In February last year, I put forth my predictions for the top racial/ethnic trends in 2007. I want to revisit this before I post my top trends of 2007 and my predictions for the top trends of 2008.
So where was I right and wrong? The original post is up here. You can go there and read the details of the predictions, but for the purposes of this post I’m just going to list the subject headings for each prediction, and after the heading I’ll list whether or not I think my prediction was right or wrong.
1. Asia/Asians are Hip and Cool
Well, this was a little true, but I overstated it a little.
2. End of Voluntary Desegregation Plans
This was true to some extent, since the supreme court rule against the desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle, but it is going to take a long time for these plans to be completely dismantled. The Supreme Court is in dire need of another moderate or liberal judge. If a Democrat wins, this may happen.
3. Biological Notions of Race
Does this ever really go out a style? :)
4. Latinos Becoming White
I was wrong; just flat out wrong here.
5. Non-African American Blacks are Popular
I think this was by far my best prediction. There were numerous articles describing non-African American Blacks as model minorities.
6. Anti-Racism/Pro-Racial Equality Blogs Blow Up
I’m not really sure about this one. There definitely were more of these sites than in 2006, but I don’t know if they “blew up.” They did grow.
So what do you think about my 6 predictions?
What’s a “non-African-American black”?
Regarding number six, I think there was a huge increase in migra blogs in 2007. If not in total number of blogs, there was certainly an increase in how cohesive the “migrasphere” has become, so it’s easier to go to (say) Migra Matters and look on the blogroll and find a large number of other blogs to read.
For number 6, if the total number of pro-racial blogs didn’t increase that much, their stature sure did with the Jena-6 rallies.
Diane, That basically refers to Blacks who are not from the US. Most of the articles using the model minority ideology focused on blacks who were born in the Caribbean or Africa, comparing them to their African American counterparts and arguing that they are overachievers, etc.
Amp, I guess that’s the corollary of number 4. :)
re “3. Biological Notions of Race
Does this ever really go out a style? :)”
Scientific Racism is on the way out. Population and molecular genetics is in.
As every newspaper was reporting last month…
“People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.”
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ion0hzQBUeDy8DZsCeO8zHYWe4AAD8TERL4G0
There is much good science being done on the genetic diversity of human populations, showing again and again that human groups living under different selection pressures (nutritional, pathogenic, climatic, etc.) have been evolving. Eg. this article on evolution to high-altitude living:
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040216/full/news040216-7.html
Some people wold say that Barack Obama is a non-African American Black (caps are my emphasis). This is particularly true because of where Obama grew up (Indonesia and Hawaii) and who his parents are, as opposed to how he self-identifies. African Americans, especially the church-going folks in the South and North, are having a difficult time identifying with the junior senator from Illinois.
However, Sidney Portier is probably the best example of a “non-African American Black.” Check out:
http://learningbyheart.blogspot.com/2008/01/to-sir-with-love.html
Or, if you can’t pull it up there, go to:
http://learningbyheart.blogspot.com/
Any similarities between our noble screen hero and the Democratic frontrunner…hmmm?
Brian Thomas
You wouldn’t go far with that “non-African-American blacks are cool” think in Canada. Toronto’s struggle with drug-related violence in the last few years (generally centred around the Caribbean community) has removed any such attitude in Ontario.
However, I could see the “actual African-Africans are cool” thing last year, or the year before.
While Sen. Obama is certainly black, he hasn’t personally suffered the effects of racism in America that some Americans of African heritage have. At least, not in their viewpoint.
Thank goodness we have whites available to tell us what ordinary black Americans think!
Lol, amp… amusement ensues… yeah, all of this “Obama’s not really black/too acceptable to whites” stuff — fueled by Debra Dickerson’s esoteric, almost exclusively academic, frankly confusing, yet somehow widely referenced as mainstream blacks’ definition of “black” — is, IMO, like the black/hispanic conflicts, 85-90% media hype. Of course, this is the opinion of only one black person (yours truly) who would never claim to speak for all black people, whose main idea is, while there is no one, monolithic “black opinion”, the media tends to deem opinions as “common” among blacks that are in reality, quite unpopular/rare/fringe. (Ex. the reparations “movement”, simultaneously occurring social and fiscal conservatism, approval of the use of Ebonics as an exclusive dialect)
Actually, what I’ve been reading are the words of black people in Chicago as reported in the Chicago newspapers; perhaps more germane than most, since this is his home state.
How pervasive that is isn’t clear. Certainly there are plenty of people black and white who look no further than the color of the man’s skin. But I made nor make no claims as to percentages, just that the viewpoint exists and finds voice. It does not appear to be simply a construct by some essayist.
Ron F said, “Actually, what I’ve been reading are the words of black people in Chicago as reported in the Chicago newspapers; perhaps more germane than most, since this is his home state.”
Ron what you are reading is filtered the reporters (and media outlets), most of whom are whites. While I think defining Obama’s race has been an issue for some African Americans, it seems to me that mostly white media outlets have routinely tried to frame the question as “Will blacks vote for Obama?” Statistically it won’t make a big difference if every single African American voter chose Obama in the general election when whites represent about 70% of the electorate. Isn’t the more interesting and relevant question, is Obama white enough (or perhaps not too black) for white America?
Statistically it won’t make a big difference if every single African American voter chose Obama in the general election when whites represent about 70% of the electorate.
But it isn’t a question about statistics, it’s a question about politics. If blacks will vote for Obama, then the primary race looks very different than if blacks decide that he’s untenable. Yes, that will have very little difference in the general (where blacks will very probably vote as a bloc for the Democrat, whether that’s Obama or John Smith), but in the primary, blacks are the swing bloc.
As Clinton is about to find out, because it looks like blacks have decided that Obama IS electable, which means she’s going to have three crushing primary defeats in a row. So much for inevitability!
Isn’t the more interesting and relevant question, is Obama white enough (or perhaps not too black) for white America?
No. That question isn’t particularly interesting, because we already know the answer. Americans would elect an (unnamed) black person without any problem.
If you didn’t think Asians were so totally awesome this year, you must be in a different circle than I am…I can’t even tell you how tired I am of being forced to watch subtitled Japanese movies. And super feminine Japanese male musicians are all the rage amongst the teen white girls I know. Everyone and their brother is using random Japanese sayings they learned from anime.
Well, so maye it’s not Asians, but Japanese.
Ron what you are reading is filtered the reporters (and media outlets), most of whom are whites.
I am conscious of that, which is why I’m saying “some have commented” and not “a significant fraction” or “a majority” think this. If people weren’t saying it they couldn’t report it, but I won’t take individual reports as a gauge of how prevalent the idea is.
Isn’t the more interesting and relevant question, is Obama white enough (or perhaps not too black) for white America?
Yes indeed. I would like to think that there are vanishingly few people who would not vote for Sen. Obama based solely on his race. OTOH, I would like to think that there are vanishingly few people who would vote for Obama based on his race; I have low expectations of that as well. The two racist effects hopefully will balance out, but who knows?
To support the concept that white America will vote for black candidates, it’s worth noting that the State of Illinois is 71% white and 15% black, yet the last 4 senators we have elected were 2 white males, one black female and one black male. In fact, the last Senatorial election had two black males as the major party candidates, and I’m not sure that that has ever happened before in American history outside of Reconstruction. However, since that last election is when Obama was elected, there was no white alternative so any effect of racism on support for him would have been hard to gauge.
Unfortunately Ron, your state is a real anomaly when it comes to voting for black candidates. It is the only state that has had a black Senator in the last 20 years. Hell, it may be the only state to have a black Senator in the past 150 years–any historians who can check that for me?
There have been 122 blacks elected to Congress, of whom 116 actually served in a real capacity. (One was not seated during Reconstruction, and five were pretend representatives from DC or the Virgin Islands.)
Of those 116, five were Senators: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi during reconstruction, and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and Carol Mosely-Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois, all in recent decades. That gap between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era is also present for Representatives, but less so; there were blacks elected in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, but not very many.
So in the past 150 years there have been five black Senators.
In point of fact, I bet I’m the only person on this blog to have voted for all the black Senators since Reconstruction – I was a college student in Cambridge, Mass. during Sen. Brooke’s last successful run for re-election. Sen. Brooke lost his last election after it got into the news that he had concealed some assets from his wife during his divorce settlement. The story at the time was that this lost him the women’s vote. Sen. Moseley-Braun taught me the fallacy of voting for someone because “it’s the turn of a black/woman/pick_your_favorite_group”, and Sen. Obama was less of a nutcase than the alternative.
BTW, Sen. Brooke was a Republican.
I bet you are Ron. :)
Thanks Robert, I actually knew about the first two Senators–Revels and Bruce, but I wasn’t thinking the math through on that one. I didn’t know about the MA senator.
What I would like to know about the representatives is how many of them were elected to represent predominantly white districts, which would get to the heart of the issue that Ron and I are raising. I know JC Watts would be one; anyone know any others? (Robert, you wanna look that one up?)
No clue of where to look, sorry. I could easily do it if you want to pay my consulting fee for the two or three days it’ll take me to do it the hard way ;)
I recall Jim Sleeper had some material on the topic in “Liberal Racism”, but I don’t remember well enough for details. But that’s a good place to start.
Pretty sure TN-9 (Memphis-area) was still majority-white when Harold Ford Sr was elected as Representative in 1974; it was majority-black when Harold Ford Jr was elected in 1997.
Not a Senator or Representative, but Douglas Wilder was elected governor of VA in 1990.
When Harold Washington (a black man) was elected Mayor of Chicago in 1983 (beating the first female Mayor of Chicago) I believe that whites were a slight plurality in Chicago, but I’m not sure if they were a majority or not. I’m having problems pulling up the information. I wonder if it would be legitimate to say that the Mayor of Chicago has more real power than many members of Congress?