Posted on 12/16/2002 5:34:44 AM PST by SJackson
Carol M. Swain, a professor of both political science and law at Vanderbilt University, has studied racial attitudes for more than a decade. Her latest book, "The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration" (Cambridge University Press, 2002), argues that white nationalism is on the rise. To defuse its appeal, she counsels African-Americans to stop supporting affirmative action and reparations. Felicia R. Lee spoke with her.
You argue that an energized white separatist movement exists, despite polls that show more racial tolerance and an increasingly diverse popular culture. Why?
A lot of white people feel that diversity is being forced on them and it comes at their expense.
For example, in one of my focus groups with whites from the New York area — men and women of different ages — they were very angry. One person said employers will not take white males when they have to take blacks, Hispanics and Chinese; that there were quotas; that blacks could go to schools like Yale before whites; that blacks were lazy.
Blacks saw quotas as a ceiling and were angry about affirmative action, too. They said affirmative action was the receptionist out front and the guy who fixes the copy machine.
Racial extremists have a long history in this country. Why sound alarm bells now?
A constellation of forces are coming together at this point in time that we've never had before. There is the projection that non-Hispanic whites will be the minority around the year 2050. There's economic uncertainty, with a recession and globalization and loss of jobs. An immigration policy that means that some immigrants do compete with Americans for jobs. Racial preferences, a policy never accepted by the majority of whites. Continued white fear of black crime. And the ability of the Internet to reach people who want information about white nationalism.
Historically, rapid demographic changes and economic uncertainty put people on a collision course and lead to social ills.
Senator Trent Lott is under fire for saying that the United States would be better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency on the segregationist platform in 1948. Should he resign?
I think Trent Lott should lead the national debate on race. If we're going to have a serious discussion, we need people to say what's on their minds. I don't think he should step down. If we attack these people when they put their feet in their mouths, we can never get to the root of the problem.
Is the specter of whites as a minority the biggest race card the racists play?
Yes. They say that your children and grandchildren will be submerged in these teeming masses of people that don't share your values, don't share your culture. It's very dangerous that white nationalists are the only ones talking in open forums about what it might mean for white people being a minority in America.
You yourself overcame the disadvantages of being black, poor, a high-school dropout. And now you advocate restrictions on immigration and the end of race-based affirmative action as big steps toward creating a better racial climate.
We can neutralize white nationalists by taking away two of their best issues. One is affirmative action as racial preferences and another is liberal immigration policies. One of the concerns that many people have about immigration is that new immigrants, who don't have a shared history of discrimination in the same way as African-Americans, can be eligible for racial preferences; it works against the interests of African-Americans and other people who have a history in this country. Some of them are illegal immigrants, who tend to depress the wages of native workers.
We need to move toward race-neutral affirmative-action policies and guarantee people a working wage. I believe that affirmative action never reached down to the people who were most disadvantaged.
What do you think of the current national black leadership?
The house is on fire for African-Americans, but the black leadership is more focused on the easier, symbolic issues. Some of those issues that the black leaders champion push some white people into the neo-conservative movement as a reaction. Like the focus on slave reparations at this time in history — the timing could not be worse. If whites don't support affirmative action, why would they support reparations? I think it comes at an enormous cost of resentments being stirred.
Black leadership needs to focus still on issues like black crime. Even though crime has dropped nationwide, it's still a pattern that separates African-Americans from other groups. There are cultural things that need to be addressed, like the high rate of illegitimacy. Close to 70 percent of black children are born illegitimate. AIDS is the leading cause of death of African-Americans under the age of 55, and that is not really being discussed by the leading black spokespeople.
Liberals, you say, are not any better in turning back white nationalists because they have no new ideas about race, immigration, poverty.
I think the left is very much focused on maintaining and defending the status quo of things put into place 30 years ago. They're not strategic at all.
How in the world is the average white person, who maybe doesn't like affirmative action, turned into a white nationalist?
To reach the mainstream white population, the group they'd like to politicize, white nationalists have very skillfully adopted the language of multiculturalism and the language of civil rights. The language of multiculturalism says it's O.K. for groups to organize for self-determination and self-pride. The white nationalists say if it's O.K. for blacks and Hispanics, then why not whites? And they say that white Americans are the group that is most discriminated against in America and that there's no one protecting their interests. They are talking about racial preferences, immigration, job loss. The K.K.K. is a dying organization, not because its views and hatred are not out there, but because people have other avenues, and white intellectuals, people who are well educated, are not going to be in any of those organizations.
I'd say, "commit suicide," but that would be -- a la Hitler -- escaping responsibility. The only thing for a white male with a conscience to do, is to walk alone into a black slum every night, and permit himself to be beaten within an inch of his life... or induce oppressed blacks to beat other white guys within an inch of their lives.
Yes, the left has made suckers of everyone who works for an honest living.
Religion is a factor: the mostly Catholic Irish were slower to assimilate than the mostly Protestant Scots and Welsh for that reason. Cultural distance from the Anglo-Saxon is another factor: Northern and Western European immigrants assimilated more rapidly than those from Eastern and Southern Europe for that reason. Physical similarity helps, but is not infallible: many Poles and Balts are blond and both groups may on average be fairer than the British norm. Yet their East European culture made them seem more alien than the Norwegians, Germans, Irish, or French.
A major factor for preservation of ethnic culture is geographic isolation, either urban or rural. Despite the fact that almost 20% of Americans are of German descent, their language, specifically the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, survives primarily in areas of Pennsylvania where the Amish settled over two centuries ago. The same is true with American Indian languages. They survive on reservations. But if a Cherokee migrates to Tulsa, a Mohawk to Long Island, or a Navajo to Las Vegas, he is likely to marry a white woman and forget his ancestral tongue.
However, when the centralizing norms of white, Anglo-European culture and the Western Christian religion fade, it is more likely for immigrants to cling to their ancestral heritage. This is particularly true when governments encourage this behavior through publicly funded bilingual education and financial support for the arts and music of their homelands. A century ago, the Eastern European immigrants to America mostly lived in neighborhoods or small towns where most affairs were conducted in their native tongue. However, for employment and entry into the larger world, English was a requisite. Thus, the Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, etc., shed their native languages and culture and became Americans.
The absence of a recognized standard culture could result in America being an archipelago of different warring tribes. This would be the end of this nation as a superpower or even a major player in world events.
But in practice? If we sealed the border with Mexico we'd have to kill thousands. Mexico would collapse under the burden of the 10 million expelled illegals plus the loss of repatriated monies. Our trade with them - our second largest trading partner - would be very seriously impaired. We'd have to invade. What then?
To make it work must extend our borders to the Panama Canal - the North-American Hispanic population would have to be removed. How many millions of killings would that require? Only men of Hitlerian resolve and ruthlessness could do something like that. And we'd do it while proclaiming our reverence for life and opposition to birth control? The men who run this country are aware of all this. That's why it isn't done.
So we'll continue on the present course - improvising, hoping for some technological miracle, or that everything somehow works out. But the technological miracle already exists. It's called birth control. We and others suppress it because of the political demands of existing religious and cultural institutions. Until that changes we'll continue on the road to disaster.
I think so, yes. I am descended from what could only be British peasants, and my grandmother, who raised me in part, was just as stuffy and proper (in a more earthy, "oh, a little dirt won't hurt you" kind of way) as Queen Victoria herself. Our weddings and funerals are conducted with the same rigid self-control and are frankly rather difficult to tell apart.
But I also consider our Anglo heritage to be a relic of pre-industrial England as most of our ancestors left there for here at that time. Immigration waves being as they were, the more Catholic/Mediterranean folks came later.
Such interesting questions, class and ethnicity! And among the most taboo in American life, class especially. I have long thought the lack of a discussion of class in this country has two primary sources: 1) the academics interested in the question, for the most part, do not have entree into the real upper class, only the monied class (and the academics from the old upper class keep their mouths shut) and 2) the upper class itself does not want anyone outside the clubs (figuratively and literally) to understand how they can tell who is and who isn't socially acceptable.
I have taken a certain amount of heat over the years for my view that the matter should be more openly and candidly discussed, especially if we are serious about a Jeffersonian aristocracy of talent and manners.
Yes, this "technological miracle" is precisely WHY we're losing the southwest: we are using birth control and Mexico is not. Birth control is indeed a technological miracle -- for the Aztlanistas.
The Israelis have the same problem and something similar will soon occur along Chinese borders. Do you see any solution other than Weapons of Mass Destruction?
And remember, I don't know how much modern-day English working class folks can tell us about working class folks from 200-300 years ago. Like I said, our ancestors came from a pre-industrial empire, not a crumbling industrialized semi-socialist Eurofaction. There was still grandeur then, a grandeur that was brought here and evolved into our ethos today. We are vastly different from those we left behind.
Texas, in other words, will be no pushover for a Hispanic takeover, in either slow motion or double time.
Now all this can change in a decade or less. California was the state that gave us Ronald Reagan and strongly conservative senators like S. I. Hayakawa, George Murphy, and William Knowland. But the Golden State also gave us Earl Warren and the Browns, pere and fils. California has had a history of labor radicalism not known to Texas, e.g., Harry Bridges' longshoremen's union and Cesar Chavez's farm workers' union. Also, Hollywood, though not as monolithically leftist in its Golden Era as it is today, had plenty of liberals and Communists among the actors, writers, and technicians. Texas has no parallel to California's entertainment industry.
Texas falling into Hispanic hands is the key to the viability of Atzlan. I won't say it is impossible. But neither is it inevitable.
Balkanization, as defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Fourth Edition, is: "To divide (a region or territory) into small, often hostile units."
The same dictionary adds as a footnote: [From the political division of the Balkans in the early 20th century.]
For America to be "balkanized" it would take the government separating people into factions, and forcing them to physically live within borders established according to some sort of qualifying commonality.
Our form of government will simply not allow for that.
Secondly, what most people seem to call balkanization, seems to actually point to a very common trait of immigration, that being the ghetto.
Ghettos have always risen in the aftermath (or during) times of large-scale immigration from one specific country into another. Newly arrived immigrants group together for common defense and comfort in specific neighborhoods, and establish links to "life back home", they set up a little chunk of home and opened stores, clubs, and churches patterned after their native cultures. That's why we have Little Italy, Chinatown, Little Havana, and whatever part of Boston is considered to be Irish turf to name just a few. Assimilation can be seen at work best by examining these ghettoes.
Assimilation is a thing of generations, not years, and language has little, if anything at all, to do with it, I have never met an American-born son of an immigrant who does not speak fluent, native, English.
The first generation can--at best--learn to effectively exist within the prevailing culture, but will always retain their ethnic identity, and feel an attachment to the place of their birth; it’s inevitable. They will have a tendency to either remain in the general vicinity of that ghetto, or form newer, more upscale ones as they begin to grow financially. Little Havana is an older, inner-city section of Miami (with incredible restaurants!) that stays vibrant by being the launching pad of working-class immigrants. But Cuban cultural traits (restaurants, retail shops, newspapers) are in ample evidence not only in Miami-Dade, but in Broward and Palm Beach County as well. In a few years, my kids will walk away from this expanded ghetto we live in, and disappear into the mainstream, with maybe nothing more than the curious tradition of serving rice, black beans, and fried sweet plantain on the Thanksgiving dinner menu.
We need to control the number of people migrating into America, and we need to eliminate the reasons why people would risk entering the country illegally, but we should not look to limit ourselves by allowing only the best and brightest from first world nations to migrate here. I want future Americans, willing to do whatever it takes to carve themselves a piece of America. Just like older Americans had to do. It created some great generations then, and it can do so again.
Most people think of assimilation as being something akin to the idea of the melting pot, but the reality is that there has never been such a thing as an American melting pot, it's always been an American stew, with each wave of immigration adding a new ingredient to it.
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