Nate Hochman has already vivisected what passes for reasoning from New York Times columnist Charles Blow in attempting to balance his theory that only white people can be racist with his current alarm at racist remarks by Hispanic political leaders in Los Angeles. If you take Blow at face value, there is little to add to Nate’s post.
But of course, Blow’s real concern — this is not really even concealed — is the collapse of a core assumption of the progressive theory of why a majority political coalition on the left is inevitable. Here is how Blow opens his column:
I have a theory about the future of America that I don’t want to come true. It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of “lite” supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it.
When you sweep away the rhetoric about “supremacy” and boil it down to the arguments about who is “us” and who is “them,” what Blow and other practitioners of “anti-racism” have been doing for the past decade and a half is projecting an America in which there will be a non-white majority that coheres as a political coalition around being anti-white. To this end, racial division is both a moral good and a political strategy of isolating the minority in order to punish them for past sins. This, despite the fact that “white” is really an entirely artificial category. Unlike black Americans, white Americans simply do not see themselves as having a sufficiently strong group identity and shared history to entirely gloss over distinctions such as ethnicity. There are sound historical reasons why black Americans do have such a group identity, to the point where one can reasonably describe black Americans as a distinct people; white Americans do not have a similarly shared experience.
But in order for there to be a “brown” majority, it is first necessary that all those who are at least arguably non-white see themselves as non-white as a primary identity and act accordingly — a theory that likewise demands a sense of shared history, despite rather obvious differences in the story of black Americans compared with the stories of Native Americans or Hispanic, Asian, or South Asian Americans. Hispanics are the linchpin of that strategy. (Asian Americans are now the predominant immigrant group, but not yet large enough to have the same weight in measuring majorities.) What has changed, of course, is that the voting patterns of Hispanics are trending away from the sort of uni-party racial-bloc voting that characterizes black Americans. As a result, people with Blow’s worldview are compelled to consider the possibility that dividing the country on racial lines might not leave black Americans in the majority. If you proceed from his premises, that is a panic-inducing idea. And it suggests why a politics of racial “us” vs. racial “them” is always playing with fire.