Racialicious Responds to “The End of White America”

Andrea: This alarmist angle covers what really bugs me about the piece–it’s offers no analysis of structures and execution of racism itself in the US. What Hsu seems to ostensibly and sloppily attempts to get at is once whiteness–and those white people and PoCs who adhere to it–fall back, racism itself will disappear. Hsu says:

There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

And there is Hsu’s “we gonna be post-racial, y’all–if we’re not already” statement–which can also be a another read on this article.

But.

This article makes me go back to Tim Wise and Vijay Prashad, who I think would have made better touchstones/springboards for Hsu’s piece because they both have more nuanced understandings of the mechanics of racism in the US. Tim Wise said about whiteness, from his book, White Like Me:

…from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s a series of laws were promulgated in Virginia and elsewhere, which elevated all persons of European descent, no matter how lowly in economic terms, above all persons of African descent. The purpose of such measures was to provide poor Europeans (increasing called whites) with a stake in the system, even though they were hardly benefiting in material terms from it. In other words, whiteness was a trick, and it worked marvelously, dampening down the push for rebellion by poor whites on the basis of class interest, and encouraging them to cast their lot with the elite, if only in aspirational terms. White skin became, for them, an alternative form of property to which they could cleave, in the absence of more tangible possessions.

And from Vijay Prashad, from his book, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Racial Purity (which gets to Thea’s point about whites as immigrants and the internecine racial conflicts among some PoCs):

Since blackness is reviled in the United States, why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed, particularly when the transit to the United States promises the dream of gold and glory? The immigrant seeks a form of veritcal assimilation, to climb from the lowest darkest echelon on the stepladder of tyranny into the bright whiteness. In U.S. history the Irish, Italians, Jews, and –in small steps with some hesitation ont he part of white America–Aisans and Latinos have all tried to barter their varied cultural worlds for the privileges of whiteness….

Yet all people who enter the United States do not strive to be accepted by the terms set by white supremacy. Some actively disregard them, finding them impossible to meet. Instead, they seek recognition, solidarity, and safety by embracing others also oppressed by white supremacy in something of a horizontal assimilation…

When people actively or tacitly refuse the terms of vertical integration they are derisively dismissed as either unassimilable or exclusionary. We hear, ‘Why do the black kids sit together in the cafeteria’ instead of ‘Why do our institutions routinely uphold the privilieges of whiteness?’ There is little space in popular discourse for an examination of what goes on outside the realm of white America among people of color.

Hsu certainly didn’t expand this space. He’s just screaming, “Fire!” in a crowded theater of racial anxiety.

Fatemeh: Hsu’s “The End of White America?” (cue scary music) essentially aims to hash out the following: “Hey, white people are freaked out that people of color are becoming the majority in the U.S. Why’s that? Don’t worry, guys. It’s cool.” But instead of just sticking to this outline, it feels like Hsu tries to condense several books on hip-hop culture, racial history of the U.S., market trends, and race theory into one article. Because all of these subjects need extensive background, he fails in his attempt to mash them together.

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