Did you read the article? It starts with:
"Is white the new black?"So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of "Beyond the Pale," his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing "the slow birth of a people."
And concludes with
Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.
Pat's not talking "American values," he's talking about "White American values."
The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.I think he's wrong to predict a "conflict"...but I do think the Tea Party movement represents a reassertion of Traditional America, especially its cultural norms.
It has little to do with race or ethnicity. Remember that "white" Americans are made up of many different ethnicities, many of which were once not considered "white." What changed? It was the cultural assimilation of those groups into the traditional American culture.
I think culture and race are often conflated, wrongly. They are different things. Race is unimportant. Culture is very important.
I should also add that the conflation of race and culture is, I believe, often done intentionally as a means of attacking traditional culture in a way that is difficult to defend.
The narrative is: if you defend traditional American culture, you are really just a racist. We see this being used against the Tea Partiers today.