Our New Look: The Colors Of Race
He United States closed the 19th century declaring--in Plessy v. Ferguson--that rigid segregation was the natural order. It was a time when W.E.B. Du Bois despaired that America would ever get beyond its homespun apartheid. "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men," he famously pronounced in 1903. Americans have not proved Du Bois wrong. Still, the country enters the millennium self-consciously striving to be a more tolerant place. The
new century will not see the end of race--the dawning of an era when skin color is of no consequence--but it will see a further erosion of racial walls. And it will see America struggling to make sense of shifting racial classifications.
Already, Americans are changing--in ways both substantive and superficial--to conform to the new, more egalitarian, ideal. Nazis may still march, but they are inevitably outnumbered by counterprotesters. Aryan Nation kooks may still kill; but, if caught, they are imprisoned, stigmatized and scorned. Racial purity is not as prized as it once was. People who call themselves white proudly acknowledge Latino and Native American roots. A small number even acknowledge some black ancestry. And interracial romance, once outlawed and condemned, now openly blooms.
Between 1960 and 1992 the number of interracially married couples multiplied more than seven times over. Black-white unions are still not the norm, accounting for only 20 percent of interracial marriages, but the marriage color line has all but dissolved between Asians and whites. In America, more children are born to white-Japanese couples than to parents who are both of Japanese ancestry. Then there are Hispanics, who are projected to become America's second largest racial-ethnic group (after whites) by 2010. Latinos may consider themselves white, black, American Indian, Asian or Pacific Islander--or deem themselves none of the above. It is not unusual in Latin America for people who don't consider themselves black to speak of a grandparent who is. Whatever they call themselves, the presence of an ever-growing number of multiracials or mestizos is forcing Americans to relinquish the notion that everyone can be put in a single racial box. The Census Bureau, acknowledging that reality, will allow people to be counted in more than one racial category during next year's Census.
When Tiger Woods revealed in 1997 that he thought of himself as "Cablinasian"--a mixture of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian--when growing up, he was greeted with bemusement, even hostility. In fact, very few black Americans are just black. If people with "black blood" can now be white or at least not black, what becomes of the concept of passing? Passing, after all, implies a denial of one's authentic ancestry to be accepted as a member of another race. But what happens when the definition of the other race changes enough to accommodate formerly forbidden ancestries? And what happens to the very notion of racism in a society where race has lost much of its meaning?
The rise of the mixed-race--or cafe au lait--society has led some to predict the end of distinctions based on ethnicity, racial appearance or ancestry. That seems unlikely. Even in Brazil, where racial mixing is accepted, even celebrated, color coding has not lost its sting. Status and privilege are still connected to lighter skin. Racial distinctions, albeit mutable and imprecise, are constantly made. In the emerging U.S. mestizo future, some people will still be whiter than others--and if the Latin America experience is any guide, they will have an advantage.
But what happens when whites become a minority? According to U.S. Census projections, by 2030 non-Hispanic whites may constitute fewer than half of those in the United States under the age of 18. A few decades after that, minorities, as now defined, will be in the majority. But common sense says the much-anticipated "majority-minority" future will never arrive. For one thing, such projections forecast the growth of ethnic cohorts as if racial intermingling will be insignificant, when it clearly will be anything but. And who is to say that a girl with one Asian grandparent, one Latino and two who are white will consider herself Asian or Latino instead of white? Or that a boy with one black, one Argentine and two Anglo grandparents will see himself as a "person of color"?
To complicate things even more, we have no idea what "majority race" will mean a half century from now. If the past is any guide, groups who are not now counted in the "majority" will be. Earlier in this century, entry of Eastern and Southern Europeans was restricted because of their supposedly inferior racial stock. Now Romanians are considered as white as any other Europeans. By the middle of the 21st century, many of those whom the Census projects to be Asian, Hispanic or black may be considered white--or whatever the new term is for the majority. The racial hierarchy, in other words, will not be upended because "minorities" suddenly outnumber whites. Racial categories will change long before that day arrives.
But if demographic shifts will not bring about the end of race, what will? The answer is that nothing will, not soon. Having established a more tolerant America is not the same as having established an America without racial assumptions and consequences. Even in today's United States, infant mortality among blacks is more than twice that for whites. Blacks suffer higher rates of cancer, have a lower life expectancy and fare worse than whites on nearly every measure of health--including access to potentially lifesaving cancer surgery, according to an October report in The New England Journal of Medicine. Race also matters when it comes to educational opportunity. According to a study published by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, public-school segregation of blacks and Latinos is on the rise, in both cities and suburbs. And those increasingly black and Latino schools generally lack the resources of the typical white student's school.
So what does that mean for the future? It means understanding, first of all, that the future is not a straightforward march from unenlightenment to paradise. When it comes to race, America has a habit of claiming victories it hasn't earned. And as evidenced by ethnic-cleansing campaigns in the Balkans and Rwanda and by ethno-religious conflict in Sri Lanka and in countless other points around the globe, intergroup tension is not a peculiarly American problem. It seems to simply be part of the human condition.
It would be wrong, though, to say that the future will be little changed from the past, that Du Bois's bleak prophecy for the 20th century will also define the new millennium. The color line is fraying all around us. The American future certainly will not be circumscribed by one long line with whites on one side and the "darker" races on the other; there will be many lines, and many camps, and few will be totally segregated. Disparities will remain. But with the rudest reminders of racism washed away, it will be a lot easier to tell ourselves that we finally have overcome.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Comments