“Like it or not, nearly half of the Latino population considers itself a race.” So writes Ian Haney López, a professor at Boalt Hall. Dispiriting is the word that comes to mind.
Since the Gore defeat in 2000, left-liberals in the US have turned away from identity politics, just as Michael Lind and Todd Gitlin among others recommended in the mid-1990s. You could say that this was one of the few unambiguous intellectual victories of American conservatives, except that devotees of Old Left class politics provided much of the ammunition. At first, the multicultis blasted the likes of Lind and Gitlin as crypto-racists or, worse yet, crypto-conservatives, but fear of Bush ended all of that. The most aggressive proponents of the multicultural world-view-that America is a congeries of “cultures” defined by race, and that said “cultures” are entitled to proportional representation in key institutions, if not some kind of quasi-sovereignty-were cowed by electoral logic. Somehow, the vast majority of Americans, “people of color” included, didn’t buy the implicit anti-Americanism, to say nothing of the illiberalism, of this profoundly odious world-view, and so the multicultis remained silent as the grave.
Banished to their redoubts in the universities, the multicultis never gave up hope. They’ve been plotting a triumphant return. The hope was that it would happen now, under a newly elected Democratic administration. Because that didn’t work out, some have grown impatient and are jumping the gun. My guess is that López falls in that category. Far from presenting the “fact” of an “emerging Latino race” dispassionately, he champions it with verve. One wonders if he considers those Latinos who identify as white or black or Asian as somehow less authentic.
RACIALIZATION FOR FUN AND PROFIT: It had been my understanding, admittedly crude, that “racialization” is a tragedy-that far beyond making a trivial distinction, ascribing racial difference to an outgroup was to cause a serious harm, to cement an exclusion in a thoroughgoing and profound way. Hence the still very low rate of intermarriage between black and non-black Americans, particularly when compared to intermarriage rates between various ethnic groups of European origin. Latinos and East Asians have followed a more “European” pattern, thus suggesting that the relevant color line in this country remains that separating black from non-black.
While it’s true that segregation and a lack of income mobility, both exacerbated by mass immigration, have driven the “racialization” of Mexican American communities in California and the Southwest, it’s not clear that this makes Latinos a “race.” Rather, I’d say that these communities are facing a social crisis that demands serious revisions to social policy, not nationalist posturing from the likes of López.
The notion that the Census Bureau merely describes “sociological reality” by codifying race is flatly absurd. The “ethnoracial pentagon” drives and then reinforces a process initiated by political entrepreneurs like López. It manufactures “sociological reality.” It sharpens divisions, and only a handful of interpreters and middlemen-in the social-services industry, among the marketing gurus, and, of course, among the professors-stand to benefit. Don’t let it happen.
— Reihan
The Dish 