national origin mattered more than the content of one's character and one's values.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Clemenza]

We will never be a "color blind" society. Even in societies where extensive race mixing has taken place (such as Brazil), there is still a link between race and social standing.

I would like to see racial categories eliminated, as they are merely a front for an ethnic spoils system? Why categorize white Argentineans alongside mulatto/quadroon Puerto Ricans as "nonwhite", while categorizing semitic and Persian people from the middle east as "white?" Eliminate the damn categories already!